Thanksgiving and a conference

So, it's been a while. No blogging for almost a week, and the only reason I'm blogging right now is that my elevation model of the Big Island of Hawai'i is large enough that projecting it into new coordinates takes forever (16% done) and I have some breathing space in the meantime. Doing a semester's worth of research and image processing in a week and not even knowing if I'll be able to put together a poster for the AGU conference in San Francisco next week is certainly not recommendable (34% done).

Anyway. Stop the whining. (37% done) Thanksgiving was a resounding success in my quarters. Shan and I invited some people over to our house, including Shan's mom (who lives in Delaware and flew in from Philadelphia on Wednesday) (46% done), Markus and Doro (who just moved from Iceland to Red Hook, Duchess County, NY, a place even more god's forsaken than Hella and Hvolsvollur combined), Darren and Terry from the aerospace gang, Armann and Asa, (59% done) Jose (or Joey, a first year geology grad student from Puerto Rico who was seeing his first snow ever around that time), and the newest family in the group, Veronica, Ryan and their baby boy Brady (74% done) and his aunt (Ryan's sister) Cherry, who lives in Hollywood and regularly brushes shoulders with the rich and famous.

Note how I said "some" in the preceding paragraph, referring to the number of people we invited to our house. Now, keep in mind that our apartment is the size of a shoe box (and the kitchen is the size of a CD cover) and you'll realize that we were stretching the (90% done) limit of what our apartment can accomodate without exploding. The party wasn't supposed to exceed 8 people... but actually, I'm glad it did. We all had such a good time, everyone left totally stuffed and (I guess) very grateful for having such nice friends as me and Shan ;) The turkeys (yes, we made two) were delicious and the absolute winner of the evening, I have to say, was the pumpking mushroom soup that Shan cooked out of the collective memory of himself and his mom.

Uups, 100% done. Talk to you later, if only to tell you about the fantastic sage stuffing and the wonderful blackberry-infused gravy. It's good to have alliances in cold Iceland when cooking Thanksgiving dinner in the Empire State!