Finally an update

Its been awhile since I've updated this site. I guess that's because not much out of the ordinary has been happening. So I asked Andrew to help me write something - here is his guest entry, with a few edits from me: Last weekend we finally put away our Christmas lights. Since it was raining, it was a good opportunity to do something inside. I wanted to mic up my drums and record a few fills in GarageBand (bought an Apple learning series book for it at B&N and wanted to try it out). But I was missing a stereo cable adapter so we had to go to Radio Shack, which happens to be by the Lowe's. While shopping at Lowe's for some storage boxes for the Christmas lights, Corey found some shelves that she wanted to buy on impulse. I thought we were just there to buy boxes, so the shelves were a bit of a suprise. Once we got back I got Corey to bang on the drums while I adjusted the mixer levels. Afterwards Corey put together the shelves while I made Pad Thai for dinner. We've made this dish before, it's not too complicated and has a nice Asian taste to it, accented by peanuts. I also added some jumbo shrimp to mine. The shelves look nice and we now have a small library in the living room where the books are easily accessible. I also cut up some white boards to add two more shelves to the kitchen pantry. This past week was the first week of classes. The campus is buzzing with students again and parking is once again a bit of a hassle. My year got off to a busy start; I'm working on about 7 projects right now, each with fairly good potential for publications. 2007 has the makings of an exciting year. Just yesterday I got invited to go to Stockholm and Frankfurt that I happily accepted. The dates are yet to be determined, but probably before end of April. Meanwhile, I'm working on papers for conferences in Tuebingen, San Diego, Tempe, and Rio. Those depend on paper publications, so from now through April I'm going to be busy writing papers. Right now we are in the middle of a three day weekend due to the MLK holiday. We did some yardwork and are going sailing today. (Corey: I am a sucker for anything blooming this time of year and couldn't resist buying 6 new creeping phlox and I planted those out so we have a tiny bit of color in the yard now.) I finally got a replacement mirror for the car ($142 spent that could have been used for something else, thanks to the vandals). The body shop would have put it on and painted it to match but they got pre-empted by other jobs, probably more lucrative than my small $50 job. Turns out the mirror installation is pretty simple and it took me no time at all to bolt on. And since finding matching paints is next to impossible, I just painted both mirrors black and today I will put them back on the car. The driver's side mirror in factory "paint to match" black doesn't look half bad and since black goes with everything. That should finish things up nicely.
Corey: Yesterday I went for a forest walk to check out the beaver dam and the lake levels. Recent rains have brought the level up by 2 to 3 feet, but we are still 5 feet below full pond. The shot on the right is the beaver dam - you can see the water on the far right and no water on the left of the picture. The shot on the left is what we call the 'boat channel'. It is basically a big ditch right now. Hard to believe we drove our power boat right through here a few years back.