Ivan's weblog

This week we went tubing to Satan’s Kingdom State Recreation Area. What an odd name! It sounds like the perfect setting for the next Stephen King novel, but it’s actually pretty nice.

This Spring we decided to plant some strawberries. Fabiola just put them in a pot in the garden a week ago. A couple of days after planting them, Fabiola noticed that there was a hole in the dirt and the plants had been moved. We suspected that it had been a squirrel, because sometimes they like to eat the plants and dig around. When Fabiola started putting the plants back in place, she noticed a strange solid object buried in the pot. At first, she thought it was some sort of plastic toy; however, upon further inspection she noticed that it was a chocolate Easter Bunny! Perhaps this squirrel, racoon or whatever decided to save its dessert for later! But some of our friends came up with the theory that I did it because I wanted the plants to give chocolate-covered strawberries…

Oriana, a medical student from Colombia, is staying with us for a couple of weeks, while waiting for her apartment to become available. She contacted us because my email appears on the Yale Mexican Student Organization website. She is doing a residence in psychiatry in a New Haven hospital.

At the hospital, she came upon a patient, which I’ll refer to as José. He only spoke Spanish, and no one at the hospital could communicate with him without an interpreter until Oriana arrived. He was found in a nearby city, and he didn’t really know how he got there. He said that all of his close relatives were dead. Despite his problem with remembering recent events, he knew his name, the names of his parents, his hometown, and his school.

When Oriana asked us if we had any suggestions about how to track down someone in Mexico, the first thing that came to my mind was the web, of course. By searching through the Mexican white pages (available online), as well as various government websites such as SEP (Ministry of Education), INEGI (Population and Statistics), and SEPOMEX (Postal Service), we managed to find his parents, which were perfectly alive, and verify all the details. After a few phone calls Oriana could reconstruct part of José’s history and locate other relatives in the U.S. (all of them were alive, by the way). I hope all this will lead to him being reunited with his family. A series of coincidences led Oriana here, and the Web helped save the day!

While browsing through a tag sale, we came upon two books from the Yale library. They were about African-American history or something like that. Luckily, they were not really selling them, but giving them away, so I took them home. A quick search in the library website confirmed their status as “lost", so I went and returned them to the library. The librarian on duty didn’t really seem to know what to do with them, but I trust they will make their way back into the system.

The Jorgensen group has a new website, created by Theresa and me. She did mostly the visual design, while I did the implementation (100% hand-crafted HTML and CSS).

This is a story from last week. First we went to Mount Snow, Vermont on a ski trip (Fabiola, Fabiola’s parents and I). Everything was great, and we have some pictures. This was Ernesto’s first experience on the snow!

The problem was that we were planning to go to Montreal, QC for a couple of days after going to Vermont. The snowstorm began the night before our trip, and it went on for the whole day. We decided to try anyway, but after an hour of windy, snow-covered roads at 20 mph with near-zero visibility, we decided to stop at the nearest motel and stay another day (this reminded me of how the Fellowship of the Ring was defeated by the Pass of Caradhras).

We happened to stay at the Horizon Inn, the same place where Fabiola and I stayed a couple of years ago. It was completely empty except for its keeper; I was worried that he might have an axe handy like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, but nothing bad happened. We canceled our trip to Canada and went back to New Haven the next day, when the weather was good. The sad part is that some of the cost of the hotel in Montreal could not be refunded and was lost; this was probably some cosmic revenge for the $250 that Fabiola and her mom had won a few days earlier in the Mohegan Sun Casino.

Yes, it’s possible, thanks to an interesting Japanese technique (don’t miss the video!).

I learned this from Dori’s blog. Thank you!

Yesterday we had a Posada, organized by YMSO, the Yale Mexican Student Organization. We had tamales, atole, and a piñata. And we have some pictures!

Today Fabiola and I ran the Christopher Martins Christmas Run for the Children 20th annual 5K race. Our unofficial net times were 28:34 and 28:54 (I won!!!) This is our third 5K race, but we didn’t improve with respect to the second one (which was better by about one minute)… But that’s not bad, considering that a year and a half ago we were a couple of couch potatoes who thought of a 200 m race as an endurance race.

It seems that my friend Alán is graduating in a finite amount of time! He has 2 out of 3 signatures already.

Now I have to start working on my dissertation…

Of course, part of the reason for linking to his blog entry is that I’m new to blogs and want to test if the pingback feature really works. ;-)

As part of the long Thanksgiving Mexican party, we went to Cambridge, MA last Saturday to celebrate el_oso’s birthday. We had great pozole and cochinita made by the birthday boy, who turned 27 (and he’s the youngest of our class!) On Sunday we went to a three-story Chinese restaurant for a dim sum buffet, with Joel’s guidance because he knows the food (whe had no idea what most of it was). The only sad thing was the post-holiday traffic on the way back: it took 3:30 to get to New Haven, instead of the usual 2:15.

This week we had the Second Northeastern Mexican National Meeting in New Haven. Our friends Sergio (from OH), Juan, Yeriley, Joel, and el_oso (MA) came for Fabiola’s famous pavo adobado. Don’t miss the pictures!

Six months ago, our license plate was stolen. Today, we found out that it has been recovered!

After our license plate was stolen, we went to the DMV and obtained a new one. The problem was that last week we started getting parking tickets in the mail for the new happy owner of our old license plate. We had to get a copy of the original police report to prove that those tickets are not ours. To our surprise, we were told that shortly after the tickets were issued, the car that had our license plate got towed and the police found out that the license plate was stolen!

Not that it helps us much, because we have a new license plate anyway.

Kudos to the NHPD. Now if only the DMV talked to the Parking and Transit office to tell them when license plates are cancelled, so that they don’t send tickets to the former owner…