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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Wednesday, July 6, 2005
5:29 p.m.
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No worries about things not working out last night: after looking like it was going to rain all day, by the time I got out of work the sky had cleared up nicely and the temperature was happily in the 70s. I had a quick dinner after work at the Burger King on Cedar, which got me to campus around 7:10. I assumed there was a 7:15 train to downtown, but as I was walking along the sidewalk to get to the station it went by and I missed it. Turned out to be a good thing, actually, because I ran into Jeremy waiting for a friend outside the stop, and I would have missed him otherwise. He seems to be doing pretty good — has living arrangements all set up in Washington for this fall, which is no small accomoplishment to hear other people talk about the housing market there. Amber was actually walking down to the Cedar station at the same time, so she ran into us as well and the two of us went down together. After some interesting shenanigans with the clock at the Great Lakes Brewery (it was more than 15 minutes fast!), we eventually met up with Erin and Ben and had enough spare time to have a pint (Erin's expression) before heading down to Public Square. I say, there must be some beer out there I can drink, and I need to find it fast. Or maybe it's my taste in alcohol in general that needs reforming. I wasn't planning on ordering anything, because even with my favorite drinks I'll never have more than a wine-glass-full anyway. The smallest thing at the brewery was, unfortunately, 16 ounces, and for me to drink that much would require at least an hour and a minor miracle or two thrown in. But I rather idiotically ordered a pint of Holy Moses anyway, and as expected had finished about a fourth of it before it was time to go. The price wasn't too bad, but my limited consumption meant that I was paying at a rate of almost exactly a dollar an ounce. We arrived on Public Square just as the orchestra was getting ready to start a few minutes after 9:00. With 80,000 people on Public Square (according to today's Plain Dealer), our "seats" ended up being in the curb lane of Ontario Street just south of Superior. Seeing anything wasn't the important part, though, and there were a number of fun songs played that made up for any defect in only being able to see half of the videoscreen set up in front of us. Shostakovich's "Festive Overture" (good bouncy song) was a new one for me, and so was Stravinsky's short orchestral arrangement of "Happy Birthday to You." One of the last items on the programme was Tchaikovsky's "1812" Overture, which drew more suspense than anything else from some of the members of the audience. Everyone knows about the big cannon-booming part, of course, so the rest of the piece is just anticipation of it showing up. The best part is that there's almost no indication that such a part exists — the line that everyone knows shows up for a few seconds quite early on, so you get all ready for some fireworks, then it disappears again and for like 10 minutes you recognize nothing but snatches of the French national anthem. Eventually, if you're waiting for it, you hear some bits that sound sort of like the cannon-booming part inverted or distorted or something, but that goes away, you don't recognize anything any more and then BOOM! it's there and the fireworks are exploding and lights are flashing and little kids are covering their ears and everyone else is humming the five seconds of melody that they know from the piece. Wow... that was a long sentence, and it sounds a bit more pretentious than I was shooting for. I don't know anything else of the work either, and I was going through all this suspense stuff right along with every other person there. Poor Tchaikovsky; if he only knew that 98 percent of his composition might as well have been white noise, for all I can remember of it. |
Thursday, July 7, 2005
9:21 p.m.
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My car's gas log informs me that between June 27 and July 5 I somehow managed to drive 315 miles. That's just nine days. Since I got my car on June 6, not even six weeks ago, it's about as far as I drive in six months when I'm at school. Even without gas being at $2.299 a gallon this is supreme madness, so an executive decision was passed down yesterday putting me on a minimum-driving budget at least until the middle of next week. This hopefully doesn't mean that I'm house-bound or work-bound (I certainly hope not on that one!) because I've got my bike and the RTA ready and waiting to take over. Yesterday, for example, I biked the four miles down to the fitness center to go swimming and came back the same way. It was good practice for the triathlon besides, which is coming up in just two weeks and three days. On that note, I want to go ahead and expound a bit on my expected performance in said event. It's a bit early to do so, but I was thinking about this while I was running this evening and if I don't put it down now I'll probably forget. Look for a nice big entry the day after in any case. So: the race is a "junior" triathlon, meaning that it's a bit shorter than a "sprint" and limited to people 23 and under. It features 750 meters of swimming, 16 kilometers of biking, and 5 kilometers of running starting at the unheard-of time of 7 a.m. When we first discussed doing this thing seriously back in the fall, I made a rough estimate or goal based on what I thought I could handle then; that's the baseline time in the table below. Based on what I've been able to do in the three events taken by themselves, I've also come up with a sort of upper limit on how long I think things will take; since I got those times without doing the events chained together I'm calling them the singleton times.
As of this moment, then, I'm expecting to complete the insanity in somewhere between 1 hour 34 minutes and 1 hour 48 minutes. I think it's safe to say that this is going to be the largest athletic undertaking of my entire life, even counting when I tried out for the baseball team in ninth grade, and that's really exciting because I seriously think I can do this without having someone fish me out of the bottom of the lake or peel me off a road somewhere. |
Monday, July 11, 2005
5:21 p.m.
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An interesting day yesterday. I spent most of it reading "Life of Pi," which I'd borrowed from Sonnie in January and hadn't gotten around to picking up. I actually started it last week some time, but since it was so nice and warm yesterday (and I had nothing else to do) I got through the majority of it by reading on my bed, outside with a cup of lemonade, next to my cat, etc. A very strange book; I wonder how much of it is actually true and how many of the "facts" as given are made up. It wasn't as existential as it sounded when Erin was giving us summaries out of it during the backpacking trip in May, at least. When I finally finished it around 5:00 it was just time to go get Sonnie for our annual excursion to Blossom. This year she took me as an early birthday present. All sorts of good fun, as usual, like holding pretzels like they were cigars and me always seeming to draw the broken-off ones out of the bag. The timing of the concert was pretty nice too: since it was a Sunday it started at 7:00, which got me home and in bed just before 11. I guess I'm turning into a regular music critic, because I find myself compelled to write a bit about last evening's fare, even after spewing out several paragraphs of related commentary on the two things I saw last weekend. But here goes. The programme was a selection of works from Rogers and Hammerstein, then intermission, then a selection of works from Stephen Sondheim. Since those are all pieces from musicals, they brought on a group of four singers to take care of the lyrics; the orchestra was disappointingly forced into a subordinate role. Losers of the evening were unfortunately two of my favorite songs. The operatic soprano who sang "The Sound of Music" was much too operatic and much too soprano for my liking. "The HILLS are aliyiyiyiyiyiyiyive" with the sound of people getting blown off the stage, if anything. (If you've ever read the Tintin comic books and have seen La Castifiore, it was the same sort of effect here.) The overture for the second act was "Comedy Tonight," usually a really fun bouncy arrangement, but it was botched by the orchestra with a lot of clownish sound effects that competely covered the melody. The concert still was great fun, though, because the winners, on the other hand, were much more numerous. I really enjoyed the arrangements on the rest of Sondheim's stuff, and the lyrics on "Getting Married Today" win the grand prize for smart rhyming and good singing: the mezzo-soprano and the tenor were both excellent. What really comes through from the instrumental side of things is the great versitility of the Cleveland Orchestra: they could (except for "Comedy Tonight") play anything from straight-up '30s overtures to modern salsa or jazz stuff with what seemed to me to be uniform high quality. Spent over an hour at work today dealing with recalictrant radio buttons. For some reason, as soon as I get more than two of them on a page the grouping doesn't work out right and/or the program crashes. Something to deal with tomorrow when I've got a vast expanse of eight hours to fill up again. |
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
5:53 p.m.
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I remember one of my French books in high school showed a picture of the French movie poster for "Groundhog Day": the title had been translated as "Le jour sans fin" ("The Day Without End"). That, I say, is what today has been at work. I feel like I wasted so much time just sitting around doing nothing, and when I was working on something I didn't seem to be making much progress. It's possible that an article in today's Plain Dealer has something to do with it. (I was going to post a link, but they didn't seem to put this particular story on www.cleveland.com.) It said that a new survey has revealed that U.S. adults waste on average just over two hours of their eight-hour work days, with the most common distractions being personal use of the Internet and talking to co-workers. I may be a person of antique sensibilities — or I may have worked at Heinen's too long — but I still have a hard time doing just about anything personal on company time. I was rather nervous the time I had to go up to my dad's cube for 20 minutes one morning to work out my car insurance. I do check my e-mail a lot, and read BBC news or people's online posts, but I would guess these add up to about the same 30 minutes of paid break time I was getting at the grocery store. Surely a nice tech-industry job can grant its workers at least that much. As I've noted before, though, the full-time guys around here are a different story. It seems some days like they're all in the middle of building houses and have to spend hours on the phone with the contractors, the plumbers, the electricians, the inspectors, etc. instead of doing their work. Two hours a day is pretty mind-boggling, but it's probably not far off the mark of what I've seen. Of course, now that I know that the average worker doesn't work during a quarter of the work day, am I going to feel that compelled to hold myself to minimal down-time of a half hour or less? |
Friday, July 15, 2005
12:08 p.m.
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Since when are Romania and France linguistic cousins? I was poking around on a few student pages off of the place where I'm going to grad school and came across a link to something called "Un ghid practic pentru aspirantul la doctorat in Statele Unite," which made me stop and blink a bit because I could almost read the title word for word. So I had a look. After an extremely short inspection, it seems that Romanian isn't as close to French as something like Spanish or Italian, but a lot closer than German and a lot closer than I would have ever expected. |
Monday, July 18, 2005
5:59 p.m.
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I guess I never mentioned my plans for the weekend in any of last week's entries: it was a camping trip to Pymatuning State Park in Pennsylvania with Mark and Nicole. (Some fun sounds in that last half-sentence!) In accordance with the hastily-prearranged schedule, I spent Thursday night packing things into my car, woke up at 5:30 to get to work at 7:00, left at 2:15, made a mad dash down to campus in heavy afternoon traffic, and arrived outside of Howe at about 2:40. I discovered, once there, that the university's new policy must be to encourage breaking into buildings as the only way to get into them: the call box outside wouldn't work, and they'd ripped the payphone out of Fribley because of some construction project. I sat down to wait for someone to come in or out of the building and hold the door, but eventually Mark and Nicole realized my car was out front and came down themselves. Our first stop was the Green Road Heinen's for food and related supplies, and then we drove straight east on Mayfield Road for around an hour and a half until we got to Pennsylvania. It was, interestingly enough, the first time I've ever crossed a state line on anything but a freeway, as far as I can remember. It was the usual business — a noticable improvement in pavement quality as soon as we got out of Ohio and a sign saying something like "Pennsylvania Welcomes You" — but the sign was a lot smaller. It made me wonder how many regular-road crossings there are between the two states, if they all have signs, and what it would be like to live thirty seconds by foot from another state. These interesting musings didn't last too long, though, because the campground popped into view after another few miles and I had to attend to the business of driving up to the office and checking in. We set up the tent, filled up our Nalgenes, and walked over to the camp store to get firewood and ice. The trip was timed perfectly: it began raining just as we were picking up the wood. It stopped, of course, once the wood had been sufficiently wetted, and we weren't able to get anything going in the way of a cooking fire. When it started storming we abandoned ship and took refuge in the tent to change clothes and wait it out. The eventual solution, once it cleared up a bit, was another trip to the camp store for lighter fluid and more matches, but it still took the three of us more than two hours to finally build up enough coals to cook six hot dogs and roast two marshmellows. But I think we all agreed that they were the best hot dogs we'd had in quite some time! The critical cooking failure continued the next day, with me assuring the others it would be easy to make pancakes on the bottom of a coffee can over a small fire (I have done this before, I promise) and the wet wood still deciding not to cooperate. We eventually poured the pancake batter into the trash and ate cold cereal. The afternoon was supposed to feature a leisurely few hours down by the Pymatuning Lake dam reading books, walking around, eating snacks, etc. Naturally, it rained in buckets as soon as we got there. Nicole and I, however, did manage to sally forth and get some excellent pictures around the lake. The afternoon ended up turning out really nice, and we also went swimming back at the campground. Saturday's dinner was supposed to be our crowning event, and in a certain sense it was our best moment. The fare was vegetables and meat seasoned with pepper and Worcester-shister-shoster-shire sauce, wrapped in foil, and tossed in packages on the fire. This part (amazingly) worked perfectly, except for one package of green peppers that decided to rip open. As we were finishing, we noticed it was getting quite dark again, so we cleared away everything that was out, took in our clothesline, put the firewood under a plastic bag, and closed up the tent. Just as we finished inspecting the last packet of meat the deluge was upon us, but it took less than two minutes to douse the fire, toss the food into the trunk, and drive off to a picnic shelter to eat. Nicole even remembered the three cans of Coke we'd put in the cooler. So it was an excellent dinner. When we got back after the rain stopped, we re-heated the coals and had more marshmellows, then went into the tent and talked for hours and hours before going to bed. Packing up Sunday morning, more rain on the way back, dropping off of the others back at Howe, and me driving home completed the trip. Cleaning out the car is definitely at the top of my list of things to do this week, because it took a pretty good beating in terms of mud, random woodchips, and an interesting smell in the trunk from all of our stuff. Wow. That just about covers the factual side of the trip. It probably sounds in summmary to have been a pretty horrific experience; it is true that it fell pretty short of the ideal trips I've enjoyed in eastern PA, southern Kentucky, and elsewhere, but we managed to do quite well given the awful weather, a short space of time, two people I'd never camped with before, and an area not really condusive to anything but fishing and boating. I for one would have liked a day of hiking, but we would have come back from that experience looking more like used dishrags than college engineering students. Certainly not a bad way to spend the weekend, all in all — I'll have to see what Mark and Nicole end up writing about it. |
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
5:37 p.m.
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I realized this morning, when I came across my high school's web site by accident, that this week marks five years since the time I went to France on a school trip. If I remember the dates right, it was July 17 to 27, 2000: the summer after my junior year of high school. A most excellent trip that's gotten even better in retrospect. It was the first time I'd ever been on an airplane, been outside of the U.S. or Canada, been to a place where they spoke a different language, etc. I even spent my 17th birthday in Paris, walking around near the Palais de Luxembourg before catching an overnight train to the Riviera. Of course, it also reconfirmed how much I liked studying the French language and how much I like traveling in general. And now that my high school's gone all technological — they were just starting to do that sort of thing when I was there — I can even present you with a site of pictures that was apparently put together some time since by my French teacher. It's not for the weak in heart or the slow in connection: if you get all romantic about European travel or are working on a dial-up Internet connection, you might think twice about going for the link. In the first case, you'd end up feeling depressed that you're stuck in the U.S. when you could be in Paris; and in the second case your arteries will harden and your computer will explode before the thing finishes loading. ... I'd so rather be strolling on the Champs-Elysées right now.... |
Random Stuff #13
Wednesday, July 20, 2005, 12:01 p.m.
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A Week On The Links I've been featuring several web links in my recent posts, so I thought I'd continue the trend and share some others I've come across either in connection with or in evasion of my work duties. Enjoy! Fabulous Adventures in Coding — Typing "What does MSDN stand for?" into Google some time last summer returned this result, the blog of a Microsoft developer. It answered my question, all right, and also provided some good laughs! |
Thursday, July 21, 2005
5:17 p.m.
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Spent yesterday afternoon having my semi-annual mouth torture; the only good thing about it was that I got to leave work two hours early. I say, every time I go to the dentist I like it less and less. This time, they broke out something new with a really long name that squirts water all over your face and sounds like a dying mouse — it's supposed to be removing hard plaque build-up. After I'd been sufficiently soaked, they put that away and introduced my poor poor gums to something called diamond floss. Picture normal floss in the form of (what looked to me at least like) thin metal wire, and then picture this going places where floss just shouldn't be allowed to fit. I must have been pouring blood everywhere by the time the hygenist was finished. The visit ended with some sort of fluoride rinse that tasted like liquefied bubble gum and stuck to your teeth in the same way. It was followed up, at least, by a nice dinner at Applebee's with my family in (slightly early) celebration of my birthday, presents, and then a good-sized chunk of the best cake in the world (Heinen's). I should have guessed that, since I'm moving into an apartment in four weeks, it would be a largely practical birthday, and it was to the last degree. The nice big box that I was hoping against hope would turn out to be a flat-screen monitor mutated at the last minute into a microwave. Fair enough, I guess, because the monitor would have been more like a birthday-graduation-Christmas present all put together and given at once, but it sure would have been nice. I say I got lots of stuff for my place in Pittsburgh, but there's an ever-increasing chance that I won't even make it, and that's starting to get me more and more nervous. The fall tuition bill from CMU came this week; it's asking for about $6000 per semester more than we've got, and still no research project in sight. I e-mailed one professor last week and one more today to see if they've got anything open, but my parents have been saying over and over again that it's probably too late. At dinner last night, my dad said I only had a "50-50" chance of going to school — the other 50 percent I assume being living at home for a bit and finding a job around here. The fact that there's a real chance I may have to give up the apartment, withdraw my acceptance to CMU, and spend a year at Rockwell while everyone else runs off to Washington or Boston or Toronto is singularly frightening. I think I would feel like I failed and fell into some no-man's-land of people who don't have their lives together. That's enough. |
Friday, July 22, 2005
5:27 p.m.
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Excitement and adventure sort of distracted me from my Raisin Bran this morning and made me show up a bit later for work than I was originally intending. My cat caught a goldfinch and was trying to bring it into the house through the back door. My mom isn't that good in an emergency or critical situation in the first place, but since the matter involved a bird it was even worse. All she could do was lock the door about six times and then run back into the kitchen away from the windows. I was dispatched to go round from the front and persuade my cat to drop the bird so we could let her back into the house. She refused, and for a while the scene consisted of my mom making noises like "Ahhahh! Oh-ho-ho! Ah-ha-ha!" in the background and me trying to reason with a cat as if she understood what I meant when I said "Drop it. Put down the bird." When I first got outside, the goldfinch was still alive, but at some point in the preceedings I heard my cat chomp down on it until something snapped, and then it wasn't making noise any more. After a minute or two, the cat set the bird down on the deck — temporarily, of course, and probably just to get a better hold on it — and I scooped her up and got her away from the thing. This, you might guess, made her rather upset, so Act II of our comedy featured me desperately trying to hold onto a squirming cat while yelling "Unlock the door! Unlock the door!" to my mom inside, who wouldn't because she was afraid the bird would flop into the kitchen. By superior shouting force I managed to make her give in, and the cat was hastily deposited into the kitchen and the door closed before she had a chance to get out again. I buried the bird in the cornfield behind the house and came in again to finish breakfast, but by then it was 7:45 and time to get ready for work. The best part about all of this is that it actually happened once before. While I was at school, my cat apparently had caught another goldfinch, and someone had let her into the house with it thinking the bird was dead. It wasn't. That time, to hear my sisters tell it, Mom ended up locking herself in her bedroom shouting "It's alive!" while the bird flopped pathetically around in the upstairs hallway until Katie put something over it and hauled it outside. And what I want to know in all of this is how my cat is doing this. We are not talking here about some lithe beast of the jungle, the dominator of a food chain; this is a 10-year-old house cat with kidney problems and no front claws. A cat, moreover, whose previous attempts at hunting have been up to the level of trapping dead leaves that were blowing across the grass and depositing them just inside the back door. |
Monday, July 25, 2005
12:07 p.m.
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I'm extremely pleased to report that our intrepid triathloners have returned from the 2005 Columbus International Triathlon in excellent shape. We didn't actually win our age brackets or anything, but we all finished and none of us were last, and that's about the best you can expect from your first time out. Erin picked me and my bike up Saturday afternoon, and we arrived at Ben's just before 4:00. We had a meeting to go to at the race site at 5, so we ended up getting there a bit early. They told all the people running in the junior triathlon not to register before the meeting, so we joined a knot of extremely fit-looking people standing in the shade until the guy in charge came to collect us. He talked about the swim course, then handed us off to some high-up official lady to explain the rest. During that part of the meeting, it came out that the junior race had some pretty anal rules, including one that said if you got lapped on the biking portion you were immediately thrown out. Erin's friend Beth and I went up to her at the end of the meeting to clarify the obscure (to us) bike rules she was quoting, and it turned out that bikes with straight handlebars weren't even allowed! It turned out we'd actually signed up for a crazy-person super-league race; I guess we should have known something was up when they started mentioning the Olympic tryouts and got to the part saying managers weren't allowed in the transition area. So Erin, Beth, and I switched from the junior to the sprint race, which should have cost us an extra $40 each, but the race director told us not to worry about it. And so back to Ben's for dinner. It is my considered opinion that the time of 4:45 should only come once in a day, a bit before dinner and right about when you're thinking about making tea and scones. If there has to be some other 4:45 in the day, it should be at the end of a really long night of having fun with friends. What I'm saying here is that 4:45 a.m. is a completely inappropriate time to start a day, and especially not your birthday at that. But start it then we did. Ben's alarm clock started playing the "William Tell" Overture three feet from my ear at 4:37, and we were all out of bed and getting ready to go by the time previously indicated. It was still dark when we got to the race site. Beth and I were given numbers way at the end of the line, right next to a fairly large group of people who'd also switched out of the junior race, so we felt a lot better about not being the only novices with mountain bikes. Everyone I talked to, though, seemed to be a swimmer and seemed to count on finishing that part of the proceedings in 15 minutes. (My fastest in the Twinsburg pool is 24 minutes.) I was still feeling all right up until about a minute before we were about to start, and then the weird stomach feeling set in. It didn't have the option to last very long, though, because 60 seconds later our part of the line reached the start and I was thrashing about in waist-deep water with around five million other people trying to run me over. I eventually made it to the far right side of the course and hung out there while I got incessantly past. The water torture ended at some indefinite point in the future — long enough for the juniors, with a 20-minute head start, to be finishing their entire triathlons. For me it was off to the biking, which turned out excellent. The course was partially on a freeway, so it was smooth and flat and all sorts of good fun. Running, afterwards, was pretty hot, because by then it was almost 9:00. I started dying with about half a mile left and had to trash-talk myself to keep going, although I still managed a nice little sprint that passed the guy in front of me in the last several meters to the finish line. I have never felt the need to drink so much in my life. Not so much a "burning thirst" like you read about, but more like a steady background feeling that I felt like having a glass of water. I consumed five cups of water and Gatorade in a row, and then had two more once I'd cooled off a bit. Beth crossed just ahead of me, Erin some time behind, and then Ben finished his Olympic-distance race almost two hours later. The results were quickly posted: I ran my first triathlon — 750 meters of swimming, 25 km of biking, and 5 km of running — in a total time of 1:57:42 which broke down as follows. The rankings are out of 204 finishers, and might change a bit as the race people seem to be making minor additions to the standings. When I checked this morning, those numbers were a little bit different.
So I suppose I no longer suck at running, which is a great feeling because that's where 75 percent of my training efforts were. Swimming I already know I need to get much faster at, and I guess I can only explain the biking (which was nice and fast by my standards) by saying that everyone else had nifty-cool road bikes and other equipment that made their job somewhat easier. I was still able to manage 9th place out of 11 in my age group, so no last-place finishes for this triathlete! |
Thursday, July 28, 2005
1:08 p.m.
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Such a mixed-up week this has been — it's a strange feeling after last weekend. At work, something I originally expected would take three hours is now halfway through its fourth day, three of my code projects miraculously broke themselves, and two people from my group have mysteriously forsaken their offices. I spent most of Monday and Tuesday compiling and recompiling my code and thinking obsessively about triathlons; I found one in Akron in September that I might try to come back for. Things haven't been any less weird at home. My parents and my younger sister are at the county fair for the week so Katie can show her horse with the 4-H Club, so that means the three of us left are kind of on our own for a while. (Or at least we would be, but my dad has been coming home every night to sleep here and then driving back to Tallmadge in the morning, even though they're supposed to be camping there the whole time.) Chris and I are at work all day, so Andrew's been running amok doing who knows what until Chris gets home at 4:00. Then again, maybe the running-amok starts when she gets home: Wednesday I came home to find them melting about 50 crayons in a coffee can on the stove and making candles, and yesterday Chris and her boyfriend were cavorting about in every room of the house at once, pushing each other off couches, etc. Andrew's friend was also over for the night, so they were around drinking pop by the two-liter and playing guitars, loud music, and video games for hours on end. I finally escaped yesterday to go swimming at the fitness center. I'd been meaning to go Wednesday but the storms probably forced the closing of the pool. (Amazing rain on the way home Wednesday, by the way. Certainly the worst I've ever had to drive in, and it's all Mark's fault. The weird part was that I could see the lightning and see the trees trashing in the wind, but I didn't hear or feel anything inside the car....) Back on topic, the swimming last night was kind of disappointing because of its excessive slowness. Ben said that swimming forward crawl the right way will be faster, but at the most it only saves 15 seconds per 50 m and I can only keep it up for about 125 m before I breathe at the wrong time and end up spluttering and attracting the attention of about eight lifeguards. I need to cut six or seven minutes off of my 750-m time in order to be reasonably on par with what other people were doing on Sunday. |
Monday, August 1, 2005
5:32 p.m.
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With only two weeks left until the great move-out, I spent pretty much this entire weekend visiting friends, reading a book in my backyard, and letting my cat find new ways to jump into my lap. After work on Friday I went to see Susannah in the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival's rendition of "Cymbeline," which was being held outside at the Shaker Heights Colonnade. This turned out to be directly across Lee Road from the Chagrin Heinen's, so I called in there first to get some "dinner" ($2.10 in bread, cheese, and chocolate milk) before heading to the show. At the intermission, I got up to walk around a bit and saw Erin and Ben sitting towards the back — they'd come in late to the first act. We all saw the second act together, then got Susannah to recite us a very nice sonnet by making a donation to the Shakespeare festival. The play was pretty good, for being Shakespeare. It had the usual Shakespearean bits of trickery by cross-dressing and double-crossing, the unaccountable coincidences and changes of heart, etc., but what made the show worth seeing was the actors' interpretations of the old dialogue (which came across very nicely) and the way they worked with the audience. I'm now convinced that most of those short soliloquies you find in Shakespeare (like "I'll to the forest, and there watch her sleep" and whatnot) are actually supposed to be addressed to the people watching, as if the character's sharing a little secret with them or wants to stir up the crowd a little bit. A nice effect, actually, especially when your audience is small, informal, and sitting on the ground 30 feet from you. On Saturday evening I drove up to campus to see a movie with Brian, and Nicole came along too when we called her from right outside Howe about 20 minutes before the movie was supposed to start. We saw all but the first 15 minutes or so of "The Fantastic Four." I think Brian was expecting I would hate it for not being intellectual, but it wasn't a bad movie in the end. Some cheesy dialogue, not-quite-science science stuff, and a wide-open sequel-ready ending are all I can say against it. We were staying to watch the credits at the end, and I noticed some of the special effects were done by a company called (I am not making this up) Giant Killer Robots. Now that's something I'd like to put on a resumé and take to a job interview. "So, tell me about yourself." "Well, for the last six years I've been the lead personnel director for Giant Killer Robots...." Or better yet, "I worked for Giant Killer Robots for a while right after college, but the job wasn't exciting enough for me." Sunday was the day of reading. I had been working on "The Dante Club" since last week, and I devoted almost the entire day yesterday to finishing that off. Read enough sitting on a towel in the sun out back to get a bit of a sunburn. My sister and I made chicken parmesan for dinner, and then I went running a bit later. My parents and other sister are home from the county fair after a week away. They got in around 9:00 last night, and for the next hour or so all they could talk about was how tired they were, how dead they felt, how they couldn't move another muscle, how tired they were, how hot it was, how tired they were, etc., etc. I escaped to bed a bit earlier than usual. And finally, the highlight of today at work was an amusing meeting on interviewing skills they had for the student interns and co-ops. It was actually being held in Milwaukee, so several of us here planned to watch the PowerPoint from a conference room and listen in to the audio on speakerphone. Well, the Internet connection in the room didn't work, so we had to get along with just the telephone-quality audio. The presenter was amazingly random in his sentences, to the point that we had no clue what he was talking about at least half of the time. He jumped between being serious and joking, answering questions and just babbling, staying on topic and going off so quickly that all six or eight of us in the conference room spent most of the hour looking back and forth between the phone and each other and laughing. |
Thursday, August 4, 2005
5:31 p.m.
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Some amazingly fantastic developments in the past few days; sorry I haven't been posting. Just read this. First, via e-mail Friday afternoon: Gregory, Monday evening: we talk on the phone. And then this morning: The financial package we intend to offer you will directly cover your tuition (as a direct internal transfer between accounts at the university), so you will not need to be actively involved in this process. You just won't get tuition bills from the university. You will also be entered into the payroll system and your student stipend will be paid to you monthly starting at the end of September (normally by direct deposit into your bank account). The MS student stipend is around $1500 a month. Well, now the life is easy. I can't quite express how nice this is making me feel. When I saw the reply this morning about the funding I was within an inch of doing a happy dance in my cube and attracting attention from all over the building. There hasn't been an official hiring yet, but the professor seems to really want me for his project, due in a large part to his liking of my high GPA. You guys have probably heard me express the opinion that those three digits are a load of crap: I get good grades, yes, but in my mind that doesn't translate into me actually knowing anything when the class is done. Plenty of people with GPAs lower than mine come away remembering and being able to work with a lot more class material than I do. I generally consider my high scores to be a combination of grade inflation and me being able to remember things well long enough to take a test or a final and then forget them. Then I feel weird when I get an A and people who worked harder got B's or C's. But not this time. This is quite possibly the most useful thing my GPA has ever done for me, when I was getting to the point of actually disparing that I'd even be able to go to grad school and not live on the streets. Now it seems I'll actually be making money, even after rent and food and other living expenses are taken care of — and that, my friends, is a first-class feeling after working jobs non-stop year-round for the last five and a half years in order to survive undergrad tuition bills. |
Saturday, August 6, 2005
10:16 p.m.
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Just got back from Phase One of moving my stuff to Pittsburgh: my parents and I took a day trip there to officially sign my lease, get the keys to my new apartment, clean and move stuff in, and meet with the professor I'm going to be working for. I feel like I've spent most of the day in the car, which isn't too far from the truth. Two hours this morning to get from here to the Pittsburgh Ikea store, 30 minutes to get from there to the apartment, 15 or 20 minutes to get to Wal-Mart and the same to get back, and finally another two hours to get back home. Spending that much time closeted in a car with my parents is maddening. My dad can't tolerate anything when he's driving — people who drive slower than he wants to, low speed limits, traffic lights that turn red, intersections that he finds to be poorly designed, etc. A rather large list. My mom spends the time reading things out loud and making desulatory comments: "76 West, straight ahead. There's a car up there. Someone's turning left behind that guy." Or: "Ah! The Luna Restaurant! A shoe store! A farmers' market!" After about a half hour of this I feel like jumping out of the car and walking to wherever we're going. The apartment's looking pretty nice, at least. There may be some difficulty fitting everything into the kitchen, but the main room is a pretty nice size for including a few chairs, tables, and maybe a couch if I can find one. My parents also stocked me up with a number of useful articles, including a vacuum cleaner, dish drainer, and some other supplies — some of which I wouldn't have even thought to have otherwise. Next weekend is the official moving day, so I'll probably be spending all my free time until then packing things up and getting things taken care of around here before I leave. |
Monday, August 8, 2005
5:33 p.m.
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Ten points to cool friends who spontaneously come up with fun ideas! Yesterday afternoon I got a call from Susannah that led to me going up to the Cheesecake Factory at Legacy Village last night so that we could see each other one more time before I move on Saturday. We'd arranged to meet just outside the door, in case we wanted to go somewhere else, at 8:00. A few minutes after that time I was walking up and down on the sidewalk trying to remember what color Susannah's car was when I found myself being waved at from the driver's seat of one of those house-sized SUVs. It was Ben and Erin, also part of the party because they'd been moving Erin's stuff in to the same apartment that Susannah was in the process of moving her things out of. Susannah herself arrived a few minutes later, so we all went in — and out again, because we got seats in the little fenced-off outdoor area that the restaurant was trying to pass off as a terrace or patio. No one felt like paying $6.50 for a slice of cake, so we ended up splitting two between the four of us. That let us order coffee and tea to go with it without causing a severe shortage in the funding department. Susannah and I split an excellent vanilla bean cheesecake, and Ben and Erin opted for something along the lines of "chocolate tuxedo." Some free sampling naturally took place, with the end result being we all thought they were both very good. The English breakfast tea that I had on the side was also a nice touch. And even the weather was behaving itself: a warm and clear evening without any annoying breezes to scatter napkins or knock things over. Around 8:45, I'd guess, the restaurant staff came around and put a lit candle in the middle of each table, so that after a while the scene was imitating the terrace of a Tuscan or Provençal sort of place rather than a suburban Ohio shopping mall. I sort of expected everyone to be wearing summer khakis and vests and to start talking about promenades along the piazza to match the high-class atmosphere. Definitely good stuff. Susannah broke out a roll of pictures from graduation and gave me two of them. They both turned out surprisingly nicely, especially in comparison with the hideous specimens from my family's camera, and they had friends in them to boot. After the pictures had been passed around the talk turned more towards camping and outdoorsman topics. It was just on to 10:15 when we left. The other three headed back towards campus, and I went back to the freeway and got home about 20 minutes later, so it wasn't even a late night in the end: after reading a bit I was in bed a bit after 11:00. Today featured what I fear will only be the beginnings of a rather long tussle with the phone company in Pittsburgh. I at first had no clue how they expected you to set up phone service if you didn't already have a phone to call them from, but then I found out you could do it online... but the first thing they ask for on the site is your phone number! Eventually my dad found the part where you could sign up for new service and pointed me there. Which was all right for about 15 minutes until I wanted to see what my local calling area would be — you can't do that unless you know your area code and three-digit prefix! I tried using the one from the grocery store that's about a half-mile from my apartment, but that only succeeded in giving me a long list of other three-digit prefixes within the city of Pittsburgh that were supposed to be local. Eventually I gave up the cheap plan and decided to pay $3 more a month for a larger local area that includes some suburbs. I also wanted to call the company up and ask them a few questions about their DSL package, but then the trouble was reversed: instead of asking me for phone numbers I don't have, I couldn't get the site to give me a customer service phone number to call them at! I came across some generic office number, called it, selected sort-of randomly from the automated menu options, and asked the operator who finally answered the phone to send me to the right place. That worked, at least. |
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