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!

days go by

I'm too lazy to
Write a real post, so I'll just
Write a few haikus.

Friend requests, messages,
Too many to leave me sane.
Why do I do this?

College students march,
A rainbow of umbrellas,
Hunched against the rain.

Winding down, slide with
The flow. Grades will come, just sit
Back, relax, enjoy.

Easter food heavy
In my belly, but it gives
Energy for fun!

Sustainabili-
ty is too long to fit in
Just five syllables.

Green tech, green campus,
Lectures about them abound,
Sustain IU week!

Pink petals poke up
Colouring campus coyly
Suggesting a sniff.

denoument

Home again, am I?

Time to rest before finals,

But "resting" means "bored".

After crazy adventuring, there is always the glorious homecoming. Or something like it. I dunno, coming home to an empty apartment after two weeks of essentially nonstop excitement is a pretty massive letdown. But let's not dwell on the pres

ent.

We shall delve into the past!

Austin:

So we won the Cluster Challenge! It was a fun competition. A lot of the other teams looked pretty good, but we knew what was what, and so we emerged victorious. :D This entitled each school to a plaque with a spiffy engraving, and we all got some kewl vests, etc., etc. The party that night was a lot of fun, too; the conference rented out an old west town (Star Hill Ranch, I think?), where there were square dancing lessons, a mechanical bull, campfire

s, a mariachi band...!

I think that we're going to ultimately write a paper about our experiences in the CC this year, which I imagine will, er, happen, as compared to the paper last year. That should be i

nteresting.

Planes, trains, and automobiles:

The Austin airport is pretty nice. There are nice leather chairs to sit in in some parts. It was there that I took my calculus e

xam. :o Then off to Indy's new airport (which is MUCH nicer than the old airport, except for the fact that none of the TSA people seem to know which doors set off alarms or how to shut off said alarms yet) for a delicious--and nutritious

--dinner of German chocolate bars. :P

The flight to Toronto was really awesome. I accidentally took the wrong seat and confused the hell out of the guy whose seat I took, but since I was already seated and

blocked in he said that it was ok for me to just stay there and he'd take my seat. "Too many planes, too little sleep," I explained lamely. But he didn't mind. My seatmate was a Mr. Steve Allen from the Toronto area. We had a really excellent chat about all things Canada, and he helped me practice saying things like "zed" and "washroom." Hahahaha.

The approach to the airport was amazing. The night was pristinely clear, and Toronto was laid out like an ADHD kid's Lite Brite board. There are random smatterings of hi

gh population density punctuating large swaths of near-emptiness. The CN tower looked awesome, though.

When I got to YYZ (why-w

hy-zed), I took my first trip through customs! It was sort of a joke, I have to say. "Wh

at are you here for?" "Visiting friends." "How long are you here?" "6 days." "Do you have anything that I should know about?" "No." "Welcome to Canada." I exchanged for Canadian money, which is super pretty. :) Not like our dull, green dollars, but a rainbow crying to be spent!

I navigated the st

range maze that followed customs, and I found Pat waiting for me. I guess Evan was in the bath-... er... washroom. Figures. :) But it was great to be greeted! Since I had had approximately 700 calories in the previous two days, I asked them to take me to dinner. So we took a quick tour of Waterloo in the dark, and I got an awesome falafel pita during the eati

ng of which I spent time choking on a piece of cucumber. But it was still delicious.

Waterloo I :

That night, I was totally exhausted, but who really needs sleep, anyway? Evan took me to the club right near his hotel where he knows some bouncers, Starlight (or -lite, maybe). We went with his friend A-Mac and his ex-girlfriend/now friend Juli, but we didn't really see them much. That night, he also took me for a somewhat longer tour of parts of Waterloo, mainly the Uptown Loop which goes through a park. It was snow covered! ^____^ It actually snowed

about half the days I was there, too, which was fantastic.

The next morning I got to see the "famed" farmers' market in St. Lawrence (I think). It was sweet! Way bigger than our farmers' market here in Bloomington, haha. We had

delicious maple syrup and bagels and samosas and fresh juice and... mmmmmmm.

Toronto :

Saturday afternoon found Evan and me combing the city for adventures. We made a stop at his parents' house (

which is totally awesome; his dad is an architect and h

is mother an interior designer, so it's an exquisitely planned industrial sort of complex that felt surprisingly really ho

mey) for clothes, first. Then we had a massive amount of food in a markety part of Toronto and swung on some swings. A stop through the AGO -- Art Gallery of Ontario -- was interesting; it was closing essentially 30 minutes after we showed

up, so it was a bit of a whirlwind visi

t. But totally worth it. Especially for the disco camper thing they had set up. :D

After that, dinner at Sushi on Bloor. FECKING DELICIOUS. We were so stuffed from all the previous food, though, that neither of us could even make it through our respective chirashi. Oof. Still, tasty. Then... oh! A thing put on by NewMindSpace wherein they intended to raise a strand of balloons and leds higher than the CN tower. It was effing cold, so we didn't stay the whole time, but w

e did end up on the webpage for it, which is

sweet. And we saw it go pretty high. Oh, and Evan's brother and his girlfriend joined us sometime before all those sh

enanigans.

THEN. The four of us took a drive down to the lakeshore to a club called Guvernment, where

we saw INFECTED MUSHROOM. It was totally tight! The laser light shows were ridiculously sweet (and expensiv

e, I'm sure), and the performance from the group was also AWESOME. So, it was really hot in the club, right? So how do they

solve that problem? Oh, they H

AVE LIQUID NITROGEN JETS THAT B

LOW OVER THE C

ROWD. It seems so obvious. Being lost in a chilly, refreshing cloud of recently-non-liquid nitrogen is exhilarating. :P

Oakville :

We all stayed in Evan and Neil's parents' house, and in the morning we at scrumptious pancakes with real Canadian maple syrup. Dericious! Evan gave me a tour of Oakville, including several sweeping views of Lake Ontario, and then it was back to Waterloo to do work.

Waterloo II :

We spent a lot of time, unfortunately, working while I was visiting. Last week was the last week of classes for my Canadian friends, so they of course had massive amounts of proje

cts and assignments to finish up and hand in. I had a crapton of stuff to do, too, that I had been shirking while not at school for the previous week. Anyway, I won't dwell on the working times. I did go to class with Evan a few times, and that was pretty fun. Their classes aren't much different from ours, I guess, except that they're bigger. And the people lecture with funnier accents. :P

Since there was snow, we had to engage in the trifecta of great Canadian sports: traybogganing, snowball fighting, and pushing other people onto their faces in snowbanks. It was good times. ^___^

What else? Oh, there was lots of good food to be had. In addition to all the interesting restaurants that I tried the

re (including one called, simply, Vegetarian Fast Food Restaurant), there were also a couple of epic cookings. Pat and Jeff and I created a Thanksgiving feast, which was

unspeakably delicious (and nutritious). Evan and I made some trout with eggplant and beans and lemon and soy sauce.... YUM.

Comments on Canada :

Bags of milk - they don't have jugs or cartons of milk, they have bags. These bags are inserte

d into pitchers when one desires to use them. I thought this was pretty much one of the funniest things ever, but they didn't see that it was.

Washrooms - not a restroom. Not a bathroom. A washroom.

Walk signs - their little man looks way more excited to cross the street than ours.

Oreos - American Oreos are superior to Canadian Oreos. There is little dispute on this fact.

The Metric System - I was terrified the first time I looked at Evan's speedometer when I was driving his car. 130?? HOLY SHIT!! But that's actually just ~80, so we weren't about to die. The picture at the top of this post is me filling up his car... in LITRES. ^___^

And I guess that wraps up my epically long blog posting. Maybe I'll be less lazy in the future and have several shorter comments, but maybe not. I keep seeming to say that. :)

delay

Too much to do, and

So little time for blogging.

I'll have to make due.

Well, it's been a really long time since I wrote anything on here, but that's okay, haha.  I've been adventuring!  The Canadians came, and we went quarry jumping, crazy caving (thanks to Mr. Sean Lewis for setting up a ridiculous trip :D), wandering around Bloomington... we also cooked a massive (I mean massive enough that I couldn't finish all the leftovers before they went bad) Thanksgiving dinner for Canadian Thanksgiving and watched War Games.  So now I've finally seen it!

I've taken midterms, and I realized that different departments function differently.  Up til now I've been doing all CS stuff, mainly, and not a lot of math, but I guess the Math department likes to kill souls.  I know that I got a 73 on my Modern Algebra midterm, but that was actually pretty good compared to what other people got.  This leads me to think that there is going to be some kind of grand, happiness-inducing curve at the end of the semester.  :3  It's definitely stressful to try to think about that grade, though.  But it's my favorite class!  Augh!

Also, I've been doing CC stuff way too much.  It's hard to manage my time when I spend 6 hours at the fricking data center in one night.  Ridiculous.  But it's sort of cool to learn how to install and optimize operating systems.  I'd actually never installed Linux before... *ashamed face*  But now I have!

The times that I see my roommates are becoming even fewer and farther between; it's sad.  But it looks like my course schedule next semester should permit many more shenanigans.  Woot!  I actually am allowed to register for classes starting today, so I think I'm going to get on that.

One of the projects I'm working on for this semester is called Fluency, and it can be tested out at this webpage.  It's a pretty neat idea; a GUI builder for people who don't know how to program.  The code that underlies it is a pretty massive mess.  I started out by improving the text areas (I just did that last night), and I'm terrified to death to try to mess with all the Null Pointer Exceptions that pop up in it.  But the project should be fun, for sure!

Also... umm... hmm... oh!  I changed my mind on what I want to be for Halloween.  I'm going to be the Silk Spectre from Watchmen.  I'm pretty excited about it.  I think I made this decision mainly because I got invited to a Heroes and Villains birthday party, and Daphne just doesn't really cut it as a superhero, haha.  :)  So that's going to be my project this afternoon.

This weekend is Homecoming, and I think it's going to be another football game that I don't go to.  Oh well.  I'll get to one eventually.  I'm pretty excited about going rappelling tomorrow, though, in stead of going to the game.  Wewt!

Oh!  And elections!  I'm TEH PSYCHED about the elections.  I had my mom buy me a sweet shirt recently: Bigfoot-Nessie 08--Change you can believe in!  ^____^

I'll try to be more diligent about writing this in the future, but no promises!  It's sort of fun to try to remember everything I've been up to, anyway.  Sort of.  :P