31 Comments on “Not Dead”

1. What weekend?

2. So glad you’re still among the living. How was Dallas?

3. Absent-mindedly booked my wife’s airplane ticket in her maiden name (hey, that’s what was on the credit card!) so she had to bring picture ID (in married name) and 25-year-old marriage license to show TSA. Flying out, 2 weeks ago, she was rewarded with extra searches; yesterday, in Milwaukee, she got a shrug and expedited processing.

   She may eventually forgive me.

   How was your air travel?

4. I, too, am not dead. So there’s that.

5. Horrible! Especially when it ended with a power outage from 9 PM Sunday to 2:41 AM Monday.

6. spent the weekend in Novi, MI watching people in funny skirtlike pants beat each other up with bamboo sticks….that’s kendo! It was the Detroit Kendo Club’s 18th Tournament, big event. The drive up was fine until I got to Findlay when it started snowing. The drive home wasn’t bad until I got to Findlay when it started snowing. I think maybe I should stay out of Findlay.

7. Tiring but productive. We went to breakfast with our accountant yesterday, then finished up our taxes. We get refunds from the feds and CT, and owe a small amount to MA. Spouse and I promptly got on line and paid for an event for each of us; I’m going to a Pagan retreat in June, and he goes to Boston Comic Con in August.

8. Glad to hear that you are Not Dead. This is very good news. I hope your weekend was full of great fun and wonderful people.

   My weekend (and thanks for asking) was cold and snowy. I ameliorated that by baking cookies, which warmed up the kitchen and made the house smell lovely. Then I brought the results to work this morning, and reactions from my co-workers are about evenly split between total delight (from the ones who aren’t dieting or giving up sweets for Lent) and total fury (from the ones who are dieting and/or Lenting).

   Safe travels back home, sir.

9. Not dead? Now I wish I hadn’t started that meme on Facebook.. :)

   The wife and I went to Memphis this weekend, basically putzed around, ate too much, and enjoyed each other’s company, then went to see “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” at the Orpheum.

   Good weekend.

10. Very peaceful. Fixed pancakes, went walking, wrote comments at blogs, the usual.

    Currently reminding myself via YouTube of the greatness of Earth Wind & Fire. “Hearts afire…”

11. I think that I, too, am Not Dead. Yet. But maybe I’m a zombie who stalks sf authors. Who knows, really.

12. I was having a fun weekend, got a pedicure, then I made sure my roommate and I will remember where we were when we heard that Justice Scalia died. It should be an even more interesting election this year.

13. Two teenage boys taking their girlfriends out to dinner and a movie (ChaChing), plus the Valentine gifts they must provide or loose said girlfriends (more ChaChing), while I window shopped at Lowes to stay warm (much less ChaChing). Glad to hear you had fun at condfw.

14. Fabulous, thanks! Saw the MN Gopher womens hockey team play UM Duluth in Duluth twice and read a great novel, “Becoming Phoebe” by J. Michael Neal; I can’t recommend it highly enough, a very different story very well told. Not Sci-Fi but a good read.

15. Gave up my hand for Lent! Recovering from hand and elbow surgery, and discovering all the things that get much harder without the use of my dominant hand. Still very grateful for modern pain management …

16. The weekend was cold. As in bitter, ten-below cold. As in ‘stay home and think up new epithets’ cold.

17. My husband and I went to see the Tamburitzans! Saw many of my folk-dance friends in the audience.

18. I went to a science fiction convention and got my copy of The Last Colony signed by the author!

19. Very, very cold. Mitigated somewhat by the thought that we won’t have Antonin Scalia to kick around anymore. Unless, zombie-like, he returns.

20. I ran a full marathon for the first time in my life. 4:29:53. :D

21. Finished reading the memoir Jewel: Never Broken for my book club; we had to read something autobiographical or biographical on a woman. After that we read The Martian and then Still Alice. Moby Dick for the summer read. Hey, I used Being Poor and Straight White Male: Lowest Difficulty Ever with my English eighth-graders for nonfiction readings. Do I owe you any royalties, Sir Scalzi?

22. Long and difficult work day Saturday followed by the death of my beloved MacBook Pro Sunday evening. Logic board fried, data allegedly retrievable, and now I have this dumb dinky HP running Windows 10. Waaaaaaaaah.

23. I went to Dallas to celebrate my sister’s birthday. Thought about crashing ConDFW but really didn’t have the time to spare.

24. Cricket wrote: “Gave up my hand for Lent! Recovering from hand and elbow surgery, and discovering all the things that get much harder without the use of my dominant hand.

    When I had my shoulder surgery a few years ago (hard sidewalk + bad fall = prosthetic shoulder joint), one of the most useful things during my recovery was the One Touch Can Opener,available at Amazon and other sites, which really can be operated one-handed. (It takes two hands to change the batteries, though.) I also went to nearby thrift stores and bought several shirts with metal snap buttons that could be opened and closed one-handed, rather than struggle with ordinary buttons.

25. I had a wonderful weekend, due in no small part to being on two panels with you! I don’t know if you enjoyed the experience, but I sure did.

    Thank you for being such a wonderful guest at ConDFW!

26. Weekend‽ What the fuck is this crazy talk you speak? Have you been dumpster diving for crack-cookies again? My weekend was the usual.. work work work. Luckily it was all overtime. 1.5×14.50 for Saturday, and 2×14.50 for Sunday. LOL Sunday was easy $.

    Other than work it has been cold, rainy/snowy/sleety/freezy rainy here the last few days. Thank goodness for the drover/stockman/duster coat, and the Aussie inspired cattle driving hat. Both are oilskin and nicely waterproof. LOL

27. Packing, as I’m moving in two weeks’ time — the Feline Overlords are most displeased. And then in six to eight weeks, I get to do it again! (Construction delays, lease up at current place, arrrrrrrrgh.)

28. Mostly okay weekend, but we had temperatures in the negative tens and one of my three beehives which was alive before the weekend was silent afterward. I shall go out today and listen again, but that’s just denial. It was pretty obviously dead.

29. Sorry about your bees, Granny. :-(

    Our weekend was lovely, a getaway to Santa Ynez wine country. Wonderful exhibit at the Wildling Museum in Solvang (“California’s Wild Edge”). Gorgeous sunset at Ocean Park. Carload of deliciousness from Mosby.

    Stay at O’Cairns Inn in Lompoc, if you go – 20 minutes off highway 101 toward the ocean. If you like tasting a lot of wine, eat at Terravant. End of uncompensated plugs. :-)

30. At the park with my 2 dogs in 4th straight day 90 F heatwave. Wrote a lot, including exams, lesson plans for the Astronomy college course I started teaching last week.
    .
    Tomorrow, Wednesday 17 Feb 2016, my 60 college students will be back from Presidents Day Holiday to take Exam #1, turn in Homework #1, and get a special hour on the LIGO Gravitational Wave Discovery. Next week, an out-of-sequence WHAT IS LIFE intro to Astrobiology

    Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger B. P. Abbott et al.* (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration) (Received 21 January 2016; published 11 February 2016) On September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory simultaneously observed a transient gravitational-wave signal.

    The signal sweeps upwards in frequency from 35 to 250 Hz with a peak gravitational-wave strain of 1.0 × 10^−21. It matches the waveform predicted by general relativity for the inspiral and merger of a pair of black holes and the ringdown of the resulting single black hole. The signal was observed with a matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 24 and a false alarm rate estimated to be less than 1 event per 203,000 years, equivalent to a significance greater than 5.1σ.

    The source lies at a luminosity distance of 410 [+160 −180] Mpc corresponding to a redshift z = 0.09 [+0.03 −0.04 ].

    In the source frame, the initial black hole masses are 36 [+5 −4M]⊙ and 29 [+4 −4M⊙], and the final black hole mass is 62[+4 −4] M⊙, with 3.0[+0.5 −0.5] M⊙c^2 radiated in gravitational waves. All uncertainties define 90% credible intervals.

    These observations demonstrate the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems. This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

    I. INTRODUCTION

    In 1916, the year after the final formulation of the field equations of general relativity, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves. He found that the linearized weak-field equations had wave solutions: transverse waves of spatial strain that travel at the speed of light, generated by time variations of the mass quadrupole moment of the source [1,2]. Einstein understood that gravitational-wave amplitudes would be remarkably small; moreover, until the Chapel Hill conference in 1957 there was significant debate about the physical reality of gravitational waves…
    .
    https://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

31. Weekend? I think I noticed one of those flying past.