Lets go (Navy) Blue!

So, this past weekend, since there was no Michigan football game, I went to the Navy football game in Annapolis against Rutgers. My friend Kelley invited me since her sister is a "firstie" (senior) at Navy. It was a lot of fun and very different than Michigan football games. First of all, since it is a military academy, there are a lot more rules that students have to follow. Every student is required to attend every football game from beginning to end, no leaving early. They all march in with their company in uniform (30 companies in the academy) and commanders(?) of each company get introduced and everyone lines up on the field. I took my disposable camera that I bought in New York when I saw the Little Mermaid because I wanted to finish it so I could get it developed (ahhh the good old days of film cameras...not knowing what the picture looks like the second after you take it!). Well, big surprise, I haven't gotten them developed yet. I was going to wait until I had the pics to post, but then I would have to go against my new rule of never going more than a week without posting so I'll just have to update it later when I get the pictures back.

So anyway, after all the midshipmen marched in, the game started. It was actually a really good game because both teams were at about the same skill level. (I also have to add that I felt weird there because it was Navy (a blue and gold team) against Rutgers (a red and white team). I felt like I was supposed to hate anyone I saw in red, I kept forgetting they weren't from THE...Ohio State University). Navy ended up winning with a late in the fourth quarter field goal, 23-21.

After the game, we went to a couple tailgates (at Navy, everyone tailgates after the game since they are not allowed to be drunk at the games, or even buzzed for that matter). We got lots of free food and I got to meet several of the people in Colleen's company...men in uniform :).

Also, John McCain was at the game, although I did not see him. It was homecoming and parent's weekend and I guess his son is in Colleen's company. They didn't do anything special for McCain though, if I hadn't been told he was there, I wouldn't have even known.

All in all it was a good day, fun to experience another college football stadium, totally different feeling that Michigan. That being said, I am going to Ann Arbor this weekend for some good old big ten football action. This time I will have my non-disposable camera so I can update with pictures any time I want.

On a side note, even though I know almost everyone who reads this blog, also reads Ted and Sara's blog, I just wanted to include this link to some pictures of my niece that were taken by a professional photographer and turned out adorable! http://sherryhammondsblog.com/
(just scroll down a bit until you see the photos of Leili!)

More ramblings about my life :)

How has it already been almost a week again since my last post??? I don't even feel like I am doing that much and time is flying by, September is more than half over!

Here are some things that I've done recently that I didn't mention in my last post. Two weekends ago, I went to New Jersey to visit boy for his birthday, which was Sunday, Sept. 7th, he turned 23. Yes, I am older than him, but only by 7 weeks. However it seems like more than that since I was a year ahead of him in school, but since I did an extra year of college, we both graduated and started our jobs at the same time so I usually forget I graduated high school a year before him and that I am therefore much wiser :).

I went there Thursday night (ahhhh the beauty of working for the federal government) on the Amtrak, which by the way was the first successful trip with no hiccups that either of us has experienced trying to visit each other since we've lived out here. It was so awesome to not have any glitches. I left work at 4:45 to take the metro into downtown DC to catch my 6:10ish train. Left right on time and arrived in Hackensack at 9:15 in only 3 hours!!!!!!!!!! So worth paying about 5 times more than the bus. Since this was Thursday night, Matt had to work Friday so I stayed home and played guitar hero/nintendo wii and watched all the HGTV I wanted while I still had control of the remote.

I also planned to make a cake Friday and I knew that Matt would not have the supplies, so I packed my cake pans in my suitcase from Alexandria and on Friday, walked over to CVS to buy the rest of the supplies. I managed to make a pretty pathetic looking double layer chocolate cake with vanilla frosting. I have to say that no matter how hard or how many times I try, my cakes never even come close to looking like mom's always did when I was a kid. My cakes never stick to the pans, but they are always a weird shape. They end up being much thicker in the center of the circle than around the edges, so the top of the cake is never flat. Or, if I want the top to be flat, I end up having a huge gap around the edges between the two layers that I attempt to just cover up with frosting. However it was pretty warm that day and by the time Matt got home, the cake had sort of started to collapse and the layers were sliding apart. Matt was a trooper though and told me the cake looked great and we enjoyed it all weekend :)

Also, for Matt's birthday I gave him two tickets to the US vs. Cuba world cup qualifying soccer match being played in Washington DC on October 11th. Matt is a big soccer fan (and so am I) so I knew he'd be excited and neither of us has ever seen the US team play. After that game I will definitely have pictures to post (so long as Matt asks me to go with his second ticket!).

Next weekend, Sept. 26th, I will be going to Ann Arbor for the Michigan vs. Wisconsin football game, which I am so excited for. Matt will be there as well as several of our college friends so it should be an awesome time. Also, Matt's parents are generously donating two (of their four) season tickets to us for the game so we do not have to go through the ordeal of trying to find tickets. Although with the way the season is going, that might not actually be too hard.

First week of production almost done, so far things are looking pretty good, my trainer was out yesterday so he is a little behind in reviewing our cases, but he will catch up with us way before we have more cases to give him so I'm not too worried.

Hope everyone is doing well and be sure to check the updated version of my previous post (couch!) and the challenge I posted in the comments!

Updated: All over the map

Okay, I know that it has been a long time since my last post, and I am sorry for that. I don't even really have an excuse other than pure laziness. I promise to try harder :)

The big news for me this week is...I HAVE A COUCH!!!!!! For 8 weeks I've only had one chair in my living room, now it looks like a real person lives here! My couch was very generously donated by my Aunt Cindy, and I am very grateful to her for it. It matches my apartment really well and is very comfortable. Here it is:



Mom and Dad came to visit me this week; dad has a business trip here and mom tagged along. We had a good time, it was my first time ever "hosting" my parents! I set up the "guest bed" (air bed) for them in the "guest room" (dining room) and everything went great. Another nice perk was they brought a lot of my stuff that did not make the cut in the July move due to space limitations, including my old desktop computer, my cello, and my skis and associated gear (I must say, I felt pretty ridiculous carrying skis around in virginia in Summer, but whatev). As for the couch, for a few minutes we were worried it would not fit through my apartment door(!) but we managed to work it through. Also making things interesting while moving the couch was worrying about the sprinkler system, which leads me to another story...

(BTW, its very possible I've already written about this story) So, a few weeks back, I'm in my apartment and I can hear a very faint fire alarm going off and what sounds like a shower running in the hallway a few doors down. So I go out to investigate and make my way over to the elevators and hear what sounds like a waterfall inside all 4 of the elevator shafts. Also through the elevator shafts, I hear an alarm beeping and a voice recording saying "there is a fire emergency in the building, please evacuate the building." Now, I think its weird that there is a fire alarm going off telling me to evacuate and I couldn't even hear it in my apartment. So I decide to go downstairs to figure out what is actually happening, because it is 11pm and I don't want to evacuate the building in my pajamas when I was just about to go to bed. I get downstairs and the lobby is completely flooded and getting worse, water is coming down from the ceiling all over the place and there are firemen there trying to figure out how to work the elevators using the firemen's operation. So I ask around and it turns out, someone hit a sprinkler on the 10th floor, and water was dripping down into all the hallways and apartments below it in that wing of the building, which thankfully, I do not live in, PHEW! And how do you think they hit the sprinkler??? MOVING A COUCH INTO THEIR APARTMENT!!! So whoever designed our fire suppression system was not very bright. The ceiling in the hallways right outside apartment doors are about 8 inches lower than the rest of the hall, and this lowered area right outside everyone's doors is where the placed all of the sprinklers, I'm actually pretty shocked this has not happened before. So, I learned my lesson from these poor people, watch out for sprinklers when moving large furniture!

So back to my actual post. I actually don't know if I was going anywhere in particular before, so I do not know what I am going "back" to. But I'll just continue rambling about what is going on in my life. This is my last week of work before I am considered to be "on production". Basically, this means, starting next week, I will begin submitting reports on the cases I examine and sending them out to attorneys and applicants. It also means that we are accountable for our work now and not just sitting in lectures and practicing examining. I am slightly nervous about starting production but we have 6 more months before we are expected to get up to 100% production. For those of you who are confused about "production", here is what it literally means. First, the life of a patent application: every patent application that comes in to the office (heretofore referred to as "a case") is assigned to a patent examiner (me) for review. We go over everything the applicant is trying to claim in their application (in other words, everything the applicant thinks they have invented and want legal protection for) and send a response (heretofore referred to as an "office action") to them letting them know which claims are patentable and which ones are not. The applicants then get 6 months to respond with amended or withdrawn claims. We then look over the amendments they have made and decide if the changes they made qualify the application for patentability. After this, we either do a final rejection, or an allowance. Patent examiner performance is purely based on how many cases you get through in a biweek. Based on your gs-level (salary) and the complexity of the technology you examine, there are a different number of cases that you a expected to examine. Every case is worth two "counts". One count for the first office action, and one count for either a final rejection or an allowance. Being on production means that you have to get X number of counts per biweek. If you do it, great. That is almost the only thing that is used to evaluate us in our job. If you produce 105% of the counts you are expected to, you become eligible for promotions and bonuses. One of the best and worst parts of this job is that your performance is almost exclusive evaluated on whether or not you meet your production goals. On one hand, you always know where you stand, you never wonder whether or not you are doing a good enough job, but at the same time, if you can not meet production, there is really nothing you can do to help your cause. But, like I said earlier, they do not expect us to be anywhere close to 100% production for quite some time.

Another perk of next week is I get to switch to the flexible work schedule. Since we spend significantly less time in lectures when we are on production, we are basically allowed to work whenever we want. We can choose to work 8, 9 hour days and 1, 8 hour day or 8, 10 hour days per biweek. We are also allowed to get to work as late as 9:30am, however I will probably try to get there around 8 or 8:30, which will still be a welcome break from the last 8 weeks of having to be at work by 7:30 everyday.

Well, thats what has been going on in my life recently. What's up with you guys?

Update on my Apartment

Well, several weeks ago I said I would post more picture of how my apartment is looking and I've finally cleaned it enough to feel good about posting pictures of it. The only big thing I still need is a couch, which I am getting in two weeks thanks to Aunt Cindy! Here are the pictures:

The Seaweed is always greener, in somebody else's lake!

I keep getting a lot of grief when I go too long without posting on my blog. This is what I have to say to that; too bad. Somehow I am very busy everyday, still trying to get settled, planning trips to and from New Jersey, and being (as dad likes to call it) a social butterfly. So, I do try to blog whenever anything interesting happens, so please keep checking because you never know. When I let it go a week without posting, I haven't forgotten about my adoring public, I'm just busy!!

Okay, now on to the point of this entry. I went to New Jersey this weekend to visit boy again and had a great time...once I got there. And so begins another tale of a 10 hour trip up the east coast to the beautiful town of Hackensack, New Jersey. I managed to make it to my bus (megabus again this time) BARELY on time. I literally walked on and the bus left as I sat down. Anywho, I figured this has to go better than last time for the following reasons: the bus moves, the bus left on time, I got my own seat with no one sitting next to me (yay!). We got to Baltimore in what I thought was pretty good time, about a half hour behind schedule, but with Washington DC traffic, I was not complaining. We then continued on to New York without any hitches until we got to the line for the Lincoln Tunnel. For those of you who do not know, in order to get in to NYC, you have to take a tunnel or bridge, and I have gathered that everyone and their mom goes through the Lincoln Tunnel when I am on a bus trying to get through it. We entered the traffic jam waiting for the tunnel at 5:30pm (45 minutes after we should have arrived in NYC, again, I was not complaining thinking we'd be about an hour late, much improved over last time). We exited the tunnel at 7:30pm much more behind schedule and much crankier (fyi, the distance we traveled was about 5 miles, 4 miles of which we traveled in the last 10ish minutes of that two hour window). So I get to Penn Station at 7:45, the same time I got there last time with the broken bus delayed train fiasco. So, I get to Hackensack at 9pm, again, the same time as my last trip for a door to door trip duration of 10 hours...again. Anyway, once I got to NJ, things got much better :)

On Wednesday (2 days before above trip), Matt surprised me with a wonderful surprise (I know I said surprise twice, but I didn't know what else to put). Matt got tickets for us to see The Little Mermaid on Broadway!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Basically, I was thrilled as I have never seen a broadway show (or been in new york outside of the train station) and The Little Mermaid is my favorite Disney movie. So, on Saturday night, we got all dressed up and went in to the city for a night out on the town! We went out to dinner at a cuban restaurant, wandered times square, and made our way over to the show. The show was, as expected, spectacular. The entire cast was so talented and really seemed like they were having fun. All of the songs from the movie were included plus 10 new songs, all composed by the two men who originally wrote the songs for the movie. Matt and I were both especially impressed by Ursula; she had a great voice that was really awesome for those minor key villain songs and she had a cool costume!

The only down side to the night was that I left my camera in Alexandria :(. I bought a disposable one in times square, but didn't take 24 pictures, so I'll have to post pictures later when I finish the roll, I almost forgot how to take picture through the viewfinder!

Coming back to DC on the bus went off pretty much without a hitch, luckily, however I think I am done with taking the bus...from now on it will probably be plane, train, or automobile.

I have new respect for Gob

Okay, today, I did something I've been wanting to do for at least 6 years...I rode a Segway!!! My friend Tim who I know from Ann Arbor but also now works at the Patent Office invited me to go with him and his girlfriend (also my friend from ann arbor) on a Segway tour of DC. I needed no convincing to say yes to that, even if I was third wheeling it. We went through a company called Capital Segway Tours (I believe they do tours in other cities but I might be wrong). We got to ride segways for two hours while getting a guided tour of many of the landmarks in downtown DC.

The segways were a little wierd to get used to at first, the hardest thing for me to master was going up hill. They are really smart and do most of the work for you, so its hard to tell yourself not to lean forward or back when going up or down hill. But after a little while, they start to feel really natural and wind up being a lot of fun. We had a tour with 15ish people, and there were some older women who had no trouble, I was impressed with them, so anyone can do it! I recommend segways to anyone, it was so fun. Here are several of the pictures I took (disclaimer: I don't look good in helmets):

Old Friends

So yesterday (Sunday) I spent the day in Annapolis, MD. In case you do not know, Annapolis is the capital of Maryland and also home to the Naval Acadamy. It was really cute small town, reminded me a lot of up north Michigan (Petoskey/Harbor Springs/Charlevoix sort of vibe). It was especially exciting because I got to spend the day with one of my good friends, Kelley, from middle school. Kelley and I became friends in 6th grade because we both played cello in the orchestra, so we always sat next to eachother. We did duets together every year in the state competition and she is actually the one who introduced me to my first cello teacher, Mr. DiFiore (who could probably provide enough material for his own post), and got me to start taking private lessons. Unfortunately, at the end of 8th grade, Kelley's family moved to Baltimore, MD. Surprisingly, the whole group of friends managed to stay in touch with Kelley through all these years, helped by the fact that she came back during thanksgiving break every year because all of her relatives still lived in Michigan. She always said she wanted to come back and go to U of M, however she ended up at University of Maryland and is now a nurse working in Baltimore. Well now that I am out here in DC, I only live about 40 minutes from Kelley so we made arrangements to hang out yesterday. She suggested we go to Annapolis because it is a really cute town with lots of quaint little shops and waterfront with lots of boats, and because her sister happens to be a senior at the Naval Academy, so we were able to hang out with her as well. We did lots of shopping and went out to dinner, all in all it was a fun day. I would definitely recommend checking out Annapolis to anyone who comes out to visit me :)