This week was a really good week. Yuliia and I got Richy (our dog) on Sunday and we've been enjoying him all week. It was funny that the first thing he did home was pee, but since then he has been a good boy. He is already house trained so that first incident was because he didn't know this was his home yet. Richy is a mix of Newfoundland and Labrador, he is a big black dog (91 pounds), he is very calm and gentle. It is fun to play with him, I ran around with him and we play ball and Yuliia is extremely happy. It is great to have a dog home.

This week I've also worked hard on my math. I wrote a clean version of my Burgess result and I am looking at other sources to look for problems to solve in this area. There are a lot of really cool papers around. Very exciting stuff.

I've also been playing sports. On Tuesday on our soccer match we were outnumbered and were losing 6-0 at halftime. We forfeited to play the next half with split teams. Once the number was fair, the game was more fun and we won 2-1. On Wednesday, we lost 6-2. It was frustrating, but the other team played great. I could have played better at goalie (I got in late so only 4 goals were on me), but they were a good team and they had many chances against me. On Friday I played racquetball with Greg. I've lost games to Greg, but never two in one session. This time he won 15-11, then I won 15-6, then we won 16-14. I was up 11-3 the first game and 14-8 the third game yet I still lost. I completely choked on that first game. On the third game I think Greg just played great. I played well and I couldn't finish him. There was a very memorable point when up 14-13 where I prevented him from tying me by hitting a diving shot, jumping up and sprinting in the other direction then sliding to hit the floor inches from the ground into the back wall to bounce all the way to the front wall. A great point, however in my match point I missed an easy volley where I tried to destroy Greg with a low shot but my shot missed by almost a foot. He got serve and I couldn't stop him again. When he was up 15-14 I won back serve and had a chance to tie but I missed again. It was a great game.

Besides that I've been reading a lot and watching Babylon 5. There is a long list of reviews I am planning to write soon. It is so long that I might get lazy about it, but hopefully I'll do it this week.

Life is good.

Since I've been back from all this travelling. I have been working on writing a paper on Burgess, got some math meetings out of the way and played lots of soccer. The math is going well.

The soccer went as follows: On Tuesday my team won 4-2, I played well and had an amazing diving save. I also played a friendly game afterwards where we won 9-3 and I out first two goals (while being the goalkeeper). On Wednesday we tied 3-3, which felt like a loss, as we were up 3-0. I played well, but if I had played great we would have won. Those 3 goals they scored on me were savable. Hard or very hard to save, but savable. On Friday, I played poorly as a forward, mainly because I don't have cleats and this tournament is outdoors, hence cleats are necessary to run well. We lost 2-1 in a close match.

The other important event this week was adopting a dog. Yuliia and I have been wanting a dog for some time and after discussing it with our landlord we filled a form to apply for adoption of a dog of the Humane Society. Surprisingly, the next day we get a phone call that some dogs are up for adoption (they had told us that there weren't any available when we filled the form) and invited us to see them. We saw six dogs. We considered three dogs and the next day we saw all of them again (first day we spent two hours at the shelter, second day we spent three hours). We walked them and played with them and decided on getting a young Newfoundland (mixed with Labrador). The dog is smaller than normal Newfoundlands because of the mix breed, he is between 2 and 5 years old. He weighs 91 pounds. The dog is very sweet. He is house trained, doesn't bark, and he is very gentle when walking. Yuliia and I loved him and we adopted him. Since we are going out of town next week, the humane society will keep the dog one more week, so while he is adopted, he hasn't been to our house yet. Yuliia and I are looking forward to having him home.