Think you are in shape? Try water skiing.

I grew up spending my summers at Joe's Pond water skiing, tubing, sailing, swimming, etc. Dad used to take all of the kids one day a week during the summer and the entire day would be devoted to water sports and spending time outside. One year we called it "Ski Camp Monday" and another year we called it "Daycare Tuesday" I think. I used to have birthday parties at Joe's Pond as well, and to this day many of my friends comment on how fun they were and how they have great memories of my apparently famous parties. More recently I have tried to have a weekend gathering with my best Cornell friends at the pond to enjoy water sports, boating, and good food. I certainly have tons of great memories from summers at Joe's Pond from throughout my life.

View of Grammy Jane's camp (left) from the water - my dad's camp is the smaller one on the right

 Water view from Grammy Jane's camp

I am very happy to say that David enjoys being at Joe's Pond as much as I do! He had water skied a few times in his life when we started dating, but it had never become a serious sport for him. In the past eight years he has been extremely motivated to improve his water skiing abilities and he has really come so far - he is probably a better skier than I am now! His efforts have not come without their fare share aches and pains from the strain on less commonly used muscles and an occasional headache / congested nose from swallowing half the lake in a bad fall. The one good thing about David is that he isn't afraid to fall, which allows him to really push himself to improve.

Last weekend we spent the weekend at Joe's Pond because we had some wedding logistics to take care of on Sunday. I have to admit that I was too lazy / wussy to water ski. I blame my post-defense coma - rather than exert myself I felt pretty content to wear comfortable clothing and just relax. David managed to ski three times though! Here are some pictures of him skiing and looking great.

Some good ones:

And we're going down!

Here's one from David just last fall to give you an idea for how much he has improved:

My dad and Alex are amazing skiers as well, with Alex really being the star of the family. She skis
competitively and is looking to ski in college as well.

My dad looking awesome (I hope he knows how cool I always think it is to have a Dad who is great at water skiing and at teaching others to ski):





Alex showing us how it's done:

Next time I'll try to get my bum into the water so we can include pictures of me skiing as well! If any friends or family want to learn to ski or enjoy a weekend or day relaxing at a Vermont lake.... let us know!

2013 Birthdays!

In the past couple of months David and I have both celebrated our birthdays so I thought it would be fun to share with you how we enjoyed our special days and what gifts we gave each other.

My birthday was in June and happened to fall on a Saturday. I was still busy preparing for my defense, so I spent much of the day working. However, David and the rest of my family did their best to make it a special day! I enjoyed a David-made french toast breakfast and later in the day steak tips, salad, and corn on the cob at my uncle Dan and aunt Purvi's house. I'm lucky because I share a birthday with my cousin Olivia - she turned 4 this year. Everyone thinks its a little eerie because the oldest and youngest grandchildren were born on the same day! My mom made me my favorite cake and both Olivia and I blew out the candles (she also had her own cake).

For my birthday, David gave me an awesome Lafuma down sleeping bag. I have been borrowing essentially the exact same sleeping bag from Christine for the past several years because I did not own a nice sleeping bag myself. Now we need to plan some camping trips!

David's birthday was just this past week and it fell on a work day. Sadly, neither of us had found time to go to the grocery store yet so breakfast was just toast. However, David usually eats breakfast alone before going to work because I sleep later than he does (lazy, right?) but for his birthday I dragged myself out of bed and we enjoyed breakfast together. For dinner we had chicken, veggie, and pineapple kabobs and I baked him a blueberry birthday pie as a surprise. It was a nice and relaxed evening for both of us!

David cooked the kabobs on our "new" Weber gas grill from Craigslist. We haven't posted about this yet, but David found this durable grill on Craigslist for just $150. Both David and I were unable to pick the grill up before the buyer sold to someone else so Grandpa John came to our rescue and picked it up for us. He even got the buyer to knock $50 off the price because the grill was in dire need of a good scrubbing! David has since put ~$50 into it to fix it up some. The grill would have cost $500-600 new, so we consider this to be one of our more successful craigslist purchases.

Cooking kabobs.





















The grillmaster!

Yum.

Happy Birthday David! He even got to sample the raw pie dough :) 

We skipped the singing because I didn't want David's ears to be permanently damaged with my horrible vocal skills. However, we did light candles and he did get to make a wish. 

I gave David a random spattering of smaller gifts that I kept thinking of during my defense prep. A simple reusable canvas lunch sack, a disposable underwater camera for our Hawaii vacation, stainless steel straws for smoothies and milk shakes, metal shirt collar inserts, "My Dog the Paradox" by The Oatmeal (a hilarious comic book of sorts), and a travel sized wooden cribbage board. I think one of his favorite gifts was the slide belt his sister gave him - instead of the standard punched hole belt this one has a ratcheting mechanism that allows the belt to be almost any size. He thought it was so super cool.

All in all, I would say we both had great birthday celebrations this year. Relaxed and family oriented, which is totally our style. 

Caroline Booth Milne, PhD

About a month ago I posted about preparing for my July 10th PhD defense. I am happy to say that the day went well and I passed!

I flew to Champaign, Illinois on July 8th and went straight to our office space there to finish preparing for the practice presentation I was going to deliver to three of my lab mates. My practice talk that day was the first time I had gone through any version of a verbal delivery, and while it was acceptable it was pretty convoluted and choppy. My lab mates had some excellent suggestions for improving clarity and and presentation content. All in all I was really thankful to have had the chance to practice for them - it really helped improve my final talk. Monday night my old roommate Laura picked me up from campus because I was car-less, and we stopped by her apartment so I could see her dog (who lived with us when we were roommates) and meet her new dog. She then brought me to Marinell's condo (my neighbor who I like to stay with) and the three of us had dinner together before I holed up in "my" bedroom and continued to work on my presentation.

Tuesday was lined up to be a busy day for me, with two scheduled meetings and presentation work. I walked a mile to the closest bus stop and then bused into campus on what used to be one of my regular bus routes. I talked to my Dad on the phone while I walked, and he told me he was on his way to Burlington for a client meeting. As I was walking down the road my department's building is on I called the caterer to confirm the delivery for my Wednesday presentation. As I was ending the call I heard screaming female voices come rushing up behind me, and as the thoughts "I'm the only person around," "I don't know any girls on campus anymore," "I'm confused" rushed through my head my sisters Alex and Christine threw their arms around me. I had NO idea they had planned a trip to Illinois to watch my presentation! It is very common for family to attend, but I had told everyone it was a short talk and the flights were too expensive so they should just watch remotely (I was going to set up a video feed). Needless to say, I was thrilled to see them and completely shocked. As I was recovering from the fact they were standing in front of me, my Dad walks around the corner. Urbana, IL is not Burlington, VT, Dad!

This is not a good quality image because it is very zoomed in, but Christine and Alex spotted me walking and started running to catch me. I'm the very hard to distinguish figure in the trees in the upper left. They are the two girls running with blue shirts on the right. Their timing couldn't have been more perfect.

Here is a picture of me saying "what on earth are you doing here???" and just generally being surprised.

After the initial surprise wore off I parted ways with my family and continued with my day. We met up again for dinner at mine and Dad's favorite spot, the Courier cafe. Dad likes the salad bar, I like the chicken salad sandwiches, and we both like the brownie sundaes. Christine and Alex seemed to really enjoy their meals and desserts as well! After dinner I holed up in my bedroom again, practicing my presentation quietly to myself. When I felt adequately prepared, I attempted to sleep. That was wishful thinking! I managed to doze off for about three hours, but for the most part my stomach was too full of butterflies for me to really relax.

Alex, Christine, and me outside of Courier Cafe.

Dad and me at Courier Cafe.

Wednesday morning arrived and the final hurdle of my six year PhD adventure began. I put on my suit, packed up my bag, and hopped into the car with Christine, Alex, and Dad who had very kindly picked me up at the bright and early time of 7:00 am. I reviewed my talking points while waiting for the caterer, and then set up in the conference room. One of my lab mates set his computer up to record and broadcast the presentation so that lab mates in Seattle and family members back on the East Coast could watch my defense. Sadly, I later learned that the broadcast quality was too choppy for people to really watch in real time. However, the presentation did record very well so some of my family was able to watch it after the fact.

The talk went very well and I was happy with my improvement over the practice talk! I covered most of the information I wanted to cover and felt that I spoke as clearly as could be expected of me, considering I have a nearly uncontrollable tendency to speak quickly while presenting. My lab mates still in IL, the post docs from our collaborators lab, my family, and my committee attended. After I finished talking I had a couple of questions from the audience, after which everyone but the committee left the room. When it was just us, they each asked a few more questions, only one of which I was unable to answer (and I should have known the answer). I left the room while they discussed my work among themselves, and waited in the hallway with my family. 5-10 min later the committee came back out and congratulated me! What a relief that was.

Presenting...

Waiting to find out if I passed.

My lab had cake to celebrate in the office and then my adviser Nathan took the lab out to lunch. I hung around afterwards to hear the results of Matt's prelim. Matt is another student in the lab who lives out in Seattle, and we had coordinated our respective milestones so that Nathan would have less travel. The rest of the day was mostly uneventful. Dad, Alex, Christine, and I went shopping at the Illinois bookstore for some spirited clothing and then Dad took us out to a celebratory dinner at a restaurant in Champaign (I may have taken a much needed nap before dinner). Thursday and Friday I ran a bunch of errands / took care of odds and ends around campus and visited with some friends in the area.

Exhausted after the presentation.

I am now home and getting back into a more normal routine! I have had a lot of small things to take care of this week so have been busy doing that. I will continue working for my adviser until the end of Summer, and have one more trip to Seattle planned in August. I do not have a job lined up for the fall yet, but I am actively looking and thinking about what I want to do next!

Click here to see the full album my dad compiled from their trip.

Go Karting, 2013

As most of you know, I've been karting (yep, that's with a k) since I left Cornell as it is a reasonably inexpensive way to stay racing. I also do Lemons from time to time, but I kart about ever 2-3 weeks. Because this eats up so many of my weekends, Caroline thought it would be cool to do a post about it.

The local track is F1 Outdoors (www.f1outdoors.com), a very nice track which can be run clockwise or counter clockwise and in two different configurations. It is a dedicated kart track which has their own "arrive and drive" karts for events and the like. A half hour private track rental runs about $1,800!!

The club at F1 Outdoors runs both shifter karts and TAG (Touch-and-go, a type of class) karts. Previously they ran the Rotax series which has many more regulations and only allows Rotax engines. As such, I have a kart with Rotax engine which is probably the most common type of engine in single speed karts at the moment. I have a CRG chassis which is what the local shop sells and supports. I (true to form) bought an older kart (~2004 chassis) for only $2,600 instead of buying a new one for around $8,000. I'm not regretting the decision, but I have been lusting after the newer karts which have better adjustability and supposedly are quicker. I've negotiated a friend at the track that we'll trade karts for a practice session - he gets video and data analysis and I get to see what a new kart feels like.

I'm number 28

Some stats about my kart:
Single Speed, centrifugal clutch
Displacement: 125cc
Max RPM: 14,200
Max Speed: ~100mph, but I gear it to be RPM limited at around 73mph at the local track
Lateral acceleration: ~2gs
Longitudinal acceleration: +1.2Gs/-.8 Gs (The kart does better under braking)
Fuel: 93 octane 2 stroke

I've just barely put a data logging setup on the kart in addition to my GoPro (video recording). It means that I can capture acceleration (in 3 axis), yaw (how fast the car is turning), speed, lap times, GPS coordinates, and front wheel speed currently. I can add a bunch more sensors which I plan on adding when I get the time. These are probably the most important for the moment. I'm hoping that this will help me figure out how to drive faster and make the whole thing a little more "engineering-y" rather than "seat of pants-y". Most karters are very much "seat of pants", which works pretty well, but I have to believe that data and science should help further. We'll see! I'm sure I'll post later when i get more data and get better at looking at it.

Check out the RaceCapturePro here: http://www.race-capture.com/

The really cool thing that having both data and video is that I can do overlay videos. Check out this video for what it all look at!

So, how have I been doing? Well, at F1 Outdoors I'm usually in the upper middle pack. I've gotten one win (see previous post), but it was in partial rain and wasn't the same as winning on a normal day. I'm motivated to figure out how to get quicker (hence the data analysis coming up), but I recently took a trip to New Hampshire to a different track and actually won! The first time on a track with very little practice and I was about a half second faster than the next fastest person. It makes me even more convinced that I haven't yet "figured out" F1 Outdoors, either from a kart setup or driver setup perspective. Hopefully future posts will be about doing testing, analysis, and getting faster!