Monthly Archive for June, 2007

Blue Ridge Mountains

Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains

Now that Memorial Day Weekend is a month in the past, I’ve gotten around to posting some of the photos Joe and I took while we were in Virginia. The weekend was a pretty relaxing one, all things considered, though we did spend Sunday hiking part of the Appalachian Trail and doing a lot of driving around the greater Wytheville area. Most of the photos are from then.

Our first big stop was at the Big Walker Lookout Tower, by a country store, which was filled with the sorts of things one expects from such an establishment. The younger ones of the group climbed the tower for photo-seeking purposes.

After some ice cream, we hopped back in the car and started searching for the hiking trail we wanted. Eventually (by which I mean hours later) we located a section of the Appalachian Trail that had a place to park our cars while we hiked. Oddly enough, part of the trail we went through went through some farmer’s cow pasture. Some of us might have gotten nostalgic if it weren’t for the fact that it was miserably hot when we weren’t under the trees. (Actually, my sister Kelley started doing Sound of Music impersonations in the middle of the pasture, but no one caught it on camera, unfortunately.)

Luckily for everyone, we found a nice creek to stick our feet in and cool off. Some of us were more excited by this than others. Not that I’m naming names or anything.

In the end, we hiked back to our cars, spent some more time driving and enjoying the scenery, went back to relaxing at the campsite, and then drove back to Ithaca the next day.

Ithaca Is…

Wells

I love my “backyard” in the summertime. Who needs air conditioning when there are creeks to stand in? Enjoy a few photos from my afternoon jaunt through Six Mile Creek.

Vindication!

I was pretty down earlier this week when everyone in my research group suddenly turned against my recent data and said it had to be wrong. I went back and adjusted some calibration parameters and reran all of the numbers, but things didn’t change too much. The trend that had them up in arms was still there. But now the tables have turned! I realized that the article I was supposed to lead a discussion on today had data for a situation similar to mine and they found the same trend that I did. So I spent most of our meeting today not so much leading a discussion on said paper, but proving to everyone that I’d made my measurements carefully and correctly and that my results constitute a clear continuation of the results of the previous paper. In the end, I won. No more questioning whether Nicole knows what she’s doing!

Instead, my advisor insisted that we add more of my–or rather our–data to the presentation he’s making at a conference next week. Win!