Yesterday I just got back from two weeks worth of vacation visiting my family and friends in Puerto Rico. After procrastinating during the first week, I am happy to say that during the second week I was able to go out and do stuff. I went to Playa El Combate, a beach in Cabo Rojo, close to my hometown Lajas. The water was so nice. I wanted to just float all day. After this past winter I was really looking forward to the Puertorrican beaches. With my siblings I went to see Pirates 3 and with a friend I saw Rise of the Silver Surfer. I guess it is the summer of sequels. I did not had high expectations regarding any of these two movies, but I am please with both in the sense that they entertained me. [With a small exception in FF2 when Mr. Fantastic mentions the Tachyon Pulse... but that was not that bad...] I also attended the wedding of one of my friends, José Emilio, who married his long time girlfriend Miriel.
I found that some relatives where having more health-related issues. My cousin had a baby boy on last October and since then baby Edwin has grown a lot. Combined with the wedding, all this made me feel really old. I mean, serious stuff is going on around me now, deaths, births, and even weddings of friends. I must confess that watching my friend and his (now) wife in their wedding attires made me feel weird. To me their still two young persons who just finished high school. Well, the truth is that I finished high school 5 years ago. A lot of things have happen since then.
Before leaving to Puerto Rico I spent one week with my girlfriend in Wellesley. She finished her undergraduate education in physics this past spring at Wellesley College. I am really proud of her :-) she got a physics prize and was offer membership to two honor societies. I always said she is the smart one in the family. Which family? This is another sign of my age, I am thinking of marrying her and leaving together! There are some details that have to be figured out before, but we are working on that.
I stopped reading Srednicki's book on QFT and started Ryder's version. On my way to Puerto Rico I started reading Nakahara's book on geometry and topology. I tried reading it before, but now it makes more sense. So far I skimmed through the first two chapters and read a bit on chapter 3 on homology groups and also read a bit on chapter 5 on manifolds.
While at PR I also finished reading the biography/memoir of John Archibald Wheller. It was a nice read; a combination of personal stories about meetings with great physicist such as Bohr and Einstein, and how Wheller developed important concepts such as geons and black holes. The first thing I did when I came back was to download the article on geons from the APS website, using the university's account.
Speaking of the university, Stony Brook is like a ghost place this days. Today I walked to the mail room to pick up some packages. I had to walked through one of the quads. Maybe there is really nobody there, since it looks like they are refurnishing the rooms. But really, it is kind of eerie walking through the plaza. It reminded me of last summer when I visited the student union looking for the ATM and found the building completely desolated. Summer classes have already started, so I guess there are not that much people around. Or maybe they are staying elsewhere. Or maybe I just do not go out to often. I suspect the latter to be more correct than the former...
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