As I mentioned last year, we spent last Christmas in Breckenridge, CO with Katie’s side of the family. It was a wonderful trip and we enjoyed a very white Christmas. Katie didn’t break any bones this time around. But we did have fun skiing, tubing, snowboarding, making snow angels, and just enjoying the company. You can see the pictures by clicking the image below.

Colorado - December 2008

After the festivities had ended Katie returned to her research which did not end quite as early as planned. Chase returned to work and life returned to normal in Richmond until March. In March, we experienced one of those rare winter storms that actually drops snow and it accumulated.  This rare storm gave Richmond between 8″ and 10″.  Richmond will typically start shutting down at about 1″ of snow (yeah, yeah, laugh away all your northerners) Katie luckily got a day off since VCU is primarily a commuter school; unfortunately Chase still had to work. Check out the few pictures we took.

Snow - March 2009

At the end of April, Katie finally presented her research to the Medicinal Chemistry department. And May 1st successfully defended her Master’s Thesis (For your sanity, don’t read unless you really like Chemistry :-p – -Chase). May 16th, Katie graduated from VCU with her Master’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences. Of course, pictures of the joyous day are posted.

Katie's Graduation

In the days after her defense and before graduation Katie interviewed for a position as a Lab Specialist in a microbiology lab at VCU; and in June started her first job. She’s still working there and enjoying the opportunities available to learn new things.

Also in June we celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Some people claim the first year is the hardest. We honestly didn’t notice much of a change other than some added jewelry. We hope the years to come are as equally blissful.

July we bought our first house. It’s a nice 4-bedroom, 2.5-bath, brand new house in the same area of town we’ve been living in. There are plenty of pictures up of it, inside and out, furnished and unfurnished. The dogs seem to have finally gotten used to the house and to going out on their tie-out leashes.

House

We spent our birthdays in Key West with Chase’s parents. We toured most of the tiny island and learned a lot of its history. We even saw some interesting places including the Pelican Poop Shop, Garden of Eden, and the Love Muscle House. If you want to read more of our adventures just scroll back through the posts or browse the pictures.

Florida/Key West - August 2009

We stayed home this year for Halloween. We handed out about 7 large bags of candy to the neighborhood kids. Chantel and Alex even brought over Jay to go trick-or-treating. He was Bumblebee from Transformers. It was really neat to see all of the costumes. Our next door neighbors’ 2-year-old granddaughters were a pumpkin and a lady bug. The one got a kick out of being the same as our dog Gizmo. The jury’s still out on how Gizmo felt. Of course, we decorated the house.

Halloween 2009

Chase, Katie, and friend Mary-Jane, and her boyfriend, Adam, drove down to Florida for Thanksgiving. It was a nice to get away from work for a while and just be able to sit back and relax. We spent the date after Thanksgiving at Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure with Mom.

Florida - Thanksgiving 2009

This year we are hosting our first Christmas. Katie’s side of the family is coming down to visit for a few days. Mom O already made us a gorgeous wreath for our front door. The Christmas lights were up before Thanksgiving. Presents have been bought and wrapped. Now all we have to do is wait for Christmas to get here.

Christmas 2009

Once again, we wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The photo gallery and blog is continuously updated, so be sure to look at it throughout the remained of 2009 and all of 2010 for updates.

Update (12/19/2009): Since this post was originally made we’ve had one of those rare snow-dumping storms hit Richmond. We got about 8-9″ of wet snow in the last 24 hours.

Snow December 2009

]]> http://www.alixblog.net/2009/12/06/another-year-of-memories/feed/ 0 http://www.alixblog.net/2009/05/19/refraction/ http://www.alixblog.net/2009/05/19/refraction/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 17:27:41 +0000 Chase http://www.alixblog.net/?p=134

Refraction
Noun
Physics
1. the change in direction of a wave, such as light or sound, in passing from one medium to another in which it has a different velocity

After a few days of pondering life in general, I have gathered a good idea of what is going on and it relates to the word above.  I have never been good at metaphors, but I am at least going to try.

Life is like a wave.  Waves typically travel in an up and down pattern and does life.  You have your ups and downs along the way.  Each of our waves has it’s own amplitude, some of us go up real high and them come down real low while others is pretty shallow.  The question is, what happens when the wave is refracted?

In the terms of physics (as stated above), when a wave is refracted, due to passing from one medium to another, its velocity changes.  When the velocity is different, the wavelength also changes.  If life is like a wave, then the medium upon which refraction can occur could be considered a major life changing event.  Life could then become a crazy ass roller coaster ride with steep ups and downs or maybe it just smoothes out and everything is easy sailing.  Of course, all that could be reversed in an instant.

The problem people need to learn is that refraction isn’t a bad thing.  It’s just a change of pace.  No matter what happens, you need to learn to deal with this changes and the outcomes that they bring in a positive way.  If everything is looked at from a pessimistic point of view, you are likely to hurt or anger the people around you as well as yourself.

One thing we have both learned in the past few years is the easiest way to hurt or anger those close to us is to not listen. And by listen I don’t just mean the hearing process. But actually understanding what is being said and why it is being said. Not only that, but to listen to everyone; to obtain all viewpoints on a situation to have a more accurate understanding of what is happening. Too often it seems we get so caught up in our own realities we fail to see how our realities affect other realities.

A couple of quick side notes.  I’ve heard that at least one person took our last post personally.  It was never intended to inflict harm in anyway.  The purpose of the post was a to allow people to have a insight into what Katie and I have been thinking for the past month or so.  We needed some time to take a step back and look at our life together. I have partially edited the previous post.

The other note, most of the pictures from Katie’s graduation and some recent pictures of the pets have been uploaded.  I’ll add the remainder when we get them from mom.

Now if only I could convice everyone to STOP bugging me to consider getting my PhD. As of right now, I want to be out of school and be a member of society and get some experience.

Katie has been on a rigorous job search, but she has come up empty handed so far.  It really seems like companies are dragging their feet on calling her back.  Either that or they just don’t think she qualified.  I did notice when I started looking for a job that companies care about experience much more than your education.  I was lucky to find a great company that overlooked that and hired me.  If it comes down to it, Katie will start looking for jobs in the RTP (Research Triangle Park near Raleigh-Durham, NC).  We really don’t want to leave the Richmond area though.  Oh well, have to follow where the jobs are.  I can get a job just about anywhere we move.

This past weekend Katie, Dustin, and I went to the XL102 (Rock station in Richmond) Chili Cook-off.  Most of the chili we had was disgusting.  I can’t understand how some of these restaurants have won awards for their chili.  The three of us could kick all their butts with the most basic of ingredients.  The music for they had wasn’t bad, but they had no energy.  Trapt and Amberlin were the two bands we saw live.  Neither one of them performed like I would expect a rock band to.  Doesn’t really matter though, it only cost us like $12 to go and we had a pretty good time either way.

Chase and I are doing well. We’re looking forward to our extended weekend in Titusville this upcoming weekend. I think we both need it to prevent burn out. It looks like we’ll be there for the landing of the shuttle, which I think will be pretty awesome. Plus we’ll get to spend some quality time lounging in/around the pool and not thinking about work or school.

Back to now though, I’m finally working on the last couple of drafts before my thesis is distributed to my committee. To put it in perspective, I give a copy to each committee member. They then have 10 days to read, comment, correct, and review my thesis. Then I defend it–they ask me questions about my work and anything related to it for a few hours. Sometime in those 10 days I’ll give a talk to my entire department on my work (about 45 min). After my defense I’ll have about a week to make any corrections before I submit my final copy to the library, where they’ll look over it to make sure it adheres to all the necessary standards and if it does and I have all my signatures then they’ll publish it and I’ll officially be done. For anyone keeping track I still have to write my table of contents (including the list of figures, list of tables, and list of schemes), abstract, and experimental–and I’m already past 115 pages.

This past weekend I installed a new processor and motherboard I reformatted my computer so I’m still trying to get everything set up properly. That being said, I have some snow pix, but you’ll have to wait until Chase gets home to see them. and they’re now up in the photo gallery.

Before I started writing I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what I was talking about when it comes to this receptor. But, the more I read to get the facts precise, the more I realize it’s so much more complicated than I ever believed. And thus, I get more confused so I have to read more to understand what I don’t understand.

But on a different note, we managed to get a download of Windows 7. Naturally we didn’t put it on one of our main rigs, but still one that would get enough to use to find out how well it works — my laptop. Luckily it’s not laid out much differently than Vista. It’s similar to experiencing Office 2007 when you’re used to Office 2003 in terms of XP to 7. The hiding all open windows features is nice. And with the themes it rotates through a stack of pictures for the background (which for someone who likes to change backgrounds often (i.e. me) it’s nice). Oh yeah, and the jumplists! /smile

Well I’ve wasted enough time here, back to re-reading what I’ve written to expand upon it further.

We usually try to keep the site up-to-date on what’s going on with us; haven’t been but so successful lately. So here’s what’s new (or the same) with us:

Katie’s still working on her Master’s in Medicinal Chemistry. She’ll hopefully be defending late Jan-early Feb. We’re hoping she’ll get a job around here since we’ve gotten attached to all of our wonderful friends here in Richmond. But as any scientist knows, research just doesn’t go the way you expect and always takes longer than anticipated.

Chase is still one of three in the IT department at G.D. But he loves the fact that it’s small enough that every day is different. Right now his department is in the midst of writing a new piece of software for their accountants to use so he’s been quite busy.

In the pet department all of our fish have died, probably due to a fungal infection. But Gizmo and Teddy are doing just fine. Gizmo is just as ornery in the morning as always about going in the kitchen. Teddy has had thankfully much fewer seizures. And this fall they got a new little sister, a little roborovski hamster named Kobito.

But here is a recap from the beginning:

We rang in the New Year here in Richmond with some friends just as we plan on ringing in 2009.

Katie and her friend Mary-Jane spent Valentine’s weekend back in Blacksburg for the fourth production of the Vagina Monologues at Virginia Tech. After working with the second and third productions it was fun change to just be an audience member for Katie.

We spent Easter in Florida with Mom and Dad A. Chantel, her fiance, and his son. We had a lot of fun dying eggs, visitng the grandparents, going to Sea World and attempting to teach Jay (Chantel’s fiance’s son) how to swim.

In May Katie presented some of her research at the Virginia Academy of Science annual meeting in Hampton, VA. And as with most of her family and friends her peers had the chance to be bored with her babbling about molecular modeling and docking of ligands to receptors.

As most of you know we tied the knot in June. We had a beautiful ceremony and reception at Whitehall Manor up in Leesburg, VA. Gorgeous setting in country. One of the pictures Dad A. keeps saying we should photo shop in some cannons and civil war soldiers. Thanks to Mom O’s help everything turned out perfect and like everyone had warned us, it was a whirlwind of fun then over before we were ready.

We spent the week after the wedding recuperating in the sun in the Grand Cayman Islands. We stayed in Chase’s parents timeshare right on the beach. Our room had a view of both the golf course and the ocean. We snorkeled with fish and an eel, swam and fed the stingrays, shopped, went sight-seeing, and of course relaxed. I think the best food I had all year was the food we had there.

Fourth of July was spent up in northern Virginia with Mom and Dad O and saying good-bye to Amanda (since she would spend the next 5 1/2 months in Australia). We drove out and watched the fireworks from the side of I-395 next to the Pentagon.

Celebrating birthdays in August was fairly uneventful. Just spent it here hanging out with friends. Although going out to eat wasn’t quite as funny as is with Mom A when we have to explain to the server that we’re really celebrating three birthdays at once.

Labor Day weekend was spent in Florida. We went out to Homosassa Springs and Katie did not take a hundred pictures of manatees like last time (Jan 2004); instead it was just the fish jumping.

For Halloween we once again went out to our friend Dustin’s uncle’s house. Where we all dressed up in scary masks to scare the kids coming through the haunted walk. Katie went as a ghoul and Chase went as death. I think we scared more adults than kids though.

Late October Katie’s car stopped producing heat. After the diagnosis of a clogged heater core we decided we had put enough money in the car that it wasn’t worth it for us to fix. So early November we bought Katie a new car; a Chevy Cobalt. So now we have a giant orange snowfall and a cobalt cobalt.

Thanksgiving was spent here in Richmond with friends. We enjoyed our first experience of hosting a big dinner as a married couple. The turkey came out perfect despite not having a pop-out timer. All of our made-from-scratch side dishes turned out well too. Although I think everyone’s favorite were the bottles of Copperridge wine (same blush we had at the wedding).

Christmas will be spent out in Colorado with Mom and Dad O, Melissa, her husband, Amanda, her boyfriend, and the two exchange students. Katie isn’t being allowed near any snowmobiles and is only skiing three days so hopefully we won’t have a repeat of Jan 2006 where Katie broke her arm.

And that brings us back to New Year’s. Happy Holidays again and enjoy the pictures!