Onions and cars

Two things.  First, last night I made French onion soup, from scratch, in an RV.  The recipe calls for 4 pounds of onions, baked in an oven for a total of 3 hours.  Turns out that is a toxic amount of onion to cook in a small space.  Irv may never be the same.  Nor will my clothes, hair, the dog, or anything else porous at all.  And was it worth it?  Meh.  I think the soup turned out too sweet.  The recipe even cautions against using vidallia or other sweet onions, a recommendation I definitely followed, but even still it was too sweet for my taste.  It did have good flavor, but I can't get past the sweetness.  Bummer.

The other thing…this weekend we went used car shopping.  We’re considering getting another car, but aren’t sure we will.  We went to one of the bigger dealerships and walked around the lot, looking at new and used options.  No salesperson hounded us, which was weird but ok.  When we found a car we were interested in knowing more about we went in search of help, and found it quickly enough.  Clark was personable and possibly the most low-pressure salesperson ever.  We asked about a 2012 Yaris and he said he’d go get the keys.  On the way to the car he asked our names (first names, with a handshake).  Then he handed over the keys and told us to take it for a drive.  That’s it.  No last name needed, no need to hand over a driver’s license or collateral, no need to even prove we even had driver’s licenses, and nope, he didn’t come with us either (he had ‘some work to do’), but he did give us his business card, “Just in case”.  Hahaha!  I guess it’s not that weird considering that we can’t exactly go anywhere with car since we functionally live on an island.  But still, that’s a first for us.

So we took it for a drive, and it was ok.  They are asking more than we’re willing to pay, so we said we’d think about it.  Then he said, “Well, make an offer if you want.  We’ll consider all offers, because we’d rather sell a car than have it sitting on the lot.”  And we shook hands again and left.  That was a surprisingly pleasant interaction with a car dealership. 

Weekend getaway

After a looooong week at an in-town conference (which is somehow worse than a conference out of town), we spent a relaxing weekend at a lovely vacation house in Douglas.  Douglas is really just Juneau, but across the bridge from downtown Juneau, on Douglas Island.  The house is owned by one of Steve's clients, who let us use it for the weekend.  So we got to hang out in a beautiful house high on a hilltop that was dozens of times larger than Irv, with a beautiful view of downtown Juneau, and with a big screen tv perfect for watching movies.  It was fabulous. 

Steve brought the GoPro and tried to take a time lapse of the view of downtown, and it sort of worked.  I'll try to get a copy to post here.  I also brought my camera and took some pictures.  The top picture (above) is the view Saturday evening as the sun was setting.

This is Friday night, as the fog rolled in:

 And finally, later Saturday night, it was crystal clear out (well, if you're on the hill on not in town where there was fog next to the water) and there's a hint of northern lights starting over the mountains!

Exhausting

For the past three months I've been working on part of my project that is really the key to all other parts of my PhD...a spatial stock assessment model.  It's been particularly exhausting in the past three weeks, as I raced to get a working model done for a presentation I have to give next week.  I've spent 10-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, working at my computer and trying to get this beast to run.  And finally, last week Thursday, it finally worked.  Wow.  Since then I've been writing code to automate the graphing of my model results and looking at those graphs to try to come to some conclusions .  By no means am I done with this model, or even done enough to give a great presentation next week, but I feel like a rock star in terms of how much I've gotten done.  And today, after painstakingly writing out a detailed, annotated, complete-with-figures, summary of my model results, I got this from my co-authors and mentors:

Mentor 1 - "Oh and good job, it seems to scale surprisingly well and doesn't seem like a bad start at all!" 
Mentor 2 - "Kari, you've made a lot of progress here and the results are promising!"

It is so nice to hear those words!  I feel like I could fly!

But, back to work...those presentations don't write themselves. 

Organizing

Only 38 days until we move!  Steve had a rare day off on Saturday so we spent part of the afternoon getting organized to move and moving most of our 'outdoor' things over to the new place - things like the kayaks, the motorcycle, and the plant pots.  That is all we'll move in advance.  It looks so bare at Irv now.  We also crawled underneath the RV and removed the stabilization jacks, and it's surprising how much support they were giving.  Now when you walk around inside you can really feel it move.  We could drive away today if needed; that's kind of fun to think about.

Now I just hope we don't get snow or ice before we do move!