brief

So quickly pass days
Of sunshine and freedom, but
We can retain their joys.

I had the pleasure to spend this weekend with Evan, and what a weekend it was! I picked him up from the airport around midnight on Thursday, which was sort of an adventure in itself. I almost missed his landing due to the plane's being 20+ minutes earlier than originally expected. He had shared with me his plans to navigate the high seas of the AmeriCanadian arrspace in his pirate garb from last weekend, so I wore the closest approximation I had to such ridiculosity (which, sadly, is quite diminished from what it was when I had that trunk of costume stuff before the flood). I heard thudding footsteps racing down the hallway from the terminals. Who else could it be? I raced towards the passenger exit and leapt into the arms of the man in the black trenchcoat--thankfully Evan--, and we collided with a thud, much to the amusement/chagrin of lookers-on.

Let's see... our adventures... we spent Friday wandering campus/Bloomington climbing and eating many things. Moroccan food (Casa Blanca!) is obnoxiously tasty. My semi-experience in parkour helped me keep up, though the blood donation earlier this week slowed me down a little. Anyway, I'd spent some time on Wednesday and Thursday writing notes in places I thought Evan might climb, and I managed a pretty good success rate with the guessings.

Friday was also the day that we went to Columbus, which was pretty great. We borrowed a pair of bikes from my lovely roommate, Georgia, and took a quick tour de downtown. We hit the library, the Chihuly at the visitors' centre, the jail, city hall, the courthouse, the tower and tunnel in Mill Race, Eos, and the Ameritech Building, among other places. My dad made his derricious fish pizza, my mom made kringla, we watched a terrible movie (Don't Mess with the Zohan), and all was right with the world.

Saturday was the race! But drama first; Georgia, Evan, and I packed out of Columbus to hit up the farmers' market in Bloomington before parkour at noon. I managed to lock the keys in the car, so we had to find a random person whose cell phone we could borrow, then wait for my parents to come rescue us. :-/

Parkour was good times; the guys were excited to meet someone new, of course. We found some more of my notes, too, so good. ^__^ The weather for the race was gorgeous: sunny and warm. It was a little ridiculous that it was $20, payable only in cash, to get in, though. We managed to find a dollar from a nice man outside, since we were short.

Bunny Gamma came in 12th! Excellent! I was really proud of them. :D We ran into Georgia and Jeff at the race, too, and they provided us with one of, again, only two pictures that exist from our weekend together. I thought it came out cute. :P

After the race was tasty dinner of seared tuna (including V-shaped brands, thanks to a smart purchase by yours truly over spring break) with sesame seeds, rice with soy/sesame/vinegar sauce, and a salad with garbanzo beans, lime, chili powder, sunflower seeds, onions, tomatoes, and general delition, followed immediately by Flight of the Conchords! It was a good show, but too brief.

Then some nighttime parkour, which ended when I tried to scale a wall in my Converses (which, for those of you who may be unaware, are sadly lacking in traction) and fell 8 feet onto my wrist. It's not broken, but it hurt like a bitch. Anyway, I have a brace on that now. We followed that adventure with a bonfire party, including delicious s'mores.

Sunday was full of pancakes, fried plantains, X-rays, and a drive to the airport. The weekend wasn't as long as I might've liked, but we had teh funz. And now it's time to get serious about schoolwork, since this is the last week of classes! Woot!

some oddities

College brings myst'ries,
The fog of knowledge obscures
The plain and simple.

We finally got our sink fixed. We've spent a couple weeks trying to fiddle with it ourselves, to no avail. Drano did nothing. Digging with spoons did nothing. Nothing did anything. So we filed a maintenance report and were treated to the message on our door (upon our return):

Replaced garbage disposal. Old one was clogged with penny.

Well, that's odd. We can't be throwing pennies down the drain in a recession! (Thanks to Georgia for that one :P) It seems like, despite education, we all still do dumb things sometimes. -___-

Other oddities... well, my arms look rather odd at the moment. Parkour over the weekend was pretty intense, and now it appears that I've taken a cheese grater to the inside surfaces of my limbs. That's what one gets for climbing things, I suppose.

Yesterday was 4/20, which, in a hippie town like Bloomington, has more connotations than "the day between 4/19 and 4/21." I guess this is a reasonable opportunity to make some comments about marijuana. Venus was writing a paper about legalizing it recently, and in talking to her about it I had some thoughts.

I know that California is considering legalizing marijuana; it's their state's most lucrative crop. If it were legalized, it could be taxed, and thereby their government could bail itself out of the massive hole it seems to be in. Not to mention that the United States has something like 25% of the world's prisoners. In fact, more than 1% of American adults are currently incarcerated. A large portion of those are due to drug misdemeanors. Legalizing marijuana would also cut down on that sort of nonsense; as a nation we gripe about having to spend so much for prisoners, blah, blah, blah, but maybe we're just interpreting illegality in the wrong way. And what is so harmful about marijuana? It's not an addictive substance. It doesn't impair any more drastically than alcohol or other already-legal substances (i.e. salvia). It's not doing any more harm to the air than tobacco smoke. There's a lot of stigma associated to it, though.

I was reading Time today when I came across an article about Amish romance novels. That's just odd in itself, and I don't really feel obligated to elaborate.

It's weird to think that the end of the term is so close. I can taste it! :D

cred and a quick summary

More and more, I
Am becoming a CS
Major you'd expect.

Haha, and by that I mean that I played StarCraft for the first time last night. Pathetic, I know, that I haven't played it before... it was pretty amusing, I have to say, when I opened the box with the installation disks and found a flier:

COMING IN 1999: DIABLO II FOR BATTLE.NET

:P Amusement ensued. Anyway, I did like StarCraft a fair amount. I haven't played a game similar to it since I was obsessed with Age of Mythology about 5 summers ago, but it's ok. I don't think it'd take long for me to get better at it, and I'm probably going back to play more later today. Teehee.

Also contributing to this CS major-ness is the Math Talent Show yesterday. I'll post a link to my friend's standup routine when he actually puts it on the interwebs. It was a good time for all, I think. A group perfomed Finite Simple Group of Order Two . I love that song. <3! Additionally, a guy did violin beatboxing? I had seen fluteboxing, but this was something completely different (and completely awesome).

I realized that I never actually mentioned what I did on spring break! The Arkansas trip was nixed due to infighting, so Robbie Woerner and I decided to head to Florida with my family. This gave us a few days at home first (Venus had a doctor's appointment or something on Tuesday, so we planned to leave following that), which meant that there was some adventure to be had right away!

On Saturday, Venus asked me to lead her friends on a caving trip. I, um, didn't have any particular confidence in these particular friends, and I was very hesitant to take them. She insisted, though, so we went. (Hahaha, I think that I will avoid mentioning their names so that this ridiculous story won't ever show up in a Google search for them, funny though that would be.) I found the most obnoxiously pansy cave that I could to take them through, because they had never been underground before, and I didn't want them to be responsible for getting hurt.

Five minutes into the cave, we are walking in a less-than-ankle-deep stream. I am in front. We come to a fork. "We're going left," I say. Seconds later, one of Venus's friends does not, for some reason, turn right at the fork. She also didn't turn left. She simply walked her face straight into the wall. This, as you might imagine, led to bleeding. So we rushed her out of the cave.

The cut was tiny (about 1.5cm), so we cleaned it up and decided to do something else with the day in Bloomington: Chris (a friend visiting from Johns Hopkins) took us to a railroad trestle west of town. We wandered around by it, and on the way back to the car I heard a yell behind me. "We got a bleeder!" Chris.

"What the hell does that mean?" I asked.

"Get a towel!" my sister ran down the hill looking frantic.

"Oh, not again..." We grabbed towels and bandaids and all that good stuff and tried to fix the bleeding friend up again, this time while en route to the Emergency Room. Was her blood not clotting? What was the matter? I had no experience with this sort of stuff. When we were 95% of the way to the hospital, the other friend offered a meek comment, "I'm sorry... it was a knee-jerk reaction."

I looked skeptically at her in the rearview mirror. "What was a knee-jerk reaction?" It was explained to us that bleeding friend had been walking behind other friend and tapped her on the shoulder, and other friend's immediate reaction was to clock bleeding friend in the face and set off another spurt of hemoglobin. Wonderful. She didn't even merit stitches at the ER; just some glue. UGH.

Then there was a nice day of hiking on Sunday with Robbie and Venus, which actually led to a chance meeting with a high school teacher whom we all had for US Government who is now retired. That was a nice surprise. Monday was full of errands (I got my computer sent off to be fixed, got the oil changed on the car, and managed to get in a bit of shopping, during which I found a killer white vest), but there have to be days like that sometimes. Tuesday I spent essentially the entire day in the car between dropping Venus at the doctor's, picking up Robbie, realizing Robbie forgot his wallet and driving back to his house and then back to my house, and heading out for our trip. We made a stop at the Lodge Cast Iron store in Tennessee. I am now the proud owner of a cast iron brand in the shape of a V.

Florida was fun, but I think we did way too much driving. From Tuesday to Saturday we visited St. Augustine (the oldest city in the US, and we went on a ghost tour to learn some of the history), Boynton Beach (Mom has a friend there), Miami (Robbie and I got to go clubbing for a little while), Venice (fossilized sharks' teeth lie scattered along the beach for observant travelers to collect, plus the beach sand was perfect for running and playing Frisbee on), and St. Pete Beach (aka "St. Pete, Bitch" as per the signs: ST PETE BCH). There was more time in the car than fun in the sun, but it wasn't a bad trip overall. :)

I guess that was a longer summary than I had intended, but... well, you know.

canadia parte deux

White lands of the North,
But full of warm things! And, of
Course, of injuries.

I get to see Evan this weekend! Super exciting! It was a pretty long flight to get here, though. Mostly because of a couple hours spent in O'Hare waiting for my other plane to board. I was bored, so I decided to explore. Did you know that O'Hare has a children's museum in it?? It was pretty crazy. I also spent upwards of an hour walking around, and I made it from end to end in that time, but I skipped, like, 4 terminals. They go from A to L or something, and each one is huge.

Irrespective of that, I'm here! Evan's little apartment is pretty nice, although it seems his roommate has made himself scarce for the weekend. :P When I got here, Evan took me out to try poutine, which is some crazy dish that is, both basically and exactly, French fries + gravy + cheese curds. Hmm.

This place is interesting; Ottawa is right on the border of two provinces, Quebec and Ontario. The drinking age is different in these two provinces, so students from the other side like to come over here to drink a year younger. There are a lot of signs at bars detailing that Ontario residents aren't permitted entry unless they are 19.

Let's see, what've we done so far, other than eat poutine... well, this weekend in Ottawa is Winterlude, an ice/snow/winter festival thing. The city sets up ice sculpting contests, ice slides (super fun), fire and ice shows... plus the Rideau canal is frozen over and skateable, so we did that. It's odd to see, like, vendors and stuff just parked out on a frozen canal. We got a beaver tail, too, which is more or less an elephant ear, but tastier and in more flavours! We got garlic and cheese. Mmmmmm. Oh, and I, of course, injured myself ice skating. The canal ice was weird. Its surface was really irregular, I guess due to the fact that there was an unseasonable warm spell this week. So my figure skates' little teeth thingies caught on one of the flaws, and down I went. Onto my knee. I'm reasonably certain that it fared better than Georgia's knee, haha, but it still kinda hurts and is a bit swollen. :( But, you know what? It was totally worth it. Oh, and some random guy visiting from Toronto took our picture. I gave him my email address, so maybe he'll have sent it to me by later today and I can put it up.

For dinner yesterday, we whipped up a dericious feast. I had brought some drunken goat cheese with me, so we had that, and we had also some fresh homemade bread, artichoke hearts, FECKING TASTY bean sprout salad, tuna salad, currants, and local brews. Yum! Every adventure with Evan seems to turn into a food adventure, inexplicably.

But that wasn't all, of course! Evan of all people would be the one to find a Valentine's Day rave for us to attend. The tickets for it were pretty sweet: Invader Zim-themed! Hahaha. So we got all dolled up and went out to the club. It was pretty sweet. :3

Well, maybe that's all. Probably not. There's still today, and we're still planning some adventuring for later. It's going to be sad to go back to Bloomington, especially since I have a midterm, like, 23 hours from now. Uck.

But it's a good weekend. :D