a very good day =)

i didn't sleep much last night... partly because i didn't get home til almost one, and got up early, partly because i was excited for a day of not working and for hanging out with a good friend. :-), but sleep or no sleep, it turned out to be an excellent day.

i got up early to make sure i was ready when jessica got here -- turned out to be plenty early to eat breakfast and to update my website before she got here (see here) note especially the updated publications pages... i now have two math articles in print as opposed to just in the queue! =) this makes my erdos number officially a 4, and this makes me happy (when my paper with Zsolt Tuza as a coauthor gets printed, i'll be a 2, which is even cooler)! =)

anyhow, long story short, jessica got here, we went up to the mall in edison, browsed through barnes and noble, saw "mean girls", which was cute, got lunch @ panera, wandered the mall, then came back to my place to chat until dinner time... then ordered a pizza and rented another movie ("chasing liberty", also cute)... we then watched the end of "back to the future" and the start of "a knight's tale" before jessica had to head back home just now (she has to work in the morning, ai yai yai)... all in all a quality day

footnotes (in chronological order):
(1) bonus points to "mean girls" for making the main character a math ace :-)
(2) bonus points to "chasing liberty" for filming large portions of the movie in parts of europe i've been to before!
(3) eric called mid-afternoon cleaning out his old room in vegas (his family moved this spring) asking if i wanted his old kids' planetarium projector (projects the constellations on your ceiling)... for as many times as i've wandered into toy stores this year and joked about actually spending the money on one, i'm now getting one for free :-)
(4) quote from cspan when we heard the news earlier that former president reagan had died this afternoon -- random caller from AZ: "my condolences to the reagan family... i was focusing my thoughts on president reagan the other day and i'm afraid my mental powers may have killed him"
(5) it's so great to have someone who's known me more than a year around relatively close at hand... it's been another 1.5 months since we got to hang out, but i like hanging out with jessica a bunch... there's something cool about hanging out with friends who have known you through several phases of your life (hs, college, and now grad school) that makes chatting with them especially valuable and cool :-) and this makes me happy :-) yay for jessica :-)
(6) finally, i got an email from my boss when i came back to the computer just now "Thanks Lara, I really appreciate all your work....you're doing great! Carolyn", so i'm getting favorable reviews all around -- yay :-)

now, time to finish the fiction book i've been reading (arrows of the queen, leigh's favorite book ever) and get some sleep... early church tomorrow, then picking up colleen's sister from the airport -- fun, eh?

a most excellent night to all y'all =)