Wow! Patrick and I went out to dinner tonight at Harvard Square. We ate at Fire + Ice, which I'd eaten at once before. And we had dessert at Finale (amazing presentation, very tasty, but on the expensive side). If I wanted to work at an upscale bakery in Boston, Finale would be my first choice. They take great care arranging their dessert elements. I had caramel mousse with puff pastry and berries, and Patrick had creme brulee (also with berries). Mmmm....

I had to do research stuff all day today (but I ran home to eat lunch with Patrick, who was still in bed), but tomorrow I get to spend all day with Patrick. We have no clue what we're doing yet.

Mr. Rogers died? That's inconceivable! I don't know why it's so weird. I guess it seemed like he'd always be there tomorrow. It's even a part of his song. You know, "I'll be back when the day is through, and I'll have more ideas for you. You'll have things you want to talk about. I will too!" Huh.

Well, I think he used his life to do good things for children. I hope PBS keeps running his show so someday my kids can watch it too.

I finally took pictures of my office! Pop-ups:

• A picture of my desk. Normally, I'd be proud of keeping my space so tidy, but at work it just makes me feel like I'm not being productive. I think I'd be a better grad student if I had papers strewn all over my desk instead of neatly organized in plastic trays. Oh yeah, and that's a little picture of Patrick and I stuck on the wall in the middle of my desk (it's this picture). It makes me happy.

• The view of the rest of the office from my desk (I share it with 5 other people in our group).

• A close up of the office door--I'm a part of the team!

And here's a picture of the view out our office window today. The sky was nice and blue, but boy, was it cold outside!

Our dorm fire alarm went off at 3:30am last night. Apparently, some drunk jackasses discharged a fire extinguisher on the 7th floor just for fun. At least it wasn't too cold outside, but it still wasn't very pleasant.

I've been working on my sweater (click the picture for more info). I'm not sure if I like the color combination; the mauve might be too muted for the variegated sleeve yarn. But I'll keep plugging along.

The sweater's turned out to be more complicated than I'd expected. My seamed raglan pattern was for sport-weight yarn instead of worsted weight, and converting it would've been hard (for me at least). So I decided to use the seamless worsted pattern instead and just knit with four different skeins of yarn. Turns out it won't be totally seamless (using four colors makes it tough to knit in the round), but I think things will work out.

The mauve wool is kind of itchy, unfortunately, but I'm loving my variegated yarn. It's soft and colorful. I used to think that I wouldn't want an entire sweater made out of variegated yarn, but I think if I had the right colorway, it might be okay. One thing at a time though.

Ha! As of right now, my website is the only one that comes up when you google 'gorgonzola smarminess' (the matching journal entries are first and second on this page). I don't know why anybody would search for that combination of words, but I'm proud to be #1! Maybe they want to name their band "Gorgonzola Smarminess," and they wanted to make sure the name wasn't taken. Huh...