Okay, here's my itinerary (yeah, boring, but I want it all in one place for reference):

• July 29: driving from Claremont to Palo Alto
• July 29-July 31: staying with Patrick's family in Palo Alto
• July 31-Aug 1: flying to Boston, leaving at 11:30pm and arriving at 10:35am
• Aug 1-Aug 15: staying at the Boston Hostel and researching with Ned at MIT
• Aug 15-Aug 24: staying at the Prescott Hotel/Hostel and continuing research with Ned
• Aug 24: moving into Sidney-Pacific
• Aug 29: MIT orientation begins
• Sept 3: Registration Day
• Sept 4: First day of classes as a graduate student!

I expect to have Internet access starting around August 2, assuming all goes well at MIT. Unfortunately, I won't be able to post pictures until I move into Sidney-Pacific and my computer arrives. Whatever will I do?

Those are some of our boxes up there. The big ones are out in the living room, but I liked how neat and tidy our boxes are (I get those nice, new brown ones; Patrick's stuck with the old white Stor-Alls). That's my foot in the corner...I took the picture from the bed, which is all taken apart now.

This morning, I accompanied Patrick to the Uhaul place in Ontario, and he got everything he needed after some running around. And a little while ago I got a housing survey from my future dorm at MIT (Sidney-Pacific). That's comforting, since I hadn't heard anything about housing since I got my assignment. This is kind of exciting now! We get to move in earlier than I'd expected (August 24th instead of the 30th), so that'll give me a little time to get settled.

I'm going to post my plans for the next month later today for those of you who are interested (mostly my parents and Patrick). And then the site will go on a little hiatus.

We spent today packing and doing errands. We went to a used book store to try and get rid of our less desirable books from recent college classes, but the store didn't give cash, only store credit. The lady in charge claimed no used book stores give cash anymore, but I don't know. If that's true, that sucks. Plus she pooh-poohed most of our books; normal people only want sci-fi and romances, I guess. We decided to take our books and leave because we wouldn't want to use the store credit to get more books! We're trying to reduce the amount of stuff we'll need to move on Monday (yikes!).

If I had more time, I'd label the books up and leave them around town (see bookcrossing.com), but it looks like right now they'll either go to Goodwill (do they take books?) or get left somewhere on campus in hopes that people will take them.

The apartment is filling up with boxes...what a lot of stuff to ship! Luckily, Patrick is going to bring smaller items with him when he visits, so we don't really have to ship everything. We pick up the Uhaul tomorrow morning, then load it up and leave Mudd for Palo Alto on Monday. Don't worry, I'll update again before I jet off to Boston (on Wednesday night).

I still can't quite believe this is happening ("this" being me leaving California/Patrick for Boston/MIT). But I'm getting a little more excited to go to Boston (everyone says great things about it, and my brief visits there have been enjoyable). And it looks like Patrick will come visit in mid-September (after MIT starts, before Stanford starts). I'm hoping I'll make enough money doing research next month to visit him in late August. Not sure if that'll happen though. This is going to be interesting.

I was going to change that title up there to "kiss your shadow" so that people who visit here from my Mudd URL would know how to get here once the Mudd forwarding stopped working, but I'm going to pack instead. Maybe later...

Miasma (the current page name) doesn't even make much sense anymore. The page used to be called "Caitlin's Inescapable Miasma of Cuteness" (I believe I am less cute now, which is good since I'm supposed to be growing up). Then I shortened it to "Miasma," which doesn't really apply to anything around here. At least "kiss your shadow" makes some sense (like I'm embracing my dark side or something). The main reason I bought kissyourshadow.com was because the song was in my head when I was trying to come up with a domain name. How un-deep!

Patrick's server isn't working right, so I moved the CNF photo album over to this server. For those of you not in the know, I spent last summer doing research at the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF) and took lots of pictures for Patrick because he was so far away. Some of them are silly, but I figure I shouldn't delete them now; I'll keep them for posterity. That was a fun summer even though I was far away from my loverboy. However did I manage it?