Thanksgiving

We awoke this morning to a beautiful 2-3 inches of snow! It was wonderful. We went out to the parking lot and let Dakota discover what snow is like. She was afraid and confused at first, and didn't want to go outside. But when she did, she started running around sniffing at the snow and shaking her head to try to get it off her face. Then we started throwing snowballs for her, and she realized she could eat it, so then she just ran around licking it up. Then we went up to the park and went sledding for a little while. Matt made an attempt to take Dakota down the hill on the sled, but it ended with a pretty spectacular crash halfway down.
Today we are thankful for snow, probably selling our car, our warm apartment, our usually great and only slightly frustrating dog, money enough to pay the bills and still have some fun, our loving families 3000 miles away, and finally, each other. Oh yeah, and free pie (from Marilee's nanny family).

Poor puppy parenting

For the most part, we figure we're pretty good dog parents. We feed her, get her lots of exercise, only yell when we're REALLY mad etc. Dakota does have to stay alone in the apartment for about 5 hours every day while we're at work and school respectively but we fill up her Kong with peanut butter and leave her lots of toys and she has always seemed to do fine. Every once in a while we come home to find a chewed up letter or pen, but for the most part her time alone in the apartment has been uneventful.

Well today while Matt and I were eating breakfast I said, "Wouldn't it be fun if we could somehow see what she actually does all day? I mean, then we could know if she actually plays with her toys or just lays down and sleeps?" Matt of course used his super-technology alert smarts to point out that we could do just that using some special feature on his video camera. So we set it up today and left for our day at work.

Anyway we came home tonight expecting all kinds of awful thing: tearing up letters, barking out the window... But we didn't expect what we actually got. Dakota just walked around the kitchen all day whining and crying and pawing at the door. It was like she was in a panic all day just wasting away for the moment we'd return.

So now I am riddled with guilt! Now when we leave her at home for five hours I won't imagine her playing with her toys and taking a little nap, I'll see her running in panicked circles crying her little brown eyes out. Now how are we going to be able to leave her? Sucky. Sometimes technology doesn't help. Better to not know. :)

Matt's reaserch

I just thought I would give you a little update on what I'm doing in my reaserch at WPI, now that I have some good pictures of it.
In the picture below, the thick black line on the left is actually a airfoil (like an airplane wing). You can also see a parachute, which is the green blob on the right. The whole setup is sitting inside a water tunnel. What I'm doing is studying the effect of the airfoil (which creates a vortex, like a tornado) on the parachute. The water flows from left to right. We're doing it in water instead of air because it is easier to study, but the results are actually directly comparable, since they are both "fluids."
We have a grant for this research because there have been some occasions where paratroopers chutes have collapsed after they jumped out of the plane. I don't believe anyone has died from it yet, because they all have had backup chutes. And if you're thinking of skydiving, don't worry about this unless there are other planes flying in close formation with you. =)


This picture shows the parachute "breathing" or expanding and contracting. (Look close, it is very subtle).