Round and round

Here I sit waiting for my program to finish synthesizing. My designs are now getting large enough that it takes a good 20 minutes for it to complete. During which I manage to waste all sorts of time. Perhaps I should use these 30 minute breaks to study for my Q-exam that's coming up in August. Hmmmmmmm. It's too bad I don't have a window.
So life's been ok this past week. The 4th sucked. It rained all day long, and I couldn't find sparklers. As far as I'm concerned a 4th without sparklers is no 4th at all. Sparklers are key to my 4th. For one because that was one of the few things we could have in Iowa as far as fireworks went, so they were there every year as far back as I remember. This was reinforced while spending the 4th in Germany (twice) because it was the only connection to normal 4th of July traditions I could find there. (Though last year they came out after a rather depressing soccer game that shall not be named!) In addition to all this sappy, sentimental stuff, they're just cool. Wrigint my name in smoke or pretending to conduct Ode to Joy really never gets old. Not to say that I tried particularly hard to find them in NY, but in Iowa they're pretty much everywhere and didn't anticipate it being complicated.
This weekend on the other hand was much better. I met up with Marcy and Shane for a long weekend of camping in Allegany State Park. Allegany is out in western NY and NY's largest state park. Large it was and quite beautiful. We wore ourselves out exploring many of the nice hiking trails and staying up way to late waiting for the bread or stew to bake in the dutch oven. But really there's nothing better than spending hours staring at a campfire. The only downside to the whole weekend were the noisy neighboors at some of the other sites. One in particular got a kick out of loudly yelling Ohio (after seeing Marcy's licence plates) and making rapter noises. Thankfully we had the park almost to ourselves on Sunday night. Well us, the porcupine and one very brave racoon.