1.31.2009

la vie boheme

Tramping through the snow,
You can't hear a sound.  It's easy
To lose yourself here.

I maintain that snow is magical.  I won't go into the whole spiel about "oh, it's so beautiful and quiet and peaceful," mainly because I don't feel linguistically equipped to deal with it in a more convincing way than I've seen it done before, but also because there are adventures to relate!

So Georgia went in to see an orthopedist about her kneecap, and she managed to break it pretty much totally.  A normal kneecap seen from the top looks like a semicircle, mmkay?  Well, she broke it vertically on the right and on the left and horizontally between those lines (so it formed, like, an "H").  In the centre of the bottom of the H is... powder.  She shattered it totally.  :/  It's been interesting/amusing to watch her crutch around in the snow.  Yeah, so I'm totally insensitive.  :P

It's sort of funny, too: I guess it's not really the type of break that a cast can be made for, so she's been set up with a compression sock and a soft-ish brace-y thing.  I mean, when you break a bone, though, you of course want your sympathetic friends to sign it, right?  So later today we're going to bust out permanent markers and sign that sock.

There has been more sledding since then!  Last night I went out with some more friends to the same hill.  Over the course of the past few days, a lot of people have had this idea.  Whereas the snow was fluffy and soft on Wednesday, last night it was hard and slick and fast.  Pretty much any flat-ish object was suitable for sledding.  I felt like a proper college student as I whooshed over a ramp riding a trash can lid, and, later, a cardboard box.  Awesome.

It's amazing the amount of ingenuity that college students have for things like that.  I mean, friends and I have faked some pretty tasty meals this semester.  If we're missing an ingredient for something, we choose the sort-of-closest thing that we have to it and sub it in.  No fresh-cut tomatoes?  Well, we do have pasta sauce...

Oh, and, as a side note: spicy hot chocolate is delicious.

1.28.2009

epic

I can't get enough
Adventure just for me, or
So it would appear.

Before I forget, here is one of the pictures from the ice cave: YAY ICE CAVE.

School was canceled today!  It was amazing.  IU hardly ever does this.  I got a text message at around 7am informing me that school was closed until noon, and one later saying that it would be closed the rest of the day (I signed up for this alert system thingy that they do.).  Of course the best choice on a snow day is to go sledding!  So I called Sean.  We met DOWNTOWN.  We settled on snow tubes at a place called Tri North, which is a middle school in Bloomington that happens to be on the city's largest hill.  Awesome!

Georgia came, too!  I was excited to spend time with her.  Jeff was busy with homework, and she was free, so it was good!  Also along for the ride were Alex (Sean's friend) and Kurt (Alex's neighbor).  Driving was pretty treacherous, but not for Kurt's Subaru with All-Wheel Drive.  :P

We get to the hill, and it's awesome!  About a dozen people have beaten us there.  We lug our tubes up to the top and start sliding down.  Then, as college students, we decide we need a ramp!  Of course!  So Alex and Kurt build a NICE LITTLE 2FT RAMP.  And it was good.  The only way to send two people down on a tube was crossways on top of each other, which Georgia and I were the only ones brave enough to try.

But there were better things to be found on the hill!  One kid had created a SNOW BIKE.  He had pulled the wheels off and REPLACED THEM WITH SKIS, which then made it easy to ride down the hill.  It cut through even unpacked snow like a dream.

Then we noticed that some kids had built a bigger ramp.  We were like, hey!  We have snow tubes!  Let's go!  So we WENT.  I know that I saw a guy catch more than 6ft of air off the end of it, and I had quite a lot of fun on it myself.  Then came Georgia's turn...

She managed to get turned around on the way down, and the moral of the story is that she landed on her knee and face somehow.  So we spent the second half of the day with Jeff in the ER getting 11 stitches in her chin and a bunch of XRAYS that revealed a broken kneecap.  Fortunately, she didn't also have a broken chin.  So that was good.  Bummer about some of the stuff she won't be able to do now, though.

But we did get a few good things out of the day.  I like the videos and pics from Sean a lot, for instance.  And Georgia's mom bought us all Panera!  And... Georgia, Jeff, and I watched the caves episode of Planet Earth.  Win!

1.24.2009

basically awesome

Cooking at last! And
I get to see Georgia!  What
A term it will be!

It's so much more awesome already.  I actually get to see the girl I'm living with!  Mary's still pretty nonpresent, but Georgia and I have been spending a lot of time together cooking, computering, homeworking, and generally hanging out.  Tonight we're off to a formal, hooray!

Not to mention the other awesomenesses: the fact that I actually get to see my own house during daylight hours is crazy.  And it isn't just because the days are getting longer!  Sean's going to have ridiculous amounts of cave trips and other adventures this term, I think, since it's his last before he jets off to grad school who-knows-where.  Last night we took a trip to a cave just west of town that didn't really have nice rock formations (people had been through and destroyed them), but in the entrance where it was below freezing there were some amazing ice formations.  I think he'll be putting up those pictures later; I'll post a link if I remember to.  And Carlo seems excited to find some adventures, too.  A trip to the Creationist museum may be in store.  I can't wait to see a mural of people riding on velociraptors.

These classes are pretty sweet, too.  I wish I had learned Scheme the right way the first time; I resented it until this semester, really.  But now that I see how just nice it is, I can't help but be in love.  Damnit, Dylan, you were right.   :s

Anyway, I'm off to prepare!  My first real dressing-up with short hair!  :D

1.18.2009

POCAR

Every part of me,
Exhausted! Immobile! Why
Did I go for that?

Well, POCAR was a little less of a success than I'd hoped for.  My team, the Flying Hellfish, managed to finish about 2/3 of the race, and then we realized that we were defeated.  One of the checkpoints we visited was a decoy, and it would have taken more than we had in us to go correct our mistake, come back to the camp, and do the last leg.  So we called it quits around 4 am after hiking something more than 12 miles over ridiculous hills.

But something about POCAR: people don't finish it.  There were some pro teams who were in it to win it, but from what I understand only 15% or so of the teams who start each year actually make it all the way through.  Good lord, was it tough!  After the first loop, we were all in a sort of false sense of security; it wasn't over particularly vicious terrain, and it was only 6 miles or something.  The second leg, though, was over crazy changes in altitude and was about 6 miles (longer, maybe; I'm not sure I mapped it out correctly), and we would have had to backtrack at least 5 to get the right checkpoint.  ARGH.  But I kept up with the boys despite the fact that I haven't really done hardcore exercise in 6 weeks or so because of that mono garbage.

Anyway, sleeping in a bed last night felt awesome.  I wish I hadn't had to get up today.  But I did, and here I am.  I'm hopefully going to get some application essays written for a research program I want to do in Germany this summer.  ^____^

1.15.2009

semester

Fun's begun, hurrah!
With so much time, maybe I'll
Keep up with writing.

So the semester has started out nicely, and it appears that it will be a fairly relaxing one (at least compared to the last one).  I've enjoyed all my classes thus far, at least, and I can only imagine that they'll get more interesting.

But it's cold.  My nostrils froze on the way to class this morning.  That isn't right.  Although it's sort of amusing to watch people go by here, and it's easy to tell who's from California (several layers of poufy coats, still shivering) and Indiana (smiling, wearing a sweatshirt)).  And seeing clouds of breath is pretty neat, too.  I'm hoping that the pond in the arboretum freezes thick enough to walk on soon.  :D

1.13.2009

home

Again, that feeling,
What's done is done, can't go back,
Memories remain.

Happy new year!

So I don't know how I could begin to talk about how fabulous the trip to Tokyo was.  I'll perhaps make a longer post about it later when I have my journal at hand and can properly recall all the crazinesses.  But I don't know if it can be done.  There are the pictures on picasa, and I've got a head and journal full of swirling thoughts, but trying to write it in a coherent way might not happen.

Anyway, the semester has started off pretty well.  I've now been to almost all of my classes at least once, and they seem like they'll be ok.  :)  I'm a lot more excited about S312 than I was about S311, Hofstadter's course is going to be, predictably, awesome, algebra should be good, robotics sounds ridiculously cool, and I find myself dreading the Scheme class less than I expected.  I can't wait to go to capoeira on Friday.  :3