Two action packed weeks have elapsed and I am too lazy to write it all down so I will write a quick summary.
-Have been having fun teaching probability. I think the class has been going well, albeit a little slow. Having 35 students is harder than having 21. I decided not to hire graders because I don't trust them, so I have a lot of grading to do.
-Have been reading lots of books, watching lots of movies, at some point I'll post reviews.
-I went to Montreal for a weekend. Had a lot of fun. Biked around the town, walked around the town and ate good food. I was impressed with the Basilica of Notre Dame, but mainly I was happy to see my mom.
-Rode 50 miles for the Prouty event (3200 bikers) to support cancer research. I did it in a mountain bike because my road bike was out of air and for some reason the pump wasn't working. It wasn't that hard, but I rode very slowly, it took me more than 5 hours.
-Played basketball, it was awesome.
-Had a really nice birthday. The best part was going to dinner with Yuliia and enjoying a nice steak, wine and a nice dessert. I have reached a quarter century.
-Have been teaching salsa and I have been taking swing classes. It is quite fun.
-I moved to a new apartment(beginning of the month). It took a lot of work and then a lot, but fortunately a couple of friends helped me out and we were able to do it in under five hours. However buying stuff for the place and ordering around took a long time (although Yuliia did almost all of the work).
-Life is good

On Saturday night, there was a fashion show in White River Junction. Yuliia and I decided to go. There are two fashion shows a year at Tip Top Cafe, one for the Spring and one for the Fall. The show was pretty fun to watch, as the models are normal people and one can tell how hard it is to walk in front of so many people.
After the fashion show, they took the stage off and it became a dance floor to dance some club music. I danced for a while and had a lot of fun.
After dancing, there was an after party, Yuliia and I didn't feel like going but some people insisted to see how beautiful the apartment was. The apartment was beautiful. The house of an artist, it was filled with cool sculptures made out of wood and it was a very big apartment.

On Sunday, we watched Monsters Inc. and the first hour of Cleopatra. Monsters Inc. is an awesome movie. Pixar never disappoints me. I hadn't seen the movie since 2001, so it was cool to see it again. Cleopatra was cool but I was too tired and fell asleep so we interrupted it after an hour (it lasts 4 hours, so we knew we would not go through it). I also played some Wii. I hadn't played since June and I had some fun playing Super Mario Galaxy, getting the last seven stars to reach 120. Now the goal is to get all of them with Luigi. This morning I got two, only 118 to go.

Monday was my exercise day. I started the day biking with Chrisil. We went on a nice trail that used to be a railroad. The nice thing about the trail is that it is flat. In this region is very hard to find non-hilly trails. The trail led us to Mascoma lake which is beautiful, specially with the change of leaves of Autumn. We kept pedaling and came to a straight part of the trail where we could see as far as my eye could see the trail surrounded by trees of many colors, it was a picture perfect sight. There were brooks and streams and nice bridges, nice little tunnels, we crossed a nice little town (Enfield) and then we stopped when we reached Cannan. We had lunch and walked around the tiny park. We stayed there for almost three hours because we decided to take the bus back instead of bike back.

At night, I went to yoga with Yuliia. Yoga has been very fun. I find most of the exercises to be very challenging and I am very proud when I am able to do them (Which is true for almost all of them). Yoga and biking made Monday my exercise day.

I also read The Hedge Knight a prequel to the famous "Song of Ice and Fire" of George R. R. Martin. The comic was really good. I loved it. The story seemed to go one way and then it all changed. The change was great, because the way the story was headed would be a bit cliche and ridiculous, so the change made it fun, believable and entertaining. Nice comic, I am glad there's a sequel which I plan to read.

This morning I biked with Chrisil. The plan was to go to a path on a mountain, to use our mountain bikes to the fullest. We realized that the climbs are super tough (seemingly impossible), so we had to walk several portions. The way down was super fun (and scary), bouncing all over the place and skidding and going super fast.
After we were back at the bottom, it was in a park, so we biked around to see what the park had to offer. The park had a nice pond and then while biking we reached a point where we couldn't cross on the bike because of the pond, but there were two logs to cross on foot. I jokingly grabbed my bike and started walking the logs. Immediately I came back, but I was thinking about whether it was possible to cross those long logs standing up. One of them was wide and it looked easy to cross except for the end where part of it was a little submerged and hence theoretically slippery. I decided to try to cross that log without the bike (as a test run). It is not hard to figure out that I fell. I fell into the pond. Me and Chrisil laughed a lot. Surprisingly, the pond wasn't freezing (I guess the adrenaline helped me not feel it so cold) and the sun had come up, so being wet wasn't as bad.
I came back to the math department, showered and then grabbed the free lunch given at the university in honor of Convocation (tomorrow is the first day of classes).

In the evening, Yuliia and I went biking. Since she used one of my bikes, she wasn't used to it and didn't have that much fun, but I had a lot of fun biking with her.

At night I tried to duplicate a sandwich that Mary makes for me whenever I go to Mexico. Without avocado, it was certain it wouldn't be as good, but I think I did a pretty good job.

I finished reading Runaways volume 3. So I have officially read the three main series that Brian K. Vaughan has written. I have said before that I like his style and I'll repeat it once more. I love his books. In volume 3, the first story arc was superb, it was fantastic. There were two more story arcs, one was okay and the other one was good. I guess it didn't end up with a strong story arc, but it was pretty good.

Final Crisis #1,2,3 I am not a fan of Grant Morrison's writing, but I had already bought this when I thought I would like his writing. I'll continue the series as several interesting things are going on, but I must admit that he writes really weird stuff (I like weird, but not so much his kind of weird). The story seems way more deep than Marvel's Secret Invasion, which is a very good thing, but for some reason I've had more fun reading Secret Invasion.

Not surprisingly the Thursday entry writes itself "Wonderful day because dancing salsa was awesome".

But I guess there's more to this Thursday. The day started with everyone (and by this I mean Greg) making fun of my haircut. Jokes like "I am amazed you can play poker so well at such a young age, since when can 12 year olds play poker". Then we went to class (Teaching seminar) and it was very fun. We wrote our best and worst learning experiences and Amir's worst learning experience was hilarious. The teacher (in high school) was so bad that the students revolted and stayed out of his class and even made a revolution song. I couldn't help but imagine Iranian kids singing a fight song to protest a class.

I was given the TNS (Thursday Night Salsa) password to be able to send an email to everyone on the list announcing salsa that night (I was the organizer) and I didn't know how to do it, so I just made reply all to one of the emails in the "sent messages" folder of TNS. The problem with that was the recipient list did not get suppressed. Oops.

Salsa was great. At first it was just Yulja and me, but soon more people showed up and I gave them "lessons" (not really as I wouldn't stop the music and would dance with someone between every tip). I danced with someone I hadn't danced before, her name is Adi (I think) and it was fun, she adapted quickly. It was also fun to dance with Safina. Since there weren't that many people, people left at around 10:10. Yulja and I danced 3 more songs before calling it a night. It was nice to dance with Yulja again after 3 weeks of not seeing her.

The other news from today was that my bike got stolen. I am still in shock, but I guess I should have been more careful given that in Thanksgiving break somebody stole the front wheel of my bike. I talked to the campus police and they told me the chance of finding it is negligible because I didn't register the bike. I will have to buy a new one. Fortunately, Giulio lent me his car while he is out of town, so I have a car to move around now that I don't have my bike. Good thing salsa made me forget about the bike.

Last night when I biked home after Basketball I was thinking "tomorrow I will just relax and not to anything too demanding". I woke up and read an email from Giulio "want to bike today". So I went biking with Giulio. We first biked to King Road and then climbed the road. The road is so steep that trucks are not allowed to go up. Well, I didn't make it. I had to walk part of the way up, it was too steep to do on my mountain bike. But after I walked the super tough part of the climb, there was still more and more climbing. The only nice thing about it was that the view of the Upper Valley was beautiful from up there.
We then rode through Enfiled while we could see Mascoma Lake at our right. Then we went to Goose Pond and the ride was great. It wasn't hilly, it was breezy, it had a very nice view of the lake and it was just plain fun. After Goose pond we got on the road between Hanover and Lyme. So that deadly climb at the end of the day from last week would have to be encountered again. Well, it turned out to be easy. I have no idea why it felt so tough last week. This time I had ridden about the same amount of miles (3 less this time) than last time, yet this time it felt easy. I guess I climbed much tougher hills on the day that it didn't feel hard. At the end of the ride, I broke my right pedal. I don't know how it happened and it made the return home from Hanover to Lebanon later in the day quite annoying. Hopefully it will be cheap to replace.

After biking, I had some food at Giulio's and then we went to play tennis with Isida, Peko, Dafina and Luisa. We would play best of 3. Dafina and I won 3 in a row, but then Peko-Isida beat us. After that Isida played singles against Luisa and Peko,Giulio and me rotated on best of 3 matches. Peko beat us both and then Dafina-Peko played me and Giulio for a set. We won 6-3, it felt good. Then we changed teams. Dafina and I started winning 2-1, but then they won the next 5 games to beat us 6-2. It was fun to play tennis, but the sport feels much less fun than racquetball or basketball. I guess one needs to be much better at the sport to make the fun come out (as a lot of points end too quickly when one isn't any good).

When I got home, Xia and Ling made dinner and they invited me to join them. They made mushrooms with Boi Choi, another vegetable thing and pork hands. I loved the boi choi dish, it was just marvelous.

A great day. Doing exercise makes me feel very good.

The tango class was really cool. There were two instructors from Buenos Aires (Manolo y Martha) and they taught Milonga and Cachengue which are other types of music which resemble tango. I danced with Yulja for a good chunk of it and I had a lot of fun because Milonga seemed easier to get for me.
I talked a bit with Martha and she was very nice. It's always fun to meet people when dancing because people are happy in this situation so the conversations usually go nicely.

In the night when I was biking I saw three deer next to the road, I first felt their movement, then I saw their white tails. They were moving very gracefully. Then one of them stopped and looked at me. We stared at each other for a bit while I kept biking up the hill. It was very nice.

While riding my bike I usually think of lots of things. This time I thought about people I am grateful to have had in my life. People like my parents, my uncle, David and others. I have to say my life is in a really good spot and a big part of it is what I was taught by these people.

My friend Giulio and me left his house at about 10:50am. We first biked from Hanover to Lyme (in New Hampshire). The ride was hilly and there was one very big climb that was difficult. After getting to Lyme, we crossed the Connecticut river to get to Vermont and then went up to Fairlee. The ride was very pleasant as we had the river on our right and the day was beautiful. We got to Fairlee around 1pm, we had biked almost 20 miles (something between 18-20 miles). We crossed the bridge to be back in New Hampshire and crossed Orford. When we arrived at Lyme again, we stopped at a yard sale and the guy was a biker and gave me lots of stuff for the ride: a cough drop to make breathing easier, energy gel, water, oil for my bike, he was a very nice guy. He will also bike on The Prouty.
We then continued on our journey back to Hanover. We took a different rout to go closer to the river. Once we were back on the normal road, we hit a big hill. The climb was very tough (specially after 35 miles of biking). I was very proud of being able to make the climb, but at the same time I am scared of having this climb at the end of the 100 mile journey in July. I might have to walk this last hill that day, but hopefully I will be able to ride it out.

I biked a little over 38 miles and felt great (although quite tired). Later that day, I biked to go home (an extra 8 miles) and was able to do it without problem.

I am considering buying a road bike, since it looks like it would be easier than doing it with a mountain bike, I didn't see anyone on the road with a mountain bike (and I saw a lot of people on the road today, it was a very nice Sunday).

The day started well with a very nice lecture in Algebraic Topology, then the thesis defense by Jonathan Bayless (one of two of Carl's students to graduate this quarter).
Then it went downhill when the lady I was going to meet to help her with her English didn't arrive to our meeting and then when I went to a party for Spanish students to which I was invited and I felt very out of place.
Of course, it was Thursday so the day was meant to end well as Thursdays always do. I went to salsa/merengue and had a fantastic time. Daisy was there, so it meant lots of fun dancing and Yulja was there (I was spelling her name Julia before) so I also danced a lot with her. It is incredible how well Yulja dances considering this was just her second lesson, I can pretty much do all my moves with her. I also danced a bit with a couple of other girls, but I mainly just danced with Daisy and Yulja as they are the ones I was looking forward to dance with tonight.

After salsa I biked home and it was wonderful. The last couple of nights, it has been very cloudy so I haven't been able to see the Full Moon while biking, but tonight I could see the Full Moon and furthermore (a word I had only used in Mathematics before) the Moon looked huge and yellow, like a big cheese, plus it looked as if it were at the end of the tunnel as I was climbing the hill, so it looked like I was riding towards it (it was beautiful).

I love dancing.

Tomorrow, I am going to Boston to watch Neil Gaiman speak. Looking forward to it. I think I will be back to Dartmouth on Saturday because there are some things I want to do back here.

The 27th Annual Prouty Century Bike Ride & Challenge Walk will be held July 12, 2008! I plan on riding 100 miles in it and I need to raise $150 dollars.
If you want to donate you can go here and donate money.
If it helps motivate donations, July 12 is my birthday so that gives an extra reason to donate.

I asked some friends to give me a test run on the qual. The things I don't know yet are big holes in things they can ask, so I did very poorly. Fortunately, I realized later that the style of questions one will ask is very different from the style of questions one of my friends likes, so I am better prepared than I looked in there. In any case, the poor performance motivated me to work much harder and I worked 4 hours after the prequal for a total of 7 hours on the day. I have finished studying for differential topology and now it is time to learn homology. My goal is to learn as much as possible from now to Friday and then just work problems like crazy on Saturday and Sunday to be polish up what I already now. I am confident that I will pass this exam.

In non-topology news, I watched two movies recently:
Steep a documentary on the history of extreme skiing. I watched it with Greg on a projector at school, it was very good. The documentary was well made and it really made me want to learn how to ski. There won't be any excuse next year, I have to learn how to ski and ski well next year so that I can hike mountains and ski them down. It looks like one of the most fun things to do and something I have to do.
AVP 2 Alien vs Predator 2. A friend is trying to start "trash movie night" and we started with this. Surprisingly the movie is not really trash. It is an okay movie (for example, it is about 15 times better than Doom). Although it is full of stupid things going on, it is not that bad. There are some cool action scenes (although actually not enough, as I wish there were more predator scenes). I have decided that my new definition of cool is Predator.

In non-movie non-topology news: Today I was so immersed in topology that I forgot I had to buy the snacks for tea in the math department, so I went at 3:20pm (tea is at 3:30pm) and managed to get back just in time, on the way to the grocery store, I biked in the rain and some idiot lady didn't do a full stop on an intersection and didn't see me and I had to do a full-brake while going fast in the rain and I even stepped out of my bicycle as I was a couple of inches from the car. It got me really mad at the lady, but it disappeared 3 seconds later when I realized it was dumb to be mad.