On Saturday, I didn't end up going to my uncle`s house because there was such a long line. Instead, Maribel, Yuliia and I went to watch my mom dance. Many groups performed little numbers in the university theater. It was cool for Yuliia to watch the traditional Mexican dances. Besides the folk dances, a group danced belly dance and my mom's group danced`tango.
After that we went home and played many board games. Cuban domino, Nerds, Marrana. Marrana was super funny as we did a "Ratonera" for punishment to the losers. A Ratonera is where a person passes between the legs of everybody and gets spanked (everybody forms in a line to deal the punishment). It was hilarious, Yuliia couldn't stop laughing even though she was the one that lost. We played all night till 4am. Really fun.

On Sunday we woke up late, watched a bit of TV, ate pancakes and then went to my father's house to celebrate Father's Day. He cooked some steaks at the grill. There was tasty potato, Rajas (cheese with jalapeño), nopales and other things. Very tasty, I had a good time. I also learned how to do some card tricks.
At night there was Nerds again and this time I was last place.

Today will be a long day full of activities because it is my last day in Juàrez. Should be fun.

I had a lot of fun with class this week, although I don't think I did that well a job with the section as my students are clearly confused by some parts of it. I have some plans for next week to fix these confusion, hopefully I'll be able to teach it better so that they can understand it better. This week I had a lot more work than usual with the class as I decided to write some Webwork* problems and it took a while to understand the programming language and "make it work" (-Tim Gunn). I also had to write the homework assignment for the week, which I think I did a good job of, you can find it here.

I also had two classes in my problem solving club where I taught Binomial theorem, Pascal's triangle, combinations, the separating method (for counting), Pompieu's thereom (Geometry) and did easy problems to lead to Putnam problems that use those theorems in their proofs. Next Tuesday we'll go through the proofs of those theorems and then teach some other common problem solving techniques.

The other math included Number Theory Seminar which was a really good talk by Carl proving the Polya-Vinogradov theorem and a cool application (the least non-quadratic residue mod p must be < sqrt{p}logp). There was also a cool Colloquium lecture on trying to measure happiness, that used an experiment from Florida where people rated words as good-bad on a scale from 1 to 10. From those numbers they then computed the average valence of all songs recorded in English in the last 40 years, plus State of the Union addresses and blogs (using the statistics compiled by wefeelfine.org). Really interesting cool stuff, it looks like gender and age does not impact happiness.

Besides math, there was salsa dancing on Thursday which was fun as I love dancing with Yuliia. Our relationship just keeps getting better and better, I am so happy with her.

On Friday night we went to hang out with Andrea and Katy to Claremont. Asa came with us and we watched Taken the action movie starring Liam Neeson. The movie was amazing, this is what action movies are supposed to be like. Full of suspense, good action scenes and a great plot. Best action movie I've seen last summer.

After the movie, we went to a bar and then went to play pool, we played four rounds of pool and it was fun. Yuliia is pretty good at it, I think Asa was the best of the bunch. I had a cool conversation with Asa, it turns out he's also into ping pong and we're planning on playing one of this days. Next week we start a soccer tournament (three month long) where I will be the goalkeeper. It should be very fun because the players seem to be very good, they will probably be much better than me, so I'll have a lot of action trying to stop goals.

Yuliia and I watched another movie together this week, we watched Dumbo. I didn't remember the movie and I was surprised how short it is (65 minutes), but it also was a bit boring although it is a very nice story and the end seems to come a little too fast (just as he starts flying). Good but not great, although definitely nice for kids.


*Webwork is a computer program that has a huge set of all kinds of Calculus problems to give as homework sets where the computer grades on the spot so the student can try again.

Started the day going to algebra class. Then I went to go buy tea for the department. While having lunch, Greg suggested we should go hiking to Mount Cardigan so we did.

The hike was easy, although the first 20 minutes in a hike are not easy for me, it gets easy once I reach the second wind. The view from the top is incredible and it was very impressive seeing the trees with ice on them. It was also a bit scary because it was a warm day and ice was falling from some trees. Since we had to be back by 3:30 to the math department and it was 2:30 when we reach the top, we had to be quick on the way down. Greg was skiing so no problem being quick for him, but I had to run. I was able to arrive back to the car at 2:55 in just 25 minutes (the climb up took me a little over 75 minutes). I don't think I've had as much fun doing exercise in a long time, running down a mountain it is very fun, specially because of the snow. Running in snow makes you feel fearless, because you know that if you fall it won't hurt that much. I was very tired afterwards, but I felt great.

I was planning on watching "La Jetee" followed by "The Fountain" but I arrived late and decided to come back to the department and watch Buffy instead. The last two episodes I've seen have been incredible (episodes 13 and 14 of season 2). Really fun stuff. Although episodes 11 and 12 were awful and I recommend skipping them if anybody is planning on watching Buffy.

At night I watched South Park and it made me want to watch 300, but I think I will not watch it, I know I can stop this temptation of watching fun crap. The South Park episode was funny but inferior to the last two episodes. To any 24 fan out there, you have to watch Episode 4 of Season 11 of South Park. This website has all of the South Park episodes streamed.

I also started rereading a book. I was reading "Shadow of Poe" in the summer but stopped around page 300 because I started reading Freakonomics. The author of "Shadow of Poe" is coming to give a talk at Dartmouth, so I decided to read "Shadow of Poe". I didn't start again, I started from a scene I remembered being a fun read (page 127) and I hope I can finish by April 19, hence I have a week to read a little over 300 pages.