owwww

Muscles ache, brain, too,

Learning, growing, expanding!

I'll redeem myself.

So I still feel like this term is pretty slow compared to other ones as far as classwork goes, but I'm finding other ways to entertain myself.  Roy and I have been doing some serious working out this week; each of us is striving to be the first to do a pullup.  :P  The daily gymination is coming as quite a shock to my as-late-untrained body, but we're pulling through.  I just can't laugh without squeezing back little tears of pain.

I'm enjoying exploring other academic pursuits, as well.  The work on Polyworld with Larry Yaeger should be pretty interesting, and now that I've got my laptop running Ubuntu alongside Windows it'll actually be feasible to work on it, haha.  And I've plowed through a couple books on graph theory this week; that was pretty interesting.  I guess a lot of it just seems intuitive, but the introduction of, y'know, proper terms is sort of nice to have.

Did I mention that I bought a beginner book on piano over the weekend!  In the absence of friends who are always around to regale me with their playings, I am reduced to attempting to pick out tunes for myself.  I guess it's on my list, so maybe it's not so useless a pursuit, after all.  Oh, I was sitting in the fireplace room in the Union (one of my favourite places on campus, especially during the winter), and for the first time I had the distinct pleasure of listening to a really talented player pour out some songs through the gorgeous white grand piano there.  It was a fantastic feeling: soaking up the fire, absorbing the music, and pondering my maths.

I went over to the place I may be living in the fall this evening to chill and play WiiFit.  That game is pretty sweet.  But I guess the apartment is the interesting thing.  ;)  It's about the same size as this place, but the kitchen is bigger, and it has a sweet loft (which would probably be my bedroom).  It also has a fireplace, and it just feels homier than this apartment.  Plus the floors don't creak.  The downside?  It's pretty far from campus.  There is a bus, but... I dunno.  I sorta wanted to be closer to where things happen.  We'll see how it goes.

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.  ^____^