s h i r o u

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at apartments online. We'll be moving to Arlington in the first week of December. It's tough to choose a place just from the websites. In a couple of weeks we will be driving up to look at places in person, but we still have to narrow things down before we go. I've made appointments for us at the apartment complexes that look best. Here are the three that I think look most promising:

1. The Palatine Apartments
2. The Madison at Ballston Station
3. Liberty Tower Apartments

I'm still suffering somewhat from sticker shock. In Durham, we pay $1050/mo for a townhouse with 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, a large kitchen and a very large, open living room. In Arlington, we will pay at least twice that for an apartment with 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, a small den, a small kitchen and a medium sized living room. Plus, we'll have to pay extra fees for our cats, and an extra fee for parking! There are cheaper apartments, but we want something that is conveniently located and not ghetto.

The price is a downside, but I'm going to be pulling a good salary, so we will be able to afford it. There are also many upsides: primarily, we will be close to everything. We will be able to walk to the metro, to nice grocery stores and other good places to shop, and to lots of restaurants, bars and coffee shops. We'll be a short train ride from a wealth of museums, theaters, concert halls and the like. I'm really looking forward to living in the middle of a bustling city.

The current plan is that we stay in Durham through the beginning of December. Our health insurance will last through the end of the month in which Laura leaves her job, so if she leaves on 29 Nov it will terminate on 30 Nov; if she leaves on 1 Dec it will terminate on 31 Dec. So we'll probably move around 5 Dec, and we'll have a couple of weeks in the DC area to acquaint ourselves with the neighborhood. We'll probably go to New York for Christmas, and I'll start my new job on 4 Jan.

So if you're familiar with the DC area, suggest to me wonderful places that we should go!

ps. If you're still following me on livejournal, please consider looking at my dreamwidth page and commenting there. I am intentionally leaving this entry public (on dw, not on lj), so you should be able to see it.

I've been very busy lately. I'm spending a lot of time writing my thesis, but I'm making real progress. I have ~80 pages and am probably about 50% finished, maybe a little less. I defend on 21 July, so I've still got another couple of months to get it done.

Yesterday I got word that the second paper I've written as a grad student has been accepted for publication. The referee comments were very positive this time, which is nice, because I got a lot of criticisms on the submission of an earlier draft. I recognize that this is par for the course and that referees will almost always ask for significant revision, but it is still a little hard not to take it personally.

Now I'm working on my third paper, which hopefully we'll be able to get out of the door this month. It largely depends on some of my collaborators, though, so I'll just have to wait and see. Since I'm working with experimentalists, this paper is kind of an anomaly for a theorist like me insomuch as it actually contains data. My advisor insisted that I have at least one publication with real physical data since I'm getting my PhD in physics, not applied math, so this is it. At this exact moment I'm running some simulations to confirm and expand on a couple of my results, hence the time to post an entry.

By the way, I now have Dreamwidth invite codes, so let me know if you want one.