Week 8: Windshields, Valentine's Day, etc.

On Sunday morning, we woke up to a LOT of snow, as you saw last week. Here's the snowman we made. Adam is building a snow fort in the background.


It turns out that it's really not a very good idea to make snow angels when you're wearing pajama pants instead of snowpants. :)


The weather has been crazy this week. During the school week, we had highs from the 40s to the 60s. The tree outside my apartment window started budding. Now it's in the 30s again.


On Wednesday I broke my windshield. :( It's really hard to tell the cracks from the melted snow drips here -- this picture is for scale.


Here's a (somewhat) better picture of the damage.


On Wednesday night our department team played basketball again. Adam is the one with the inside-out jersey, and the other blue player is Ben, who organized the team. In this shot, they're not so far behind Team Monica, but later they got mercy-ruled -- in this league, they end the game when one team gets behind by 30 points.


Thursday night was the Women of Whiting social event for the spring. We served desserts and wine. I made Elizabeth and Lisa come along with me. We had a pretty decent turnout -- about 30 people. We're also raising funds to bring Valerie Young to campus to do a workshop. I didn't think we'd possibly be able to do it -- our budget for the event would be about $3500 -- but we've already raised $2500 from various departments in the engineering school, including $300 from applied math, and the (very flush) biomedical engineering department has promised to make up whatever difference we need.


Since we were so busy during the week, Adam and I held Valentine's Day (Observed) on Saturday. We played video games, did some homework, watched the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring, and cooked a lovely dinner together. Adam made Trattoria-Style Spinach Fettucini with fresh and dried tomatoes and carrots and feta cheese, and I made salad for the dinner and fudge for dessert.


This morning I was feeling a little homesick, so I made waffles! The last one in the batch was a little small, but it was a pretty shape.


This picture doesn't really convey the pain and suffering I went through ;) but here's the welt my stirrup leathers (or my jeans?) left on my calf during my riding lesson today, with my other foot for scale.