Nice work if you can get it...

This week my travels took me to Nice, in the south of France. Too bad its winter there and it didn't look nearly as nice (no pun intended!) as the picture at left! I arrived Sunday morning, and we had a massive thunderstorm on Sunday afternoon and evening. By Monday it was clear again and in the mid-50's.

Actually went for an IBM meeting at our lab in a suburb of Nice, called La Gaude. When you leave the Mediterranean and go north, you begin to climb up hills and then mountains. Our La Gaude lab is high on a hill overlooking the sea to the south, and looking north the mountains. What a gorgeous location! If I worked there I'd never get anything done! (Plus, they have bottles of wine in the cafeteria for lunch - the life!) Enjoyed a couple of good meals there, particularly at one restaurant, La Grand Balcon which I would recommend if you happen to be in Nice.

Back on Wednesday night to New York. Last week, helped Liz pack her apartment as she has now officially moved to England to be with Azeem and start her post-doc at Kings College, London. I think being in London will be will a nice experience, and good to have someone to visit in London, but we will miss having her close to us in New York. (But we won't miss a lot of her stuff, which is now in storage at our house!!)

Mike still hasn't heard from 3 of the 4 schools he applied to - but its getting to be that time, and we are starting to nail-bite. I was at NYU's Courant Institute last week to give a talk, and that would be a cool place to go to school! We are still kind of hoping for U. of Washington in Seattle to come through, though. More later, stay tuned!

Snow in the Big Apple

Our latest news is a record snowfall in New York and our tristate area. The forecasters - great pundits that they are! - had been predicting '6 to 12'. Don and I had orchestra tickets for Saturday night, and debated whether to drive down or take the train. We decided to drive, and fortunately for us the storm didn't really start until about 7 pm, and didn't pick up steam until after midnight. So we had dinner with Elizabeth at a pretty good Spanish/Mediterranean/Tapas place on the upper westside, then went off to hear Lorin Maazel conduct Mozart's last three symphonies (39, 40, 41). The music was good - 39th was workman-like, but they picked up steam with the 40th and the Jupiter.

By the time we got out of Lincoln Center the wind had picked up and it was snowing fairly hard. Its times like these I'm glad I bought the gas-guzzling SUV - the roads were bad, but we slowly navigated our way north and got home by midnight. Which was good, because that's when the storm really started to pick up. We had snow falling at up to 5 inches per hour for awhile - by morning there was over 2 feet, and it was still coming down! Reminded me of a good old Chardon, Ohio winter storm! That's what I get for making fun of the groundhog. After three hours of shoveling and very sore muscles, we could get cars out of the driveway. I gotta get a snowblower!

Here are some pictures of the front of our house and the back deck the day after - its a beautiful, sunny day!