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We have our little rituals, Juan Pablo and I. Every night I make my bed. He gets on the bed and I throw the sheet on top of him. He runs around, twisting and turning to try to fight his way out of the sheet, sometimes falling off the edge of the bed. Then he jumps back up again, ready to do the same thing with the blanket. And then the quilt.

When I get home from work I lie on the floor and surf the web on my phone. He lies right next to me and chews up his rawhide. Surfing memes and chewing up rawhide must stimulate the same part of the brain. He eats his dinner while I eat mine and I read the Weekly Standard. I chase him down the hall, he chases me back. Sometimes I hide in the study and it takes him a moment to find me. We chase each other until we're breathing so hard that we have to stop for a drink of water. Then it's time for a walk, up and down the streets of Altadena, to all of our favorite bushes and patches of grass.

In the mornings we wake up and strrrrretch and then we lie on the bed with our chins on the window sill, watching the neighbor's cat and bulldog. Since I am a magician with long arms and opposable thumbs, I can open the window to let in the smells of the cat and the dog and the orange grove. Sometimes the neighbor comes out to water the orange trees. One of us gently growls every time a new person or animal appears on the scene.

I love my little dog.

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I've been working like a maniac. I looked at my time sheet and saw that last Monday was a holiday, and Friday was a regular day off, and I was like, "What? That happened already? We had a three-day week? Oh, yeah, MLK day, I was working. And that weekend, too. And this weekend."

And now I'm still here and it's 1:12 am and I have to be at work again by 7:30 am tomorrow.

Well, you know. The Solar System isn't going to explore itself.

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I went to the gym last night. I ran three miles, but I could only run about .75 of those miles at randomjunk's pace. Well, well. I'll just have to keep trying. Today I went to spin class for the third time, and it was SUCH A KILLER. AHHHH. Then I went to work and got in a couple of hours of work, and then I went back to the gym for Zumba. I've become a glutton for punishment. { I went to some insane cardiovascular workout on Wednesday. Everyone in the class is super fit... probably because everyone that wasn't is dead now. } After lunch I read some more of Red Mars (almost finished now!) and took Juan Pablo hiking up the canyon near my house. There is now a river in the canyon (what novelty!), so that made it a more interesting hike. Then dog obedience class, then dinner. It's amazing how many things you can do in one day when you start at 8 am with spin class.

Tomorrow I'm driving a bunch of foreigners to Santa Barbara to see a rocket launch. Hopefully the weather will cooperate.

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Hollywood called, and asked if I wanted to be a "science advisor" for their new TV series based on Kim Stanley Robinson's book "Red Mars".

omggggg I hope they choose meeeeeeeeeeee
*squeeeeeeeeee* They said that they needed to ask me some questions about terraforming.

{By the way I judged that book by its cover for many years, and did not read it, and now that I've finally been reading it, it's REALLY GOOD.}


In other news I just got a series of invitations to give talks at different institutions. I was invited to give a talk at Caltech next week on a "topic of my choice" (living inside yardangs, obviously).

I'm going to give a talk about volcanoes at Georgia Tech in April (will middaymoon be there???)
I was also asked to come back and give a talk at my homeland of Brown University sometime this spring (probably about intersecting ridges on Mars).
I also just got invited to this interdisciplinary lecture at Caltech about the 'History of Exploration Through Time'. I'm not giving that lecture (some fancy person is) but for some reason they invited me to be their guest at dinner with the speaker at the super fancy Caltech Faculty Club. -Accepted-
I was also invited to go on an adventure with some geologists to an island off the coast of California that is currently only open to the US Navy.

On top of that, I finally submitted a paper that I'd been working on for *ages*! Hopefully this early publication will mean that I can get at least three publications in 2016! I have an unofficial goal of publishing 100 first-author papers over the course of my career... which means that I have to average about 3 per year over the next 30 years.

Speaking of lectures, tonight I am going to a lecture about this Deep Space Atomic Clock that they have been building here at JPL. So I'd better finish writing my talk about yardangs before it starts!

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The zumba continues.

I've been to zumba every day this week. Some days I've done another class, too, like kickboxing. This morning I had my "complimentary personal trainer consultation", after which they gave me the high pressure sales pitch to hire a personal trainer. No thanks-- I could barely convince myself to buy this gym membership. They asked me if I was serious about my fitness goals. I am... but I have silly fitness goals. I can't pay someone $780/mo just so that I can improve my breakdancing.

Every instructor is different, and they all prefer slightly different music. Some classes feel like a one-hour Dance Dance Revolution mix, some feel like a one-hour Latin dance-a-thon, others like a funky soul party, and others like an 80s aerobics class. In those classes I feel like a member of the mall aerobics class taken over by Joan of Arc in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. In any case, I get to spend an hour watching an incredibly energetic and amazing dancer shake their stuff. And best of all, they break it down so that I can copy them. I would have copied y'all in the club, too, it would have just been more awkward.

All in all, one thing is clear: Zumba class was made for me, and I was made for Zumba.

Now I'm back at work until late tonight. Since there's no one here, it's 100% loud dubstep and looking at Mars. An excellent combination.

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Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

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Inspired by randomjunk, I started going to the gym. I looked up the gym type that she goes to, and noted that you get a FREE MASSAGE every month with your membership!?!? Whaaaat? Amazing!?!

Well I didn't join that gym, as it was too far away, but I did join 24-hour Fitness, which is conveniently located between my house and my workplace. Over the last five days I've been every day, sometimes taking two classes, sometimes one. I've taken three Zumba classes (1 hr each), one cycling class (1 hr... I thought it was only a half an hour so I almost died around minute 32 when I realized). I also took a kickboxing class. One day I went on the stairmaster for 30 minutes. Oh my. I weighed myself this morning, and according to the scale I weigh more than I've ever weighed in my life. Good thing I already ate all of my Christmas candy, so it won't tempt me anymore. Cardiovascularly speaking, and strength-wise, I'm not as out of shape as I thought I would be. I guess working on the 8th floor and only using the stairs has been helpful for something. After each class I want to say, "IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE!?!?" Except the cycling class, man, that was pretty harsh. Everyone warned me that Michelle, the instructor, is a beast.

The 24-hour fitness dude who got me signed up on the computer was a student at Cal Poly Pomona. He wants to be an intern at JPL this summer. It would be weird if he ended up working for me. He asked me what my goals were for joining the gym. I didn't really have any, other than "to get in shape". Since then I've been trying to think of what my goals actually are. I think I just wanted an activity to do, and I'd exhausted lying around on the floor of my house and scrolling through 9gag.

So far the combination of vigorous aerobic exercise and giving up Facebook (and 9gag) at work has made me extraordinarily productive... we'll see how long that lasts. We're headed into the season right now when everyone is frantically writing conference abstracts for this conference we have coming up in March (the deadline to submit something is January 12th).

Today it rained about half as many inches as we got during the entire year of 2015. It's supposed to continue raining for the rest of the week. THE REST OF THE WEEK! That's like eternity here in southern California, where weather isn't supposed to be a thing. The El Nino they promised us has finally arrived.

In other news, I bought a couch, a coffee table, and an end table. The latter two arrived this afternoon, and the couch is scheduled to arrive some time in the next month. It is a foldout couch, so the next time didi comes I'll have a place for him to sleep (and all of you, too, fair Nutangians).

Tomorrow we go to the bosses and ask for ~3 million dollars to continue building our Moon robot. I hope we succeed. :) My colleague's job hangs in the balance.

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