"Great day in the morning....

....what once was lost, now is found."

Kudos to you if you remember that commercial. Congratulations on having a life if you don't.

So, yes, I'm alive. Yes, I've been busy. Yes, I've been watching the comments on my last post. Yes, I think you're both silly. Did I miss anything? Oh, yes, I'm wearing new socks today.

Busy, busy, busy. My first year research project is finished. [/begin stuff you probably don't care to know] What was originally pegged as a pulsar candidate from coincident radio and x-ray detections turned out to be a high-mass x-ray binary similar to Cygnus X-3. That is, my object is actually a binary system consisting of a compact object (black hole or neutron star) and a Wolf-Rayet star. This is only the second such system (Cygnus X-3 being the first) to be identified. [/end stuff you probably don't care to know] I presented at Astrofest 2005, and had quite the time at Astrofeast 2005. I wrote up a paper on the research. Tomorrow I meet with my committee. They will tell me everything I did wrong, and I will drop to my knees pleading that I have only completed one year of grad school, am young and naive, and will never let it happen again. They will have mercy, or at least pity, and I'll get to start my next project.

Classes have started. I'm taking two, and teaching one. This semester is all about cosmology and extrasolar planets. As for the class I teach, I think I've got a pretty good group this year. (Or am I just saying that in case one of them finds this blog?)

I'll try and update more. I have some new ideas for more Modern-Day Etiquette, and have received some great suggestions from people as well. Lots of things are going on, and since you've nothing better to do, I'm sure you'll read all about them here.

By the way, I just think it's hilarious that this blog comes with a spell checker....a spell checker in which "blog" is not recognized as a word. That delights me to no end.

(And in case you were wondering, it was a VW commercial, circa 1999-2000. The thing that was once lost was a full-size spare tire. And here you thought it went the way of the coelacanth, didn't you?)

(Ha! It didn't recognize coelacanth either.)

(What? Coelacanth? It's a prehistoric fish, thought to be extinct....until they caught one off the coast of Madagascar. Ah, that commercial was so funny at the time....)