Irrelevance Glorified

Last September, one my good friends from college tied the knot. Russell was kinda an inherited friend — he went to high school with Yusuke before Yusuke joined me at IMSA. So, when I went to UIUC and roomed with Yusuke, I ended up hanging out a lot with Russell and Cameron. Russell is a very likable guy. In fact, he would annoy me greatly because whenever we went out places, people were always coming up to us and greeting him. He was always knowing people. Infuriating. Anyways, after graduating, he went up to Wisconsin to work for Kimberly-Clark, becoming our go-to guy for absorbables. Early last year I found out that he had become engaged to a lucky lady, and was planning his wedding for later on that year. When I found out that Yusuke was engineering his vacation to coincide with the wedding, I knew I had to make it. A number of the pictures below showcase his adorable daughter Itsuki. I often wonder what goes through the head of young children when they visit another country where they don’t speak the same language. I mean, it’s gotta be weird to get into a big metal tube, appear in a strange new area with lots of strange looking people, and all of a sudden no one understands you! Maybe I’m just underestimating the youth of today.

Flickr Set Here
Slideshow Below
Pictures & descriptions after the jump

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This is a bit out of order, but whatever. Last July, I decided to spend Independence day in Seattle, visiting my good friends Cameron and Gina. It was my first visit to their place since their kid, Ariana, was born. My visit was also a catalyst for our old college friend, Dave, to visit from Champaign. I think he enjoyed the west coast.

I had heard that Seattle put on a decent fireworks show, but due to budget restrictions, they canceled it that year. After a furious donation drive effort, though, Seattleites raised enough money to put on the show anyways. Personally, I think that’s a bad precedent to set. Now, they’ll never get funding for a fireworks show. Anyways, we were going to go to the fireworks show, but the weather was somewhat uncertain, and we had a baby to transport as well. So we decided not to go to the fireworks, but try and check it out from the upstairs balcony, which technically had a view. But some trees were blocking the view of some of the shells, so we decided to check it out on the TV. After watching it on TV for a while….we remembered that watching fireworks on TV is usually not very entertaining. So we watched a movie. However, I did enjoy reflecting on this gradual descent through various levels of laziness.

Flickr set here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures and Descriptions after the Jump.

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Wowsers! I’m only six months behind on my updates.

I hate crossing time zones for personal trips. The flights are always so inconveniently timed and long. So when it comes time for the year-end holidays, I tend to stay on the West Coast. For Thanksgiving last year, I visited my friends Cameron and Gina up in Seattle. Looking back, most of these pictures are of their < 1 year old daughter, Ariana (aka Ari). Partially, that's because we didn't do a whole lot of exciting, picture worthy things. But mostly, it's because she is phenomenally cute. So yeah, enjoy pictures of squirmy happy baby. Again, I was too lazy to grab my camera most of the time, so most of the pictures and videos are with my phone.

Flickr set here
Slideshow below
Pictures & Descriptions after the jump

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Back in October 2010, I traveled back to Chicagoland for the wedding of one of my cousins. Due to the frenetic pace of school/work and the time/cost of travel, I rarely see any of my relatives. Because my Floridian sister can’t stand the cold (scientifically speaking), she rarely ventures North during the non-summer months. However, all bets are off for weddings. Family weddings are generally Rao-fests, where I see the relatives that I never see otherwise. This one was nicely timed, in that it was also my birthday. I forgot my camera on this trip, so I started taking pictures with my cell phone. It is a functional camera and can take decent videos, but the still image quality leaves a lot to be desired. So I’ve supplemented these pictures with pictures from my sister and my cousin Tara.

Flickr set here.
Slideshow below
Pictures & Descriptions after the jump.

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Last August, I went to Colorado for the NREL‘s 20th Silicon Workshop. This is a really nice conference series concentrating on crystalline silicon photovoltaics (as opposed to thin-film silicon, CIGS, Cd-Te, and solar thermal). It’s a nice mix of industry and academia (mostly industry), and the sessions touched upon the current problems facing the industry as well as a look into the future of the technology. It also happened to be in Breckenridge, a ski resort town. Of course, it was August, so there was no snow on the ground, but it was still a picturesque area. I was intrigued because Breckenridge sits at about 9,000 ft in elevation, which is already close to the highest I’ve been (on land). So, this trip not only offered a chance to learn about silicon photovoltaics (awesome), I could do a little bit of hiking on the nearby mountains and hit a personal best for hiking altitude.

Anyways, here are some pictures of the trip. I didn’t take very many; it was raining most of the time and I didn’t get to really explore so much.

Flickr set here.
Slideshow below.
Photos & descriptions after the jump.

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Back in May, I took a long weekend and traveled back to Chicago for my nephews very first birthday. It was the first time I had seen him since last August, so he had grown up quite a bit, and was on the very verge of walking. My other sister was traveling up from Florida, and a bunch of rugrats were invited over to ensure that chaos would ensue.

Interacting with Sachin is interestingly different from a lot of other kids. In the limited interaction that I’ve had with my other friends’ young kids, I feel like I’m met with a bit of skepticism. Like, they are not sure if I’m for real or not, and they take a while before they feel like they can address my existence. For Sachin, he took to me pretty quickly. I think that the most simple explanation is that unlike my other friends with little kids, I look a lot like his Mommy and Daddy. Sachin showed little hesitation in crawling up to me, pulling on my pant legs to bring himself to his feet, and then asking to be picked up.

In the pictures below, you’ll notice that there aren’t a whole lot of actual birthday party pictures. That’s because I was pressed into camcorder duty, and was thus unable to use my own camera. However, there are a lot of other pictures of doing cute little Sachin things that I’m sure people can enjoy. You can blame the graininess of the pictures on the fact that I used a high ISO setting to combat his fidgety-ness.

Flickr Set Here
Slideshow Below
Pictures and Descriptions after the jump.

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Much like last year, my Mom visited me in February. However, things were better than last year. First of all, we weren’t both sick. Second of all, she was able to stay 2 weeks instead of just 1. And third, it didn’t rain all the whole time, just part of the time.

I wasn’t really in a position to take a lot of vacation time, so there weren’t any awesome road trips, but we did manage to see some things when the weather permitted. First off, we visited the Winchester Mystery House, a interesting little tourist trap in San Jose. Basically, the heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune used her husband’s legacy to build a rambling, chaotic house. No pictures allowed, though, of the inside, so no photographic evidence.

The weekend after that, it was a rainy day, so we went to do some museuming in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where we visited the Conservatory of Flowers, the Science Museum, the Art Museum, and a Japanese Tea Garden. And the day after, we visited a state park to see some redwoods.

Whenever I look over these pictures, I usually find that I forgot to take many pictures of actual people. That is true in this set as well. It’s quite flower-filled, at my Mom’s request. But still, hope you enjoy.

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below
Pictures and Descriptions After the Jump

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Last Thanksgiving, I decided not to go back to Chicago, mostly because flying back to the Midwest is a pain in the butt and sorta expensive as well. I like to travel within the time zone, to minimize those hassles. So when Bruce and Tina extended an invitation to me to visit for Thanksgiving, I accepted it before they could explain that it was mostly sarcasm.

Visiting them is “interesting”, mostly due to their two young boys, Nile (20 months when I visited) and Cyrus (3 months), who are slowly draining their parents’ sanity. This was actually my first time meeting Cyrus. He was still blob-like at this age, but I liked Cyrus; he did not fuss when I held him, and we had some good conversations during tummy time. Nile was a bit suspicious of me, but allowed me to read some books to him. He’s pretty verbal at this age, although Tina is much more skilled at comprehending him than I am.

We were pretty ambitious for this Thanksgiving meal; I convinced Tina to try out the Good Eats Brined Turkey recipe, which makes for a deliciously moist turkey. It turned out well overall, although we were hampered by not having a true probe thermometer. I also made a slow-cooker cabbage dish that turned out pretty well, and a sausage stuffing that was delicious, although I should have chopped the walnuts within it a bit finer.

Overall, though, this was just an excuse to visit Bruce & Tina, two of my favorite people.

Anyways, here are some pictures of my visit, which will probably be used as evidence someday by Child Protective Services.

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures And Descriptions After the Break.

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Back in November, I used up some of my vacation days and visited Japan. Not just on a whim, mind you; when I travel, I travel to visit people. In this case, it’s my good friends Yusuke and Tomoko, old compatriots from High School (Yusuke) and undergrad (Tomoko). While I flew in from San Francisco, another friend from undergrad, Becky, flew in from Boston along with her boyfriend Steve. So in many ways, it was a little reunion with a lot of my favorite people.
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I was in Chicago at the end of July/beginning of August, but not three weeks later I found myself back again. Cameron and Gina were having a wedding reception! I know what you’re thinking. Wasn’t there some sort of reverend activity back in September? Well yes, there was. But you know, parents prefer it to see their kids getting married, rather than just hearing about it, so they decided to have a little ceremony in Chicago, and invite more than two people. I didn’t remember to take many pictures, because I was all caught up in the moment, but here they are, along with a picture courtesy of Dave Clutter.

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