Karen's Chronicles

House

We put an offer in on a house this morning.

Waiting to hear back + trying to work on thesis => distracted...

Just need to push through a few more sections...

Here are some pictures we took, mostly for our own memory. Thus they often focus on random things that we found good, odd, or in need of repair. I'll post more later if we get the house.

Move pictures

Move Recap

Yes, we made it. We pulled in ATL about 12pm EST. We unhitched the car and the tow dolly (all while being supervised by a youth who was previously walking around.) Then it was off to Tech to test the perception of the campus police department. We wanted to see that if someone pulled a large, brightly colored truck into the alley by the AE building and began unloading things at 1am if anyone would notice, let alone try to stop us. The PD either failed or passed depending on how you look at it. Either way we unloaded all of my books and papers without anyone saying a word to us and without getting mugged.

Saturday dawned bright and sunny, yet remarkably cool. I've never had such good weather for a move, and may never have it again. The moving guys showed up at around 10, which was later that I would have liked. However, years of moving had taught me that "first thing" in the morning equals around 10 in mover speak. They moved quickly though and we were out of the apartment by 1:20. Unfortunately we missed our check out time so had to wait until 2 for the lady to be free again. Then it was off to pick up the tow dolly for the car. We left the twin cities around 3pm, heading due east. We stopped that night in Bloomington, IL where we arrived at arrived at around 12:30. We both fell into bed and didn't move until 7 the next morning. Then it was downstairs to fight our free breakfast with a large group of Hispanic Jehovah's witnesses. We were on the road by 8, and pulled into the Clarksville, TN U*haul at around 3:40pm. It took us a while to get our truck pulled up to where it needed to be to load up the last of Steven's stuff. We were ready to go by around 4:10 but it took us another 30 minutes to get out of the place because the on attendant was swamped. After a quick, but lovely dinner at the red*lobster across the way we were off again.

Trying to find a place to eat dinner when you are in a 16' truck towing a car behind you is no easy feat. You cannot back up and you take up about 7 car spaces... We luckily managed to never have to remove the tow dolly to get ourselves unstuck. The closest we came, we were saved by a KOA sign which assured me that down the road a ways would surely be a spot big enough to turn an RV.

We slept in this morning and I am now at work setting up my work area so that I can finish my thesis over the next two weeks.

Fire

So last night as we were trying to get a good night's sleep before leaving the fire alarm went off. I was completely out of it and the alarm didn't even register until Brian got up. Then of course the sound was so piercing and deafening that we got dressed, put on shoes grabbed purses and laptop bags and walked out the door and outside. I was angry thinking it was another false alarm. Not to be.

Some sort of real fire down in the garage. We were outside for about an hour while all of the greater MPS fire departments arrived. We were allowed to go back, but not into the garage around 2am. So I still have to go see if the silver car is OK.

As we were standing outside watching men with oxygen and large axes swarm near the truck (we had parked it as far away from the building as possible, so it was near the fire trucks), Brian commented, "Good thing we got the truck damage insurance."

The move back South

The stuff is off the walls and off the refrigerator -- must be moving time. Tomorrow the movers come to pack me out. Brian and I will reverse our journey through Illinois back to Atlanta. Stay tuned for updates.

Towing and Power

Last night was a rather eventful night. I was woken up numerous times by seemingly random events. The first was a series of shouts emanating from what turned out to be my next door neighbor's balcony. Now this is strange in of itself in that I've never seen this person, let alone heard them shouting. The shouts were mostly single words which took me quite a while to work out what was going on until he yelled "stand in front of the truck" Luckily this finally resolved itself with the car in question being towed. Then sometime later the power went out. Normally this should pass unnoticed, but no some piece of random electronics in my apartment let out a soul piercing screech enough to wake me up. Then when the power came back on -- all of the air conditioning units in the entire place came alive waking me up yet again.

New Phase

I never seem to be able to finish one phase of life before beginning another. Such is the case with my next phase. Brian and I have both been offered positions as assistant professors at a school which shall remain unnamed. We will however, be living in Atlanta. It was a bittersweet decision for me as I had an offer from another school, which was a better fit. Unfortunately, they decided that Brian was not a particularly good fit for them. Considering the overwhelming number of qualified female faculty members on engineering campuses around the country, this frustrates me to no end. Nothing I can do about it now, but one day...

Hard to believe as I sit here desperately trying to finish one phase in my life, that another one is going to begin whether I am ready or not. Also hard to believe that this Air Force brat has chosen a career whose ultimate goal is to achieve tenure therefore essentially tying herself to the place. (This isn't so set in stone as it used to be, but you see the irony)

If this announcement comes as a bit of a shock to my readers, I apologize. The whole process has not been the smoothest and we were trying to keep things quiet to keep our edge in negotiations.

The good news is that hopefully by fall, you will all have a place to stay in Atlanta. Feel free to buy your tickets for football/basketball games now :)

Data analysis marathon

On the most, impossibly beautiful day (sunny, mid 70's). I'm inside stuck to my computer doing weekend 1 of my three week data analysis marathon. Otherwise things are going well. Stay tuned later this week for news about jobs and Karen and Brian's future.

North American

On Friday I flew back down to Atlanta on Friday to run my final two subjects. Just before I left I saw my old nemesis -- an enormous North American moving van. We don't get many professional moving trucks around here, so it was striking. It blocked most of the east side of the parking lot. Then when I got back in to town on Sunday when I got home there were a pile of boxes piled around the recycle bin. The whole places smelled of new cardboard -- a very familiar smell to me. And there they were, several wardrobe boxes. Also something the home mover never uses. Ah the memories.

Back to ATL

OK, I finally got my last expert lined up for Saturday. So back to Atlanta with me. I spent all last week in Atlanta running my experiment. Now it is a race to the end.

Data Entry

One of these days I'm going to automate data collection so that I don't have to spend hours entering data into an excel spreadsheet. However today is not that day. So here I sit typing in data, hoping that some helpful person at the airline I've been studying will volunteer, and be my final participant! Everybody send positive thoughts my way.

I just need one more expert!

Scenarios 5,6,7,8,9,10 Good

Well I've made good progress. I think it is as ready to go as it can be without a significant additional effort (like months worth). Now I need to focus on making one additional training scenario, getting the first training scenario to work better and make changes to the experimental packet.

I've got non-expert participants lined up for Sunday/Monday. Unfortunately still no experts. Sigh. Just got to keep hoping someone/something comes through.

Where o where are my vounteers

At this point I have two people signed up as volunteers. Unfortunately, both of them are not experts. At this point, after many pleading emails I have 0 experts signed up. This is tragic. Sigh. I'm not sure what to do.

Scenarils 3, 4 and most of 5 are done.

For some reason the code behind my code is choking on a what I think is a legitimate answer to Scenario 5's second problem...

3 Days of Coding...

So I spent all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in a massive coding effort to get my stuff into shape for what will hopefully be my final experimental version debuting next week...

I've started a log now to check off each scenario's individual case once I've verified that I'm happy with how the system handles it. I've got 12 scenarios (with between 1-3 cases each). Right now I've managed to verify 2.

Keep posted for my progress. The number needs to read 12 by Friday...