Life is good

Life is good right now. You will seldom hear somebody as generally negative as I am say that, but there you go.

This Friday, I will be having dinner with several wonderful friends at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. (in case you want to be jealous, here is the menu). On Saturday, I'll be hanging out at a friend's barbecue in Mountain View, and on Sunday going to dim sum in San Francisco's Chinatown. Incidentally, dim sum is one of my favorite communal meals--I think there's something to be said about the intrinsic goodness of putting food on wheels. Think about it--the felafel truck, New York pretzel vendors, the Good Humor man... After seeing more friends and hanging out/relaxing, I fly to Boston and see more wonderful people.

So yeah--my term is done. I survived. As you can probably tell, I'm pretty giddy with sleep deprivation. I have cloistered myself at home for the past five days, working flat out on this project (simulation of heat and moisture tranfer at a basement using the WUFI 2D finite element software package. Woo.) Taxes are done--$30 at H&R Block. Strongly recommended--a real relief to get them taken care of without much effort on my part, especially considering the complexity this year (income in two countries).

Anyway, here's a perfunctory photo for this blog post:

Actually, I do have a related story. As I was walking to get my taxes done, up the steet, I saw a duck start to waddle across. The first lane of traffic stopped, but I could see what was going to happen next... this BMW comes flying by in the next lane. Duck disappears under the car; big explosion of feathers. Oof. Poor duckie. I looked to check out how bad the pate smear was... and there goes duckie, booking it back to the sidewalk (well, as much as a waddle could be considered 'booking'). It looks like he lost most of his tailfeathers, but no obvious injuries. I looked at him, and said, "Man, you are one lucky bird." Something that made me smile that day.