The love of my life is an all-star in all aspects of life, and that includes her job at Noom. Not only was she promoted to a manager position in her first year, she has also taken on several projects and extra duties. Her most recent project, and biggest yet, is making a promotional video for the company. After months of hard work leading her team, dealing with videographers, and planning the shoot, she went to the Noom headquarters in New York City to put it all together. For the first time in a long time I was going to be home alone and, for the first time ever, taking care of Ruby all alone too. As if missing my best friend wasn’t enough already!

On Tuesday morning, Laura packed and prepared for her trip, then we made our way to the Charlottesville Amtrak station. Ever a thoughtful steward of Noom’s money, she opted to take the train all the way to NYC instead of an airplane and stay in an AirBnB instead of an expensive hotel. The Charlottesville Amtrak station is a nice old building but the platforms are spartan and dreary. We waited inside until the 5 minute warning for the train’s arrival. Once she was onboard, I waved goodbye and headed home to tend to Ruby.

The next couple days became a blur of running to campus, finding metered parking, quickly getting as much research work done as possible, and rushing home to take Ruby out and exercise her. My rhythm was thrown completely off, and I had never more appreciated all that Laura does to take care of the apartment and our dog. Luckily, I didn’t have too much homework to deal with and only one day of classes during that time, so I never had to leave Ruby alone for too long. We even made it to the dog park one of the days!

In terms of work on my project, which I will talk more about in a separate post soon, I was able to get our filament extruder mounted vertically to improve our melt-spinning process, and I helped bring in a new anti-vibration table that I’ll be setting up for nano tensile testing carbon fibers. On top of it all, I even attended a seminar on project planning for PhD students. In retrospect,it was nice to do stuff with some hustle. I was reminded how effective I can be under a short time clock, and it was a good example of how much I can get done in a short amount of time if I really try.

I learned a few other things as well while Laura was away as well:

1.) I am so glad Laura works from home and I feel so lucky that she puts so much effort into keeping Ruby happy and healthy.

2.) Without Laura around I basically become Ruby’s paparazzi; I can’t stop taking pictures of her that I think Laura would like to see. Examples below.

3.) My drive to do dishes or clean diminishes rapidly when Laura isn’t home. By Thursday the kitchen was looking a bit like a stereotypical college dorm, but I got everything back into shape for her return.

Laura’s train was scheduled to arrive at 7:20p on Thursday evening, but it was delayed due to signaling issues. Unsure how long the delay would last, I walked to the row of shops across the street and enjoyed fries and a beer at Parallel 38. Fortunately, the delay was only long enough for me to hastily finish that beer and by 7:50p we were on the road home. Tired from three busy days of travel and work, including a surprise switch of accommodations because the AirBnB host forgot to pay his electric bill, she very deservedly enjoyed a night of relaxing at home. Ruby was ecstatic that Laura was home, and so was I. I really missed my best friend.