Are we going to NYC?

Rebecca was accepted to present ("poster") at a conference in NYC in late March. Since we've never been to NYC, we decided to take this chance to see if we could get both of us to spend a couple days there. The sad thing is that during the day, Rebecca will be stuck in a conference while I am wandering art museums and galleries. But if we work this out, we'll have plenty of time in the evenings to do fun stuff together. [The conference is on Human Sentence Processing, and the work I'll present is stuff that I have done with the Linguistics research groups I've been involved with...my thesis stuff isn't ready to submit anywhere yet -becca]

The question is: are we going to be able to work out a way to get to NYC? It's very expensive to get a hotel anywhere and for some reason most of the hotels are booked already. Who knew that something big is ALWAYS happening in NYC? We don't really know anything about good hotels in NYC, so I emailed a professor of mine who goes to NYC all the time. He had some recommendations (stay at the YMCA because it's cheapest, but he usually stays at a nicer place on the upper west side) but it turns out that neither of those work because the YMCA is booked and the nicer hotel is way out of our price range. We'd like to keep the trip under $1000 [i.e. under what we got back in our tax refund :)]. Which is quite hard. And we didn't know. But we just don't have the money to spend on this trip, but it would be a nice graduation present to each other.

Well, we tried finding a good place for reasonable rates on Saturday. We think that we've got it worked out, but sadly BYU has to do all our travel purchases (because they're paying for Rebecca's half of the trip) and they aren't going to be in the office until Tuesday. Which means we have to wait on pins and needles hoping that the hotel isn't full in that time.

Going backwards in the week - we went out on Saturday to pick up some new needles for Rebecca, tough needles. She fixed all our jeans and started working on some of her other mending projects that we've had since we got married. This sewing machine is a handy little tool. She's going to make me an apron one of these days, I've already picked out the fabric.

Friday night, we went to see Harry Potter in the dollar theater. It was good, but I felt like this one was an "action flick" instead of a portrayal of Harry's experiences and world. To me, I appreciate the third film the best because it was an "artsy" approach to the Harry Potter world. For example, in the final battle of the fourth movie between Harry and Voldemort, why was Voldemort monologuing?!? I wanted to scream that out in the theater, the great line from The Incredibles, "I can't believe you got me monologuing!" But in the 3rd movie, the focus was on Harry coming to grips with his parents and his own power. I guess it's a difference in perspective between two types of directors: those who film movies to make money and those who film movies because they can be an art form.

Rebecca had an interesting mutual night on Thursday. The girls wanted to have a "girly" night [they called it a "Beauty night" -becca], so against Rebecca's better judgement, they invited someone to come talk to them about "colors" and what "season" they are [at least we had someone else talk about this stuff...I was kind of at a loss for what to do!]. It's supposed to help you identify which clothing colors best flatter you. My question is: how did they relate that to Young Women virtues? [ummm...Individual Worth?]

For Valentine's Day, we made chocolate covered strawberries and watched a documentary called "My Date with Drew." Cool premise to the film, we recommend people seeing it.

That's about it for this week. Have a good one.