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.

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.

Trivia night yesterday was pretty fun. After four rounds we were down 62-58. Third place had 48. We wagered 0 in the final round banking on a difficult question (and knowing the first place team would wager 7). But the first place team knew the question and they won. I have to win next week.

Today was a very math-y day. The number theory lecture was very good and then I worked on stuff on Burgess. The meeting with Carl went well, learning a pretty fancy trick to do a sum and then I sat down and worked on the problem much longer. I think I can improve an inequality significantly.

The main news for the day was soccer. For two months I've been waiting for today's game. The game against the defending champions, the famous Amici F.C. I was pumped. We started the game on the wrong foot, they scored on a free kick in the first 30 seconds. We tied it up later with a beautiful shot by Valerio. But Amici would score two more goals before the end of the half. One by Eric (dude who scored the first goal) where he dribbled past Asa and shot on the right corner, and another goal that I don't remember exactly, but it was a nice shot. There was also an incredible shot that hit the upper bar and didn't go in. We also had a very good chance at goal, when a player of ours got the ball with an open goal in front of him and hit it up.

We were down 3-1 at half. The first ten minutes of the game we were dominating the game but couldn't get the goal. There was a play where Sergi got fouled. It was a terrible foul, his legs had cleat marks on them. But the ref didn't call it. It should have been a red card on the other team. Soon after that, with our team feeling bad for Sergi they scored another goal, when a dude made a great shot on the upper left corner of the goal. We were down 4-1.

Being down 4-1, we kept fighting. There was a play were there were lots of shots near the opposition's goal and then all of a sudden the ref called it a goal. I was too far to see if it went in or not, but it didn't matter I was ecstatic. We were down 2 and there were still 7 minutes left. In less than a minute, Sergi scored on a beautiful left footed shot to the upper left corner. It was 4-3 and there was plenty of time to tie. I had some outstanding saves, saving several of their shots when they were inside the box. We had a counterattack and it looked like Sergi would have a 1-1 with the goalkeeper. He got fouled from behind and the ref did not give a card. I couldn't believe it, this should be a red card and he wasn't even giving a yellow card. We didn't score on the free kick. Later their team had another good attack. On the counterattack, the ball reached Sergi and he was one on one with the goalkeeper. Sergi never misses these. He dribbled the keeper and scored to tie the game, I was jumping up and down. There was one minute left and it seemed like we would pull the impossible and tie the game. They got a free kick and their shooter Eric, is amazing. I had two people set up a wall to cover the right side. I stayed in the middle. He shot to the lower left corner, I did a diving save. I couldn't believe how quick I moved, it was all instinct. I was super proud too, I think I yelled "Not twice", referring to how his first goal was identical (except it was from left to right instead of right to left). We kept it tied.

After the game, one team didn't show up, so I played again, making use of the nice field. I got a bit bored being the goalkeeper because the game wasn't so intense. I had fun with some diving saves and I also took the ball from side to side, dribbling past three players and then I shot on target, but the keeper saved my shot. It was pretty fun, but I was exhausted.

I am so happy about the result. I won't be able to play the next three weeks, as I am going to Ukraine next Wednesday, but I'll be back for the playoffs and hopefully we'll take the championship away from Amici. I know we can do it.

I worked very hard on the weekend in math, and Monday it kept going as I had to study a lot for a meeting with Carl. The meeting was on proving Burgess bound. I did a much better job than I thought I would doing it. I liked that I could fix holes in many places. It looks easy to improve the constant in the book, but I don't know if it will improve the constant on Booker's paper. We'll find out this weekend.

Monday was busy day as I also wrote a letter recommendation and then wrote an essay for film society on Coraline. The essay took me a little over three hours to write (why did I volunteer). It was a fun day.

I didn't get much sleep due to the long Monday, but I was full of energy in the morning. Combinatorics class was great with a really cool proof showing that if you fill up n-1 cells in an nxn array, with the obvious restriction, you can complete a Latin square. That was amazing to see. It took the whole two hours to prove, but what a result!

After that, there was number theory seminar. Florian gave a great talk about counting integers satisfying certain things, such as number of integers expressible as 2^k + phi(m). Showing that there are a positive proportion of this, also a positive proportion of 2^k + sigma(m). He also showed n = 2^k - phi(m) >> x^(1/6) a much weaker statement, but it is just harder to do substractions than sums due to the fact that sums already bound the sizes of k and m, while substractions don't put any bound on k and m. He also showed n = phi(m) - 2^k >> x^(1/2) /logx. It was crazy the number of Hammers he pulled out to get these results.

After the seminar I was extremely tired due to the lack of sleep. However, I went to school for the problem solving club, and solved a cool problem. There was only one student though, I don't know if it will keep going.

At night I went to trivia night and it was fun. It was specially nice to hang out with friends I hadn't talked to a lot in the last year. We were winning after three rounds, but we did horribly in the last round and we ended up in third place.

When I got home, again I stayed up late doing the taxes. Yuliia's W-2 was not here, so the next day (Wednesday) I had to find out the information by calling her employers. Now, the taxes are done with and I am very happy about it. Looking forward to the big refund.

On Wednesday there were several things to make me happy. I played well in Guitar Hero (hadn't played since June in my house). I solved some cool math problems (I am very pleased with how I am thinking about math most of the day and can jump on problems). In particular, I showed heuristically that if you take the product of the first n primes and add 1 (call it N), most of the time you get a composite number, to be more precise, the number of n<= x where N is prime is O(logx).

I also played amazing at the soccer game. I realized that a big reason for me thinking I played great is if I do an amazing save. Today I had some really extraordinary saves. I think I should train a bit for the playoffs, I want to shut out every team. Next week we play the defending champions, Amici, they are supposed to be great. I am so excited about it, every week I keep wishing we played them and next week it will finally happen. By the way, we won 5-1.

The last three days, I have missed Yuliia more and more. It has been two weeks now since she went to Ukraine and I can't wait to see her again (two more weeks). We talk on Skype every day and that is great, but I miss her physical presence. I am so happy with Yuliia, I am looking forward to going to Ukraine soon.
Life is good.

On Wednesday, I woke up early to work on math. In number theory class we proved Bertrand's postulate. I find it much easier to learn things in classes than on my own, as when I see a proof on the board, I can recreate it, while when I see it in the book I need to read it many times before I can start recreating it. I wonder why?

My mom cooked chicken in curry sauce and some very tasty potatoes, they were delicious.

At night I went to play soccer. We won 4-2, the game was pretty tight, for a long time the score was 3-2. I had some good saves and overall a good game but for some reason I don't feel like I played that great.

After soccer my mom and I watched some TV like the old days.

Thursday was math day. Class from 10-12, seminar from 12-1, seminar from 1:30-2:30, seminar from 2:30-3:30 and colloquium from 4-5. The class was pretty fun, seeing a proof of the Marriage problem which permitted us to prove a pretty strong lowerbound for latin squares. The first seminar was the graduate student seminar and it was a sort of introduction to K-theory. Matt is very good at giving a talk. After that talk, it was combinatorics seminar where Sergi showed a combinatorial proof of a sum that shows the (n+1)-derangements = sum of k*a_n,k where a_n,k is the number of times k is the biggest fixed point in a permutation. It was a pretty good talk.

The number theory seminar was given by my friend Paul Pollack and he gave a really nice talk about sigma(n) (sum of the divisors of n). And proved that the gcd of (n,sigma(n)) is large very few times, therefore giving another proof that the perfect numbers are o(x) (density 0).

Colloquium was from 4-5 and Kevin Ford gave a talk on Pratt trees which were used earlier to show that to verify that a number was prime, you could do it in O((logp)^3+epsilon). It is interesting then to analyze the size of a Pratt tree to be able to reduce the time to verify the prime. If you improve the Pratt stuff as much as you can you get O((logp)^2+epsilon) which is already known by another method (due to Carl Pomerance), but studying the Pratt trees are fun in their own regard as funky things happen, with the distribution of H(p) (height of the Pratt tree).

At 6:30 I went to dinner with the number theory crowd, to spend some time with Paul. It was quite fun and quite tasty.

After dinner I went salsa dancing with my mom. It was very fun. I also danced with other girls that really enjoyed dancing. Always fun to salsa.

Classes started last week. Carl, my advisor, is teaching a grad level course on number theory. I have enjoyed that class very much this week, specially the homework assignment which consisted of seven problems. I brute forced my way through one of them, but usually I would find pretty solutions. My favorite was proving that the set {p/q: p, q prime} is dense in the positive reals. I also enjoyed using a theorem from class to give a correct proof for what I call Enrique's theorem (For b >= 3, for all n a natural number, there exists an n-th digit number base b that is a multiple of 1,2,3,...,n). I had proven it for large enough n, but now I can do it for any n.

Besides the class, my weekly meeting with Carl was fun. We talked about highly factorable numbers and it was nice to see a big simplification by Carl once I presented a proof I read in a paper. I have a project for this week and it looks fun.

The two other cool math things this week were a talk by David Stork using mathematics to discover art history, such as proving that the painters didn't use help of optics in 1425 (there's a big debate about this because a modern painter wrote a book attributing the difference in quality between paintings after 1425 and the ones before 1425 to the use of optic techniques and tracing), proving that Vermeer painted the Girl with the Pearl Earring alone, proving Van Eyck used a real room and not a fictitious one for his Arnolfini painting and much more. Great talk. Another great talk was given by Bart de Simon, explaining the famous abc conjecture, using lots of jokes and giving lots of computational data (I must admit, I am a data junkie).

On Monday and Tuesday Yuliia was getting more and more nervous because of her flight to Ukraine on Wednesday. On Wednesday we left the house at 8:30am driving to New York, to the JFK airport. We got there at 2:30pm and I left the airport at 3pm to go pick up my mom at La Guardia (her plane arrived at 2:50pm) and I got there at 3:40pm due to traffic. After that, I drove all the way back to Grantham, NH for a soccer game that was at 9pm. I was really nervous I wouldn't make it so I only stopped once (to eat), unfortunately, the traffic in New York, New Haven and Hartford prevented me from going fast and then once I got free of traffic it started raining. Hence I arrived at the game at 9:10pm, 5 minutes late (in terms of game time) but we were already down by 2. I played great and it was a fun game but we lost 4-3 (I arrived when we were losing 2-0). It was fun.

On Thursday, after my advisor meeting, I went to watch I Love You Man with my mom. The movie had some very funny moments and a good story, but it wasn't that great a movie, it was just good. In the evening I went to eat pizza with the prospective students and I met some of them, most of the time I spent talking with Yulan, a student from MIT that wants to work with Pete Winkler. Dartmouth seems like a great fit for her. After the pizza thing I went to dance salsa with my mom. It was quite empty, but it was still fun (I love dancing with my mom).

On Friday, I went to the grad student seminar talk which was great. I learned about Markov chains from Giulio and he wrote some beautiful programs, such as generating a random email of a person by analyzing statistically all his other emails. He also wrote a cool decrypter for simple encoding tricks. It would be cool to do something like this with all the data I have from IM conversations, to be able to generate emails that would look like my friends emails.
After the talk I went to other prospective student events including dinner at the Orient, which my mom joined us too. After dinner, my mom went to watch "Monsters vs Aliens" while I went to Game Night where I played a lot of Rockband. I was a little rusty with guitar playing in Expert, but I could still do them in Hard. I had a lot of fun singing too. I love that game.

Saturday I went to play basketball with other grad students. We played 4 on 4. My team won 11-6,11-6, 11-8 and 11-6 (the 11-8 we were down 8-0 and came back). I didn't play very good, but Asa had a great game and it was fun to have two new players: Peter and Brad.

After basketball I went to watch a movie with my mom. We watched Adventureland which was really good. The laughs weren't there all the time, but the overall story was very well done. A funny, interesting movie about summer love.

After the movie, it was the main event, Noche de Primavera, a semiformal dance featuring a live band playing salsa, merengue, bachata and tango. My mom and I helped teaching bachata and walking around helping with the other dances at first (there was an hour class before the actual event). Once the band started playing it became super fun. I danced a lot with my mom and Daisy. I had a lot of fun dancing as all the girls I danced with smiled a lot, it is always fun to feel the pleasure of dance. My mom danced with some very good dancers once they noticed how she dances (at first when I would dance with someone, no one would take her out but later in the night when everyone had noticed how she dances, it was almost impossible for her to remain seated). Really fun. I danced for about five hours. A really long day considering I played two hours of basketball.

On Sunday, it was all about homework for my number theory class. I also went to the Quechee gorge to show my mom. In the evening we went to the Dartmouth movie theater to watch Lola Montes, a 1956 movie about the Spanish dancer that was a lover of many famous men (such as the king of Bavaria and Franz Liszt). I was bored at times, mostly because I had number theory problems in my head, but after the middle, I started enjoying the movie very much. Interesting story and an interesting storytelling technique.

Friday night was the BSG finale. Yuliia and I went to Jody's house, which is an awesome house, to watch the BSG finale. I loved the episode. The episode was full of emotion and feeling. The last 45 minutes weren't that strong, but I feel necessary as it is good to have a big wrap up of 4 seasons of television. This show is quite good and it reinforced that TV can be awesome (I already had seen evidence thanks to Buffy and Angel). Yuliia didn't like it so much and the rest of the people there weren't as happy as me, but I enjoyed it immensely.

On Saturday, Yuliia and I watched the sixth episode of Dollhouse, which has been by far the best episode so far. The episode opens up so many interesting possibilities of what can happen and the overall arc is getting into place. A wonderful episode.

After doing lots of house errands and watching TV, Yuliia and I drove to Boston to meet with Sid and watch the Oscar shorts. The place was sold out, so we ended up getting food at Cafe Pamplona, a place near Harvard. Yuliia tasted tortilla española and loved it, while I had a tasty sandwich. After dinner we went to Michio's place and watched Equilibrium, a movie which has some cult appeal. Of the four people watching it, I was the only one that liked it (although I think all of us were entertained). The movie has a lot of ridiculous scenes and many flaws but I enjoyed the action and I enjoyed the plot.

Sunday, we woke up late (had gone to bed at 4:30am) and went to have breakfast at a famous Portuguese breakfast place in Union square. The meal was big and delicious (I love those pancakes). After that we went in to a pretty big comic bookstore. I bought a comic by Brian Michael Bendis, a guy that writes most of the mainstream comics for Marvel now, but was an indie writer before writing Ultimate Spider-man. I checked out his book Fortune and Glory which details how he wrote a screenplay for a movie and how it got lost in development. The comic was quite good, with lots of humor. I enjoyed it a lot, I didn't know Bendis drew his one stuff and it got me very interested into reading his comic "Torso".

After the comic bookstore we went to the theater again to try to see the animated Oscar shorts to find out it was sold out (third time I have gone to Coolidge theater and it has been sold out, all three times for Oscar shorts, although the first time was a year ago). We bought the tickets for the night showing. In the meantime we walked around and went in a bookstore called "Israel Bookstore" which has a lot of Jewish books. Then we went to Starbucks (to cold to walk outside) and there Asa met us.

With Asa, we went to play candlepin bowling, a New England version of bowling that is quite different. The pins are arranged a bit differently, ate more rectangular and the ball is tiny, like a cannonball (all of the same weight). Instead of two shots per frame, there are three, but other than that the scoring is essentially the same (strike gets the two next shots, a spare gets the next shot and hitting ten after three shots doesn't give you any extra shot). We played two matches and in all of that, there was only one strike (Sid) and two spares (both by me). I think no one did ten pins in three shots. My second spare was awesome as I was losing by 14, I hit the spare and then a 9 to win it. Asa won the first game 64-62-63-51 (Asa, Sid, Yuliia, me) and I won the second game 59-?-?-64 (I don't remember Sid and Yuliia but I they were in the 40s). I had a lot of fun.

After bowling, we went to watch the Animated Oscar Shorts. I loved them. They showed the five Oscar shorts and five runner ups. I like all ten, but I could tell why the five were the ones nominated, there was only one guy in the honorable mentions that I think could have cracked in the top five. I guess I should review each one separately: Lavatory: A Love Story is a cute, funny Russian short (10 minutes) about a woman that works cleaning in a lavatory. After cleaning she returns and in the place where coins should be she finds some flowers. It becomes a story about finding where the flowers came from. Quite good. Oktapodi a two minute French film that just makes one laugh nonstop. Wonderful. The House of Small Cubes a Japanese film (the one that won the Oscar) that is full of emotion. I loved the storytelling in this short, not using a single word (actually neither of the five nominees had any dialogue) and telling the whole life of an old man. Really fantastic movie. This Way Up a hilarious short about two funeral people who have to carry a corpse but they are car has an accident so they have to carry it all the way through hills and many obstacles. Very funny. Presto A funny short by Pixar about a magician that can't get a bunny to come through his hat as the bunny is hungry. Lots of funny things happen. It is a clever short that I enjoyed a lot. Those were the five nominees and then we go to the five honorable mentions: Varmints the longest of the movies (24 minutes) is interesting but kind of hard to understand. I liked it more after Yuliia told me about a thing I had missed (namely that the green alienlike pods grew from seeds that the main character had planted). This was the weakest of the bunch, but it was still pretty good (although Sid and Asa were very bored by it). John and Karen really funny and really short (3 minutes), it is about a polar bear apologizing to a penguin in a romantic setting. Hilarious. Gopher Broke a funny story featuring a hungry gopher. SKHIZEIN a French short that I loved. This is the one I think could have been in the top five, very funny, imaginative and interesting. Loved it. Hot Dog, this one was a bit funny and it had animation that was quite different. I didn't like it that much, but it was okay.

Watching the shorts made me realize, that there is a place where comedy gets critical acclaim and that is in short animated movies (and in full length animated movies). I don't know why comedies don't get so much love, but I was happy that they get love when it comes to short films.

On Monday, we had lunch with Asa at a diner in Brookline, I had a very tasty omelet and the interesting thing was learning what an egg salad was (the waiter was surprised when Yuliia and I asked). After the lunch, we went to the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts). We mainly walked around looking at art and discussing project Runway. My favorite part in that museum is the Impressionist part. Yuliia really enjoyed old sculptures from India.

At night, we took advantage of restaurant week and went to a restaurant called T W Many things were tasty, the bread was tasty, the free appetizer was tasty. I had an endive salad which was pretty good as an appetizer, then Cous Cous which wasn't very good as an entre and a tasty Tiramisu as dessert. Yuliia had a much better appetizer, delicious meat, good thing she couldn't eat it all, as I was quite sad with my entree.

On Tuesday, we woke up late again and went to have lunch at Zoe's a Greek diner near Harvard. I had eaten there before with Iuli and Mike and liked it a lot. I had a club sandwich this time with home fries, but I wished I had ordered some breakfast, as their breakfasts are really good. After that, we went to a Russian grocery store so that Yuliia could get Russian cheese and other kinds of food that are not usually found in normal grocery stores. She was quite happy with it.

We then went to do normal bowling with Asa. We played three games. I bowled an awful 48 in the first game to be in last place. In the second game I played great (for our standards) and bowled 126. Yuliia was second place with 107. In the third game, it seemed like no one would reach 100, but Asa hit a spare in the last frame to get to 105. I got 90. It was very fun.
After bowling it was time to drive home. Part of the drive Yuliia watched Lord of the Rings in the car, so when we got home we watched Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. I hadn't seen it in about four years (maybe more) and I enjoyed it a lot. This time, I was mainly enjoying the beautiful landscapes and amazing cinematography. This movie is of the highest quality, all the money that was spend was well spent. Yuliia hadn't seen the movie before and was super happy with it. When it was over she wanted to watch more, but I didn't as it was 2am and watching Two Towers would mean ending the day after 6am (the extended editions are quite long).

On Wednesday, we watched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I loved watching it again, specially since Yuliia enjoys it so much too. I can't believe how real everything seems. Peter Jackson really created a believable Middle Earth. I also really love how well they made this movie to feel even though the book seems unadaptable (with its storytelling way of one story and then the next, instead of marching through both stories at the same time as the movie does). It seems to have the perfect rhythm, a perfect synchrony between both storylines (Frodo-Sam, Aragorn-Gandalf). Just a jewel of filmmaking. After watching it I went to buy Return of the King (which I'll watch tonight) which I have never seen in its extended edition. I am looking forward to it. I wonder if Yuliia is missing out by not seeing the originals, but I think the extended editions are better, so she probably isn't missing out.

After the movie, I went to play soccer. We were supposed to play the Dartmouth Women this week, but because of Spring Break we won by default. We played a pick up game instead, which was very fun. It is interesting to see how when the game is not part of the tournament we all play with less intensity. The tournament doesn't mean much, but in some ways the games are much better as everyone tries harder. I did enjoy being able to get out of the goal more often as I was unafraid of being scored upon. We won 10-3, I played poorly the first 15 minutes, but then played better.

A really fun week full of activities. Life is good.

The week's highlights were finishing the class I was teaching and Yuliia getting accepted for a green card. Let's go through the day to day rundown in any case:

Monday: Gave my students the final exam and then graded them. It took over four hours to grade. The students did an excellent job, as the average was a 90. I was very happy to see some good grades from students that weren't doing so well. I am very happy with the way the quarter went. In the exam the last question was "what was the most interesting/exciting part of the class?" and the replies were funny and nice, I enjoyed teaching the class a great deal.

Tuesday: Yuliia and I printed pictures to be prepared with more evidence for the green card interview the next day. At night I went to Trivia night at Ramunto's. After four rounds our team was up 82-72 (there were more teams, but the rest are irrelevant). The final round consists of bidding a number between 0-10 and then there's a question. We debated for a while before decidng on bidding 0. I wanted to bid 1, but after careful analysis today, I realized it was better to bid 0, as this is the right choice whenever our odds of answering the right question are < 56% which I think was the case. We bid 0, the question turned out to be easy, so we tied. There was a tiebreaker where we had to bid between 0-82 and then see a question. We debated for a while and bid 82, the other team bid 81 (we didn't know this before bidding obviously). We both answered wrong and they won. I haven't calculated the optimal bidding strategy for the tie breaker. At night, I had an Olympiad meeting where we figured out problems for a quick exam where we filter out to find the best 200 students of the city.

Wednesday: Yuliia and I drove to Manchester for her green card interview. The interview went smoothly and she got her green card. We were nervous about them asking about her original birth certificate (it didn't arrive in time, it arrived today, Friday, to our house), but fortunately it was a non-issue. Yuliia was ecstatic. We walked around Manchester downtown feeling great. When we came back we bought tickets for Ukraine. Yuliia will go from April 1 to May 14 and I will go from April 29 to May 14. I am excited to finally meet her family. The only bad thing about doing the trip will be missing three soccer games which brings me to mentioning that I played soccer at night. We won 7-2. The game again was very close in the first half, but we had two goals at the end of the half and two goals at the beginning of the second half. Too hard to come back from that. I played pretty good. The first goal they scored on me was due to a defensive mistake (I saved a goal, the defender mistakenly passed it back to an enemy attacker who had an open goal), the second goal was a blunder by me after I was still thinking about the previous goal. When I came back from the game, I watched an episode of Project Runway and then had another Olympiad meeting over the internet.

Thursday: It was shopping day with Yuliia. Buying lots of stuff, mainly to take as gifts to Ukraine. Other than that, I finished reading a book and had a nice evening with Yuliia watching Project Runway.

Friday: Yuliia and I watched many episodes of Project Runway. We pretty much have one more episode to watch before the end of season 4. The quality of designers is quite high. It seems like there's a clear winner as Christian is just so good. The final episode should be fun as it will have a competition before the big competition. Tonight is the last episode of BSG and I am looking forward to it. There will be a party to celebrate.

Life is good.

Last Saturday Yuliia and I went to the semiformal right after watching The Visitor. It was quite fun. Yuliia looked very beautiful and I looked quite handsome. We had some fun dancing around.

On Sunday, we went to watch Coraline and then we had some nice dinner at the Fort (an all day breakfast place).

On Monday, I had a good time at the film society meeting and teaching calculus.

Tuesday, I really liked the lecture, where I talked about time of death. At night I went to watch Doubt again with Yuliia and Asa. I was happy that Yuliia liked the movie too. Asa didn't like it as much, so we had interesting conversations about the movie.

Wednesday was really fun. Woke up at 6:30am to read a paper. Again the meeting with Carl was very productive and enlightening. The calculus class went well too.

The super highlight was playing soccer. We played .gov a pretty good team (much better than previous weeks). We scored immediately (2 minutes) to go up 1-0. I started shaky with a couple of mistakes, but kept the goal intact. After that I played really well. I did some amazing saves on route to a shut out. We ended up winning 3-0. I was so happy with the shut out. A huge smile on my face. I had to save a couple of one on ones, some very close headers and a shot from less than a meter away from the goal (a player caught the rebound, but I jumped in time to save her shot). The main highlight of the week.

On Thursday, number theory seminar was pretty fun. Some interesting technique to prove irrationality of numbers came up. I enjoyed the talk very much.
At night, Yuliia and I went with her belly-dance class mates to Salt Hill (a Lebanon pub) to open-mic night and see Gina (the instructor perform). After being there 10 minutes they asked for IDs and Yuliia didn't bring hers, so they wanted to kick us out. After some discussion and noticing it was only 9pm, they let us stay till 9:45pm. The bad news was Gina didn't perform in that time. So we went drove to Hanover, grabbed the ID and then headed back. We got there at 10:20pm, and fortunately Gina hadn't performed yet. We saw the show and it was really good, Yuliia was very happy.

On Friday, after class and writing a practice exam for my students (there is one class left and then the final exam), we drove to Hooksett to the IMAX theater to watch Watchmen. The plan was to drive to Chick-Fil-A in Nashua then go back to the IMAX, but we didn't have time as we wanted to arrive at least one hour before the show to get good seats. Instead we ate at McDonalds. Watchmen was really good. It was very close to the book and it changed the ending in a very good way (it didn't seem cinematic to keep the book ending). I am not a big fan of the action scenes in the movie, but in some parts they were really good, as in the fights involving Ozymandias. The CG for Dr. Manhattan was incredible and any scene with Rorschach was perfect. I was very scared the movie would be bad, but I am very happy that it was quite good. I went with a group of ten and most people enjoyed it. It was interesting to see that two people who didn't like the comic liked the movie a lot. Yuliia also liked it (although not all of it, as some parts are pretty graphic).
The whole trip was a 7 hour investment with driving and watching a longish movie, but it was worth it.

On Saturday I went to play basketball with other math grads. The teams were Asa, Ralf and me versus Nick, Matt and Avram. We won all four games 11-6, 11-2, 13-11 and 11-6. The second game ended really quickly because it seemed that Asa and me couldn't miss a shot, and since we played with the scorer getting the ball, this meant that was a huge advantage. The third game was the most exciting (although it ended anti-climaticly as it ended with me hitting a long shot for two points). We played for a bit over 90 minutes, it was very fun.
At night I went to watch Let the Right One In a Swedish movie that has been garnering many awards. I won't say what the movie is about since I think it is more fun to not know anything (I wished I hadn't known anything before going, although knowing made me go and also made me convince Yuliia not to go, both of which were great decisions). At times the movie felt very slow to me, but I think it was very interesting. I read the FAQ on imdb and it made me think it was even cooler. The movie is definitely something worth watching. I am glad I watched it (even if I was a bit bored at times).