Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Originally Rebecca was supposed to be gone from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday night. She is interviewing with a company called TellMe and they offered to fly her out to San Jose. Tuesday afternoon, she was interviewing over the phone with Stanford's NLP group and they wanted to see her in person as well, so we worked it out so that she could stay an extra day in order to make it to both interviews [with Stanford reimbursing the cost to extend the trip]. This was the first time we've been apart since we got married, so it was stressful and emotionally difficult [for both of us!]. I just have gotten so used to having Rebecca around that it isn't easy to be away from her.

This is interesting because so many people I know see their spouse so little. I find it a great blessing to be able to spend so much time with my best friend. Although I know this won't necessarily last, it is definitely a wonderful thing for now.

Ah, married life is so much fun. Sunday evening, we went over to Rebecca's friend's house to eat lasagna. It was one of those frozen pre-made lasagnas and when she had read the box, she thought it said that it took one hour and 15 minutes to cook. But it ACTUALLY said 115 minutes for cooking time. A difference of forty minutes. We all had a good laugh about that and then waited for the food to be done. Well, as irony would have it, when Rebecca's friend was getting the long awaited food out of the oven, the tin bent and the whole thing dropped on the floor. Needless to say, she was upset about it while the rest of us thought it was too great of a story to even be bothered by the reality of it. So we scraped it off their floor and ate lasagna-from-the-floor. True story.

Even though Rebecca's experimental results weren't looking as good as she hoped Monday, we took a quick break to go have dinner at Karl and Angela's place. They moved this week to San Jose for Karl's internship and Rebecca kept saying that "we'll never see them again." Although they DID move to where we ARE going to move, most likely we'll just miss them because they will come back here around the time that we move out there. But I doubt that was the last time we'll EVER see them. [okay so maybe I exaggerated, but why pass up a good excuse to hang out! -beck] So we chatted Monday night and then raced back to our house so Rebecca could beat her head against the computer some more, because she said she wasn't getting anywhere with her data. [things were in a much better perspective when I met with my advisor Tuesday morning, and was sent on a quest for more data the rest of the week. I finally got additional data (which should improve things) Saturday night, so I'll have to see how quickly I can incorporate it because I really need the survey to start yesterday in order to stay on schedule. Although yesterday when I looked back on the preliminary results from the beginning of the week, they didn't look nearly as bad as I remembered! Ah, perspective... -beck]

And then Rebecca left Wednesday afternoon. The flight went well. She managed to drive around San Jose by herself. [the most nerve-wracking part, of course...I don't actually like to drive in cities. Long distance drives, however, those are fun. :) I got to spend time with friends out there, as well, which was a definite plus. -beck] She made it to all her interviews and they went well. Really, she should be writing this email so you know how things went. I can only give you my opinion of the whole affair. I stayed alive while at home, working on my video project and keeping the house clean. When she got back Friday night, we got home at around 1 in the morning and woke up the next day at 9. My parents were in town this weekend, so we wanted to spend some time chatting with them.

[I enjoyed meeting with both of these groups of people. The teams have interesting, intelligent people. The interviewing styles were different, though, which probably is to be expected. TellMe gave me programming problems, and talked a little bit about research concepts. Stanford talked about research ideas, and a little bit about programming. In fact, with the Stanford group I got to play ping-pong while discussing things. Maybe this demonstrates whether I can multi-task? :) And TellMe has a dog-friendly environment, so of course I asked whether anyone brought their cat in...my interviewer replied that no, that would be "weird." :) Overall I feel like both interviews went well, and both sound like jobs I would enjoy working at. So I guess we'll see from here.]

We played a game with my parents and Rebecca told them all about her trip. Hopefully we'll get an offer back from one (or both?) of them soon; it would be nice to have some plans defined for our move this summer. Especially so we can finally start looking for housing. But now we get to play the waiting game; lucky for Rebecca she doesn't have time to think about it because she's too busy trying to finish up her thesis project.