Last ten days or so have been some what dull but helped me get some things done - mostly in research. Aurora sent her suggestions about the manuscript. Initially I felt they were kind of harsh, but when taken a deeper look and read carefully, all of them were truly justified. I have slowly been working on incorporating those suggestions. My persistent cough and sudden bleeding nose are the other things keeping me quiet. After interacting with the VASP Tech Support and fighting around with the compilation process, I finally managed to compile VASP 4.6.28 with Intel’s FORTRAN compiler - more importantly, results from the test calculations agree with the previous ones. Dr. Orlando’s colloquium talk was good and Dr. P arranged a group dinner in The Library - needless to mention that the food was good

Saturday was memorable - I had known about this event for quite some time, mostly due to the fact I had seen several practice sessions and the tunes have been lingering around ever since. Celebrated as a part of Lake Linden’s French-Canadian Christmas Celebration, venue for an afternoon of traditional folk music & dance of French Canada was the historic Congregational Church. It was a good feeling to have known many of the performers and some of the audience. Variety of music (vocal and instrumental, solo group and sing-alongs), dances (waltz, etc), poem-reading, and several dance tutorials were the highlights of the 2-hour long event. Almost everyone who attended had plenty of fun. I spent sometime in organizing the pictures and with Dave’s help, I sent out an email to the organizers/performers later in Sunday. Sorry, owing to my personal policy/principle of not posting pictures taken at social gatherings for general public, these pictures are not for display One of my friends called to tell me about his plans of visiting Houghton in Winter and I am eagerly looking forward to that….