Slept an hour on Friday morning to make it to the 5am bus to Logan airport. Yuliia forgot her passport and we were nervous but the passport was mailed and everything is fine now (she needs it for our flight to Mexico City next week). We flew to El Paso and got home.

Once home, I had a meeting with the Olympiad Committee to write the exam. I was just trying out the problems invented, not being a good problem inventor myself. However at the end we had 6 problems one of which I didn't like and we needed 6 problems, so I tried to invent one (also, the last 5 Chihuahua Math Olympiad exams have had a problem by me, so I want to continue the tradition). I came up with one I loved and it made it into the exam. The problem is the following:
Given the numbers 1 to 12 written around a circle the following operation takes place: Each number looks at his adjacent neighbors and if both of them are smaller than him, he kills them. In how many ways can the numbers be arranged in such a way that after one operation only four remain alive.

We finished writing the exam earlier than usual, we even got to sleep a full four hours. The next day, we went to my dad's office to print the exam, then to a pharmacy to get copies. The exam wasn't perfectly written so in the hour where students can ask questions we got many similar questions. I had a lot of answering to do in the question hour.

In the middle of the exam, four of us went to eat gorditas. They were delicious. On our way back, David hit his car. A woman driving in front of us, turn right seemingly to park but it turned out it was a move to make a U-turn which she decided to do regardless of us driving right behind her. So we hit her door. It was a bit funny, things seemed to be okay, the woman will pay for the damages (defense and light).

After the exam, I ate home (chicken with apples), took a one hour nap and then greeted the Committee to grade. We started at around 6pm and ended at 4:45am. Obviously there were many distractions such as the Kim Clijsters-Serena Williams match, many procrastinating conversations, food, etc. My problem turned out to be the hardest, no one got more than 3 points (7 is the score for a correct solution). I think my problem should have been submitted to the Mexican Math Olympiad instead with a few tweaks. I love the problem.

After deciding the winners of the exam (this was a very successful exam, having a good spread on the scores and having enough people scoring highly), because of trash talk four of us decided to compete trying out a math problem and see who would solve it the fastest. We started at 5:15am and finished at 6:30am when I finished my solution and decided to check the others. Hector solved it correctly 10 minutes before me, David had it wrong and Perrito also had it wrong, so Hector won and I had second place. I was very happy because I loved my solution, I thought it was very creative and that the problem was quite hard. Hector's solution was also pretty cool, I liked seeing two different solutions. I was so happy to not give up because of being too late or being too tired. The problem was to find all pairs of integers a,b such that 3^a + 7^b is a perfect square.

I woke up early today to watch NFL games and tennis and hang around with my family. Life is good.

On Sunday Yuliia and I drove to Newport, Rhode Island to relive one of our favorite trips together. We arrived at Newport at 5pm and then drove to Ocean Drive to soak in the beautiful view of the ocean, walk around the rocks next to the ocean and enjoy a sunset. The weather was great and the view was spectacular.

The next day we woke up late and went to Bellevue Avenue to check out the mansions. We went in The Breakers a huge mansion owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt (train company) (not owned by him anymore, but originally). The house was amazing, a lot of open spaces and very nice art everywhere. The house felt like a mini-museum. It is very ostentatious. It also has a magnificent view of the ocean. The reason the house is called "The Breakers" is because the waves from the ocean break at the cliffs in the yard of the house.

After The Breakers we walked around the Cliff walk to the Marble House, bought by another Vanderbilt (brother) as a gift to his wife. The wife, Alva, divorced him the next year, a big scandal as divorces weren't common, and even less common among the mega rich. Alva was a very interesting character, she fought for the women's right to vote and other women's issues. It was interesting to me how she fought for the freedom of women yet she forced her daughter, Consuelo, into an arranged marriage (with the Duke of Marlborough) and was very strict with her. The house felt much smaller than the Breakers, but also was very richly decorated and it had interesting things such as having different rooms in different styles, Italian, Gothic even Chinese (although the Chinese styled one is outside the house, being a Tea House). Very interesting house, very beautiful.

After mansion gazing we went to eat dinner at Yesterday's. We ordered crab cake and then Scallops. Both were incredible, the crab cake is the most delicious thing I've eaten in months and the scallops were also very good. The meal wasn't expensive, so it was perfect. The only thing that couldn't have been better was the dessert. The dessert, a creme brulle cheesecake wasn't that great.

After dinner we drove back to New Hampshire. The trip was very fun. Yuliia and I had a great time. We will go back to check out more mansions as our tickets were for five mansions.

Thursday was traveling day. I woke up at 6:50am to go to the bus station. I didn't make it, the bus leaves at 7:20 and I got there at 7:22. I bought the ticket to try to catch it at New London where it would stop in 30 minutes. I was nervous while driving that I wouldn't make it, but I did make it. I was very happy. The flight from Boston went smoothly. I was at the Houston airport for many hours and then I boarded the plane on route to Mexico. Everything went well. In Mexico City I took the metro (after asking for directions from some helpful women in a booth) to get to the bus stop and then took the bus to Morelia. I got there at about 4am (22 hours later after factoring in the time zone difference). The taxi didn't even know where the hotel was and when I got there it said "Open" but no one would open the door after I rang and knocked for a long time. I called Yuliia and asked her to call the hotel (I didn't have the number), that didn't work either. I then went and knocked on a side glass. This worked, the person told me where to go (which he had left open for me already). I got in the big house (which would house all 12 of us) and picked a bed. It took me a long time to find the lights for the bedroom (they were at the other end of the room in a hidden niche). As soon as I put my head in the pillow, a mosquito started flying around. I turn the light on and kill it. I put my head in the pillow and a mosquito started flying around. After repeating the previous operation several times, I got to the point that when I put my head down at 6:30am, there was no more mosquitoes flying around my head. Time to sleep.

At 8am I got woken up by one of the professors (Toño). He informed me that the plan was to meet in the university at 9am. I showered quickly, which wasn't easy given that there was no warm water (good thing the Vermont swimming tour prepared me). I was in very good shape because I slept for over 5 hours in the bus from Mexico City to Morelia, and the cold water also helped waking me up.

We walked towards the university trying to find a place to have breakfast and the few eating places seemed to be closed, so some people bought snacks from a gas station while David, Efrén and I went to a small town trying to find something to eat. We found a place that sold fruit and we ate fruit.

After breakfast it was time to look at the problems. I worked with David and Florian in the Number Theory problems. Efrén worked on algebra. David and I also tried the algebra ones and I also did one of the combinatorics problems that looked fun. Pablo, Joshua and Carlos worked on the Combinatorics problems (all three of them won Gold medals in IberoAmerican Math Olympiad, Joshua and Carlos have Silver medals in the IMO and Pablo is the sole Gold medalist for Mexico in the IMO). Guevara, Chino and Leonardo worked on Geometry (Chino is a gold medal in the Ibero, Guevara was not only a gold medal but had a perfect exam in the Ibero 2006). Toño and Patricio worked on several problems (Patricio was the first Silver medalist for Mexico in the IMO and he also got a Gold in the Ibero). I was surrounded by Mexican Olympiad stars, however I was able to solve most of the problems I tried solving. It was very fun trying out problems all day.

On Saturday we presented the different solutions and decided on the short list (and the order of difficulty). It was a cool experience. I love seeing solutions to Olympiad problems, most of them are very pretty. At night we went to Sirloin Stockade to have dinner, it is a nice Buffet place. It was interesting seeing the waiters with their mouths covered (people are being very careful in Mexico due to the swine flu). I ate lots of good stuff there, it was a nice meal.
After the meal, we hung out in the hotel talking all night. It was very fun speaking with other Mexican mathematicians (or engineers). Lots of interesting topics came out and it is just refreshing to speak Spanish and be around nice people.

Since we finished everything on Saturday, Sunday became lazy day and most people went back to their homes. David, Chino and me were the only ones that stayed an extra night because our flights were bought for Monday. At night we went out into downtown. I had forgotten how beautiful Morelia is. It felt like I was in a very old town, felt European. Really beautiful. I ate some ice cream, some Mexican candy and then had sopes for supper.

I left the hotel at 2am, took a taxi to the bus station. The conversation with the taxi driver was very interesting. It turns out that he worked 19 years in the Morelia airport and was fired when the airports were privatized. The sindicate told the employees that no one would be fired and need only sign some papers to acknowledge that they were under new bosses now. It turns out that what the employees signed was their resignation. The national sindicate deceived the employees all around the country (this was back in 2000). A terrible story.

I got into the bus at 2:20am, the bus arrived in Mexico City at 5:50 (30 minutes early). I took the metro to the airport and got there at 7am, but then changing terminals and stuff made me get to my gate at 7:40am and there was a long line. If I had taken the 2:30 bus or if the 2:20 bus had arrived at 6:20 as I thought it would, I wouldn't make it to my 9am flight. I got lucky.

After a couple of flights and a bus ride I was back home to see Yuliia at 10pm. I was very happy. We celebrated by watching the latest episode of Project Runway.

A great trip to Morelia. I love to travel and I love the Math Olympiad

The first days of the week were taken over by the class. I had to write the exam, give the exam and then grade the exam. When writing I thought it would be super easy, while grading I thought it was terrible, but then when I finished grading I realized it wasn't so bad. The median was 81, which is pretty good and the mean is 78 which is not bad. However, I got 8 students dropping the class which definitely hurt my ego of being able to teach to everyone.

On Thursday after a day of relaxing at the apartment, Yuliia and I left to go to New York City to visit my mom and sister (they were there for vacations). We left New Hampshire at 11pm and arrived at my mom's hotel in midtown NYC at 4am. I slept for three hours before I had to get up to move the car. I thought I would have to pay $30 a day, but then I realized that I could take it out in the night and save the night fees. Turned out that I parked it in a place where Saturdays were free, so I ended up spending only $19 for the 3 days I was in NY. I was very pleased with this.

The first day we went to the New York Botanical Gardens. We were a little worried because the subway stopped quite far from it (express doesn't stop everywhere) and the region wasn't very nice. After thirty minutes of walking we gave up and took a cab, which only charged $6, not bad for four people. My mom and sister didn't like the botanical gardens, but I liked them, I specially liked walking in the middle of the natural forest. Yuliia had a good time too, although she was also underwhelmed.

At night, my mom and sister went to the Broadway play "Wicked". Yuliia and I didn't go because we didn't get tickets. We went instead to eat at Red Lobster, which is right next to Parson's the school of design (Project Runway season 2 has many jokes about Red Lobster and Yuliia wanted to check it out). In fact Runway was also the reason we went to the Botanical Gardens.

The next day started with us going to the Met. We had a great time. I love the Egyptian displays and the modern art section. We ended up not seeing the European art collection as we ran out of time (five hours wasn't enough). In the Met we ate at their new lunch place, which was overpriced but had really tasty food. Yuliia and I shared a chicken dish. I really liked the painter Chuck Close. I also enjoyed seeing armors from medieval times to imagine the Song of Ice and Fire characters in these armor. Time ran really fast in this wonderful museum.

After the museum we biked in Central Park for a couple of hours. Yuliia and I would have mini races to see who would get to the next street light first. I won most of them, but she won several. It was very fun.

At night we walked around, saw the Plaza, the Rockefeller Center and then got to the hotel. From there we walked to a salsa club called Copacabana that a sales clerk recommended to my mom. After walking for a bit we got to the address and there was nothing there. After asking a taxi driver we found out the place closed at least a year ago. It was pretty funny. At least we tried.

Sunday was a very relaxed day. Yuliia and I went to Jersey City to have lunch with Elliott (formerly known as Forrest), his girlfriend and our friend Johnny. The lunch was pretty tasty, I had chilies quiles while Yuliia had a salmon eggs benedict.
After Jersey we went back to NYC and hung out with my mom and sister. We went to Soho to eat pizza at the first pizzeria of the country "Lombardi's Pizza". The pizza was very tasty. After the pizza we discovered a place that sells different kinds of rice pudding (I had never seen anything like it before). We bought Hazelnut and Mango, I loved the mango flavored one. We then drove back to the hotel to drop my mom and sister off before it was time to drive back to New Hampshire. This drive became memorable when we all started dancing and singing to Michael Jackson.

I had a really good time in New York with my family. Life is good.

Thursday was a relaxing day. At night we went to dance salsa and had a lot of fun.
Friday was another cool day. Class went very well and then at night we went to Asa and Natasha's place to watch Project Runway. We watched the last five episodes. The season was very fun. I am excited that Project Runway was able to fix their legal problems and season 6 will finally be on the air on August 20.

Saturday started very slow with Yuliia and me just chilling out at the house not doing anything of consequence. Then we drove to Burlington with the plan of eating at Leunig's (a restaurant we love) and taking a cruise around Lake Champlain. I had a 20% discount at Leunig's because of my birthday. But when I was about to use the coupon, I realized it was only valid Monday-Thursday, hence my discount was invalid. Too bad because it expires at the end of the month. The food was delicious. I had salmon with balsamic strawberries, garlic mashed potatoes and mint & jalapeño salad. Really tasty.

After dinner, we went to the lake and took the sunset cruise. The cruise was very pleasant and we had a lot of fun. We took lots of funny pictures, enjoyed the breeze, enjoyed the beautiful landscape. The sunset wasn't as beautiful as when we did this last year, but what is amazing is seeing the water and how the look changes with the different light.

After the cruise, we went to a bookstore to check out books. I love bookstores. After 45 minutes of browsing around we left. We went to a nice coffee shop and spent a relaxing time just before the drive back.

I really love Burlington and once again, Yuliia and I had a wonderful time there.

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 Monday, I started the day eating Choco Krispis, knowing I wouldn't be able to eat them in a while. After the breakfast we went to my dad's office to get work done on Yuliia's teeth. From there we went to El Paso to do some last day errands. We had lunch with Maribel, my mom and my uncle. We ate at a Lebanese restaurant and the food was great. Yuliia and I shared a huge Chicken Shawarma, it was delicious.
Later we went to watch Year One at the movie theater. The movie was terrible. I laughed a few times but most of the laughs were forced or out of pity for the movie. It was just very bad (although the story was kind of good).
After the movie we went to Juárez to host the Abel project graduation party. I had a good time. It ended early and so my mom, Yuliia, Emmanuel and me played Nerds. Yuliia dominated and the other three of us tied for second place with 112 points (although I could have had 109, there was a controversial decision). Yuliia and I went to the roof to look at the sky and then it was time for bed.

We woke up early on Tuesday to make it to our flight. We got there on time. The flights went without trouble. One of the legs of the flight was long enough that they had one of those things were you can pick which movie you want to see. This meant distraction from "A Song of Ice and Fire", but it was cool. I won a Backgammon game, finished a Sudoku game, watched about 30 minutes of A Beautiful Mind and about 10 minutes of "30 Rock" episode.
We arrived at Manchester a little after midnight (due to a delay in Newark) and got home at 2am. It was good to be home.

On Wednesday we watched Harry Potter: Chamber of Secrets. The movie is pretty good. Not great, but fun. Not much else happened Wednesday.

On Friday the day started by going to Dartmouth to drop off Yuliia in her Spanish class. Later I taught my first lecture for Probability. I think the lecture was okay, but a lot of the interaction planned with the group had to be canceled because the class was so large. There were 38 students in the classroom. I guess homework grading will take a Herculean effort, but the lectures will be very fun to plan. The first lecture was pretty easy stuff, but there will be lots of cool problems to try later on.

At night, Yuliia and I went to watch Taking of Pellham 123 which was pretty good. I liked it and Yuliia liked it very much. The surprising thing was that even though there was a 10 minute line to buy tickets, Yuliia and I ended up being the only two people watching Pellham. I think the movie has some flaws but it is definitely very entertaining.

When we got home after a little card playing, we watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azcaban. Prisoner of Azcaban is where the books start being very good. I have a soft spot for this book and it was great that they had Alfonso Cuarón direct the movie. I think the movie is much better than the previous two (part of it is that the book is also better). I enjoyed it and it got me excited. I am looking forward to the sixth movie, although I think Yuliia and I won't watch the fourth and fifth yet as she's currently reading the books and she hasn't read those two in English yet (she read them in Russian a while ago).

On Saturday we went shopping. While Yuliia looked for clothes, shoes and other Summer items, I read a lot. After that we came home and watched Fanboys which wasn't great. The movie has its funny parts and the story flows smoothly, but there just isn't much there. Not a movie I would recommend.
Haven't done much besides playing a little poker (first time in two months). I played a 5-card draw tournament. I know very little about five card draw but I felt like playing so I played. I played terrible, but I had fun.

The flight to come to Mexico was at Thursday (June 11) at 6:10am, which meant leaving the house at aout 3:30am. We left the house at the right time, but I hadn´t planned for gasoline stations being closed at night (I am still used to the 24 hour service of El Paso). I knew of a stop that had "24 hour" service and I knew I had enough gas to get there, but when I got there it was closed. They would open at 5am and it was 4:40am, I was already in reserves and the airport was still almost 40 miles away. I had to gamble and keep going instead of waiting 20 minutes, as I would miss the flight by staying. 20 miles later, after a lot of stress not knowing if we would make it, we got to an open gasoline station (it was past 5am). Then we made it to the airport at 5:30am and got on the plane in time. Smooth flying from there.
Once in El Paso, we went for lunch and then went towatch The Hangover again. Hilarious, I couldn´t stop laughing again. Really good comedy. At night we went salsa dancing and had a lot of fun.

On Friday we chilled out and at night layed a lot of Rockband, I was specially happy to sing "Parabola" by Tool. I also played "Nerds". Nerds has been kind of a daily thing as we all love to play it. It was funny to see how into it Yuliia got.

On Saturday I watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer´s Stone with Yuliia. It was fun to watch it again after so many years. The movie is not great, but it is not bad. Right after the movie I went to give a talk at the university (UACJ). I did a poor job with the talk, it has the potential to be a very good 80 minute talk for high school students but I botched it by under preparing. After the talks I had fun talking with David, Diana and Marcelino.

On Sunday morning, we watched Hot Rod, a mediocre comedy. I thought it would be good even with the bad reviews because the main performers are the guys that made the Jizz in my Pants music video, which is absolutely hilarious, however the movie wasn´t vergy good and although we laughed quite a bit, the movie just wasn´t good.
In the evening we went to El Paso to go celebrate my uncle´s birthday. We had a nice dinner and a fun conversation. Yuliia is getting used to my uncle´s dark humor and had a really good time. I also read a very interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about "El Chapo", the main drug lord behind the wave of violence.

On Monday we went to El Paso to watch Up again. It wasn´t as good on second viewing to me, but I think that is because I just saw it and the power of the emotional scenes just goes away if they are so fresh in the mind. Yuliia likes it even more on second viewing, the same with my sister, so there´s also the possibility that I just wasn´t in the mood, wanting to read more of Storm of Swords.

On Tuesday I went to El Paso to meet with David. We got together at 4pm. The plan was to try to invent problems for problem writing competition in Mexico. Of course, most of what we did was talk about random things and David even played poker for a while. Discussing fantasy baseball, math, olympiad, Abel, travel and other things. I invented a not so cool problem and a really cool one (although now I found an easier solution, I still like the problem very much), the special part about the cool one is that I finished solving it while I was walking across the border on my way back home. I got home at 11:30pm and it was Nerds time (as it has been essentially every night).

On Wednesday we went to El Paso to watch Más que Amor, Frenesí (Not Love, Just Frenzy) a 1996 Spanish movie. It was being shown at a café called Fellini. The movie was very chaotic and it seemed to try to hard to be Almodovar. In the end, I decided I liked it, as I enjoyed the second half of the movie (or maybe just the last third) and in the defense of the first half, we arrived 10 minutes late so maybe we missed too much.
After the movie we went to Flayz´s apartment and played Nerds. It was pretty crazy to play with six people.

On Thursday we went to see my father at the dentist. They checked up on Yuliia. When we came back home I took Eddy for a walk (my German Shepherd) and then I danced a little salsa in my mom´s class, trying to help one of her students learn how to turn. At night we went to the VIP theaters (really awesome big leather seats that recline) to watch The Proposal the romantic comedy with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. I had a good time enjoying my crepe, laughing alongside Yuliia, my sister and my mom (mostly, as the other Enrique and Emmanuel didn´t laugh that much). The movie is not bad and it entertained while making me laugh enough times. The plot was weak and it had very illogical parts, but it wasn´t bad.

On Friday I went to the dentist in the morning to accompany Yuliia and maybe get my teeth cleaned too. After they finished treating Yuliia we waited two hours to see if theywould treat me, but fortunately for my dad, his employees (and him) were very busy all day, so no time to treat me. After that, I came home, ate a nice meal (not as good as the previous day with chiles rellenos) and then I went to the university to give a class for the olympiad kids. I taught them some basic number theory, mainly congruences. I even had a digression about the Gregorian calendar, I had a lot of fun.
After the class, I went for ice cream with David, Omar and Perrito and we had a fun conversation. I came home and at night some friends of my mom´s, Maribel, Yuliia and I played Nerds (6 handed again) and then Flabbergast (this time 7 people), a game where you act out things and your team has to guess. It was very fun. To end the day we played Cuban Domino, a game called "Tren" (Train).
It was a very fun night.

Today I woke up around Noon and went to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned. Now I wrote this and later I will TeX up my Burgess results, the problems I invented for the math olympiad and then I will go have a good time with my uncle and maybe at night Salsa. Tomorrow will be time to have dinner with my father and enjoy Father´s Day.

I am having a really good time in Mexico. I feel a little guilty over my lack of progress with my research, but I am confident it will be back on track once I am in New Hampshire. I also have to prepare the outline of the Summer class I am teaching. The website should be up on Wednesday.

Life is good.

On Monday Yuliia and I moved. It was much harder work that I thought it would be. I started moving things at 3pm and we ended at 10:30pm (although we did take a one hour break). When we finished we rushed off to Applebees to get a pretty awesome dessert called Mile High Cream Pie, which was delicious.

On Tuesday I went to school for the last day of classes and then went shopping with Yulichka (things for the new apartment). Besides that, I did a lot of reading.

On Wednesday, I had my meeting with Carl and talked about the Burgess bound. Good progress has been happening of lately, I am excited about it. The meeting was pretty cool. Again, Yuliia and I did more shopping at night.

Thursday was a pretty awesome day. I went to teach a class to Hartford High School. The math teacher invited Dartmouth to send a grad student to give a class and I volunteered. It was very fun. I started out by showing Pascal's identity in two ways, algebraically and combinatorially. Then showing that the sum of the n-th row of Pascal's triangle is 2^n by using the Binomial theorem, but also giving a combinatorial argument. They seemed to enjoy it. Then I gave them some examples of counting things and gave them the task of counting the different poker hands. They really got into the project and were very enthusiastic. The class was a success, I was very happy. Yuliia took some cool pictures (Dartmouth asked me to take pictures).
After the class, the apartment manager helped me pick up a kitchen table (as I don't have a truck) and then Yuliia and I built it. It took two hours, much more than I thought it would. At night, Yuliia and I went dancing and I enjoyed it very much.

Today (Friday), I had another meeting with Carl and it was cool. We finally figured out why Booker used something to range through primes when it seemed unnecessary. Also, I was happy to understand Weil's bound better. In the afternoon I ate a really good meal that Yuliia cooked (chicken with a mushroom sauce) and then we went to watch Hangover which is absolutely hilarious. Yuliia and I couldn't stop laughing, it is really good.

I haven't written in a while and I already forgot what I did earlier in the week, but the writing gets more detailed as we get closer to today's date.

On Saturday (May 16), Yuliia and I went to see five apartments. We'll move at the start of June. We also played 3 hours of Wii Fit. We started playing daily after that.

On Sunday, I mostly worked on my research, getting an explicit constant for Burgess bound. My bound is not better than a recent one published by Booker, but it works for all p instead of p = 1 mod 4. It was fun stuff.

On Monday, the class was cool. Later, Yuliia and I went for ice cream and then watched Sunshine Cleaning. The movie was pretty good, it was funny at times and interesting. I liked it.

On Tuesday, Yuliia and I went to do some shopping and from there we went to watch Angels and Demons. The movie was very exciting. Yuliia loved it. I enjoyed it a lot (specially watching it with her, as she gets into the movie a lot). After the movie, I worked on my number theory homework. I didn't do so well as I needed more time to work on it, but I solved more than half the problems.

I started Wednesday with working on my homework. Then I went to class. Then I had a meeting with Carl. The meeting went really well. Looking at possible applications of this explicit bound which leads to a really cool project that would incorporate some cool programming and interesting estimates. There's also a couple of other projects that look cool. I also learned of a pretty clever machine Lehmer built in the 30s to be able to sieve to large numbers. Before computers were made, he made this device out of bicycle chains. It was awesome. After meeting with Carl, I met with Florian to discuss something (that has now become possibly irrelevant) and he invited me to be in the problem selection committee for the IberoAmerican Mathematical Olympiad, that would be awesome.
After the math events, I went home to pick up Yuliia to go bowling and discovered she had cooked a delicious chicken dish. It has been her best cooking yet and we were very happy when we arrived bowling. On the first game, I bowled 114 and Yuliia did 93, which was incredible given that she had 44 after 7 frames. Asa won with something near 130. The second game we all bowled poorly. I had a chance to win when I hit an amazing spare in the tenth frame and needed a 7 to tie in my last shot. I threw a gutter ball. We played a third game and I got hurt, so for five frames I didn't score anything, but when I felt better I started doing better and finished the tenth frame with a spare and a strike.
After bowling, Asa and I got ready to go to the soccer playoffs. I was pumped. On the quarterfinal match. We scored quickly to go up 1-0. Then my defense got confused with subs and played terrible. I did some amazing saves but then they scored on me on a play where I should have done better (my defense also messed up that play). Later in the game we scored the 2-1 goal and were in good position. With one minute remaining, their goalkeeper, who was attacking, got the ball inside the area with no defenders near and had a clear shot against me. He shot it to my left and I did a diving save. The shot was too slow but it was well placed, I was very happy to stop it.
Our next game was against a really good team, Amici. We started really well and in the 8th minute they scored on a free kick. I should have stopped that goal. The shot was fantastic, but I should have been covering that angle. I felt terrible after that goal. However I got my confidence back after I did many outstanding saves. Later, one of their players shot to my left and I jumped for it, but a defender deflected it right and the ball went in. It was disheartening, but at the same time I didn't feel guilty as there was absolutely nothing I could do, deflections are fluky. We managed to score to make it 2-1 and soon after Sergi did a great play and shot perfectly but the ball hit the post. I thought we had them. After more saves, a shot came when a defender again deflected it inside. Two deflected goals and a shot I should have saved, plus a shot that hit the post when it should have gone in on our side. If those things go another way we win. We played great even though our team was clearly inferior to their team. I am very proud of our performance, but next year we have to win.
We stayed and watched the final, where Hypertherm Black bear Amici 3-2 with a goal in the last second (and I do mean last second, it left his foot with 3 seconds left), an amazing finale.

Thursday was math day. I went to a two hour class followed by four 1-hour seminars. The class was great. We showed a nice lowerbound for Ramsey using the probabilistic method (I had seen this before), but more surprisingly, we saw a really crazy result: For any first order logical statement S, as n goes to infinity, the graph G(n,1/2) (random graph with each edge having probability 1/2) satisfies property S with probability either 1 or 0. That is nothing in between!!!
I was shocked at that result, yet the proof wasn't all that complicated. It essentially used the probabilistic method + the Completeness theorem. It was cool.
After the combinatorics class, I went to graduate student seminar where Patricia gave a really good talk about the four coloring theorem in other surfaces. Giving a characterization of the best upper bound for the chromatic number for any surface of genus not 0. However it can't be used to prove it for genus = 0 which is where the four color theorem takes place. She have a nice proof of the 6 color theorem, which is very simple, but that argument couldn't be improved to make it 5 or 4.
The next seminar was combinatorics seminar and I didn't understand what was going on that well. An undergrad, Yangyang, gave a talk about forbidden patterns. It related to permutations, but I missed the beginning and it was tough to figure out exactly what was being analyzed. Yangyang is a really good math student at Dartmouth, but she will go to law school in Yale instead of going into math.
Number theory seminar was a cool talk answering (for large primes) a conjecture concerning permuting a residue class mod p The talk was pretty cool. Their theorem showed a result for p > 2.6x10^55, but it seemed like there was room for improving that bound.
The last talk was a colloquium talk on theoretical physics, using ideas from dynamical systems. I liked the speaker, I think he did a very good job.

After all the math, I went home, enjoyed dinner with Yuliia, watched a fun episode of Chuck (we are about 7 episodes behind) and then went salsa dancing. For most of the songs, the only people on the dance floor were Yuliia and me. In general, there were never more than six people in the room or more than two couples on the dance floor (including Yuliia and me). I am guessing the term being near the end and the lack of prompt emails is the reason this happened. I had a lot of fun. I hadn't danced in a place with Yuliia since early March. We met this way, so dancing salsa with her is very special.

On Friday, after class, I had a meeting with Carl again. The meeting started pretty cool seeing places where there was room for improvement on my bound. Then there were places that seemed that had an insane room for improvement. However, I made a mistake on the board and once I fixed it, it was clear that there was no room for improvement in the parts that seemed to have a lot of room. It was both cool and uncool. The cool part was that it meant my estimates were done well, the bad part was not getting a better bound. The good thing is that the other half side of the inequality does seem to have lots of room for improvement as I haven't taken into account some estimates I did. My first goal now is to find out a good constant when r = 2 and then move from there, as r = 2 is what usually makes the constant be too big.
After the meeting, we went to buy Yuliia a phone and I was getting nervous about the time as I had tickets for a talk at MIT at 7pm and it was 4:15pm when we left Lebanon. We arrived at Boston at 6:15pm and after some confusion with where to meet Sid we met him at 6:40pm at MIT. We tried to get a ticket for Yuliia (as she changed her mind about going), but it was sold out, so only Sid and I went in. The talk was really good. JMS talked about failure and he told a lot of amusing, funny stories along the way. I can see why he's such a prolific writer. Most of the questions by the audience related to Babylon 5, but here and there, there would be questions that were interesting to me. There were many funny moments, including a guy that wrote down questions such as "what is your favorite food?" "If I was a burger would you ear me?" Sid and I had interesting discussions revolving on the talk by JMS.
After the talk, we went to eat Ethiopian food. I liked it a lot. It reminded me of my days eating Indian food with Sid and Arjun in Budapest. No forks, spoons, knives. Using your hands. I enjoy it a lot, plus the food was very tasty.

On Saturday, we walked around Chinatown in Boston, then we went to watch Star Trek. The movie was fantastic. The action was great, it had its funny moments and it made you care for the characters. Yuliia was cheering during some moments, it was pretty cool. Fun movie.
After the movie we went to have dinner near Harvard square. Yuliia and I shared a bruschetta and then a tasty risotto. Yuliia was absolute in love with the risotto. She usually jumps on the shrimp, but the combination of meat in the risotto was so tasty that she even forgot about the shrimp. I also liked that they had a different sort of bread and they had a tasty hummus to put on it. I enjoyed the place very much.

It has been a great week. I am really happy with my life.