fire alarms and math nerds

Math nerds, unite!  By

The power of numbers,

We play... Settlers?  Hm.

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending a party of math nerds.  Those people can be lots of fun in large groups, especially when there are party games around that encourage it.  For instance, during the course of the evening, we played Apples to Apples, and one green card that came up was "edgy."  The winning card?  "Stop signs."  Maybe not math nerdy so much as... well... regularly, generally neardy, but fun nonetheless.  We also played a round of Settlers of Catan, which I whupped up in, thanks to the still-burning shame of losing last time I played with Evan.  :P

The board that we used for it was super-nice, though.  I borrowed it from a friend's roommate, and he had built a wooden briefcase to tote it around in and everything.  I'm pretty sure he had every expansion, but we elected to forgo the expansions in light of the fact that half the people who wanted to play had never played before.  Might have been too confusing.  But I'm thinking that I probably want to get a board of my own sometime; it's a good game to have around.

Also yesterday was Capoeira.  It's such fun!  We extended our respective repertoires of badassery by cartwheeling over barriers.  Have you ever tried it?  It's terrifying!  But you feel frickin awesome when you do it.  :D

Oh!  And I finally got my W-2 from Google and filed my taxes.  Thanks, Uncle Sam.

This morning I was awakened by an odd odor shortly followed by a piercing beeping noise.  Evidently Georgia had left a pot on the stove for a wee bit too long, and the stuff in it had turned the charcoal.  Our fire alarm was not happy.  Unfortunately, it was really unpleasant to throw open all the windows and doors downstairs, as it's approximately 28 degrees here (that's -2 for you metric folk ;).

Undaunted by previous kitchen incidents, I started making bread this morning.  It should be super tasty: cranberry cinnamon sugar.  Mmmmmm.

Anyway, I'm hoping to find some excitement for this weekend.  I'm thinking that I'll probably dye my hair back to brown so that it's mo' betta' for my Silk Spectre costume.  Watchmen releases on Friday!  I'm excited!  :D!

no facebook: day 2

Productivity

No longer punctuated

With random people.

Well, it's been about 37 hours since I swore off Facebook, and it's been beautiful.  :)  I guess I never spent that much time on there, but I did take microbreaks from whatever I was theoretically supposed to be doing in order to see if I had any messages/invites/pokes/whatever.  It's amazing what removing those 15 second diversions can do for focus.

I'm a little sad about the fact that I essentially lost a second email address.  I know a lot of people won't be contacting me at all for 38 more days.  :(

In other news, I'm starting to lean more and more towards Cognitive Science for graduate school.  I've had meetings with a couple of people in the department over the last day or so, and the idea of combining all these seemingly-random things that I've been studying up until now into a coherent sort of discipline is really appealing.  I signed up to take the GRE for Computer Science in early April.  I have to say I'm at least a little apprehensive; I can only assume that there are things I won't know on it that I'll learn in the next year, but from my score on the practice exam I think I'll do okay.  I'm hoping to get a book from a prof about graph theory, which is an entire topic that is entirely missing from IU's CS program.  Meh.

lent

I like to observe
Other folks' holidays. It's
Good for the soul.

Well, I'm not Catholic, but Lent starts tomorrow, and I've decided to give something up. I observed Ramadan a couple years ago, and that was a really rewarding experience. Why not, right? I decided to forgo Facebook for the next 40 days and 40 nights. We'll see how that works out, haha. :) Hopefully it will end in my being more productive.

Anyway, I will still be existing until Easter. If you need to contact me (and you can't use Facebook to do it!), my email address and phone number are still listed on my Facebook page. ;) Teehee.

Wish me luck!

exclamation points!!!

Did you ever notice

The sheer number of them?  My

Left pinky itches.

I didn't realize until I glanced at this blog's archive just now that I use exclamation points entirely too much.  Maybe it isn't a bad thing.  I think it's probably just a consequence of the person I am: living fully in EVERY SINGLE SECOND.  Maybe I just get bored reading dully-punctuated textbooks all day.  Maybe I like factorials, or I am trying to "not" everything.  Whatever it is, it is.

I guess the real point of this post is to express some more excitement, though.  I got an email from my host this week that my features should be launching sometime in the next month!  Who knows what that really means, but they've definitely been picked up by other engineers, and they should be ready and raring to go.  Soon!

pictures!

Everywhere I go,

Random people appear, and

They send me pictures!

Picture from the Canal de Rideau in Ottawa, taken by Ed, a random guy Evan and I ran into during our skating.  His are actually the only pictures that exist from the trip... haha, oops.

<3!!!

(-∞, 2601218943565795100204903227081043611191521875016945785727541837850835631156947382240678577958130457082619920575892247259536641565162052015873791984587740832529105244690388811884123764341191951045505346658616243271940197113909845536727278537099345629855586719369774070003700430783758997420676784016967207846280629229032107161669867260548988445514257193985499448939594496064045132362140265986193073249369770477606067680670176491669403034819961881455625195592566918830825514942947596537274845624628824234526597789737740896466553992435928786212515967483220976029505696699927284670563747137533019248313587076125412683415860129447566011455420749589952563543068288634631084965650682771552996256790845235702552186222358130016700834523443236821935793184701956510729781804354173890560727428048583995919729021726612291298420516067579036232337699453964191475175567557695392233803056825308599977441675784352815913461340394604901269542028838347101363733824484506660093348484440711931292537694657354337375724772230181534032647177531984537341478674327048457983786618703257405938924215709695994630557521063203263493209220738320923356309923267504401701760572026010829288042335606643089888710297380797578013056049576342838683057190662205291174822510536697756603029574043387983471518552602805333866357139101046336419769097397432285994219837046979109956303389604675889865795711176566670039156748153115943980043625399399731203066490601325311304719028898491856203766669164468791125249193754425845895000311561682974304641142538074897281723375955380661719801404677935614793635266265683339509760000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000)

who says math isn't romantic?

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

Oi What a week!

So this past week has been so jam packed with stuff but I've been on so many pain meds I don't really remember a lot of it. I had surgery on Monday- they put some screw, bone graft, and wire in my kneecap. The day got off to a really good start though, Jeff woke up early and suprised me with a longstem pink and white rose and a little stuffed animal tree frog that had "surgery frog" written on its stomach. My knee hurts a lot more now than when I broke it, and these pain meds are doing a number on me. I'm finally able to think somewhat coherently and so, I'm able to write this entry! I'm sad I had to miss class this morning though (I was throwing up), we were going to be learning different frog calls! I was really looking forward to it!

I'm excited because tomorrow Jeff and I are going to see Circ de Soleil, which his mom kindly got us tickets for. Saturday night we are going to a dance at Collins: the Vieneese Ball. Hopefully dancing with my knee won't be too bad, but I know that Jeff will make sure I have a good time no matter what. Sunday I have to do a 4 hour lab, ugh, BUT Kyle is also moving to Bloomington that day, which is very exciting! I need to start sending valentine's to people actually! Yay! Danielle is coming up this weekend to visit Dennis, so hopefully I'll be able to do something with them as well.

Val- I hope you have fun in Canada this weekend! Find a penpal for me! And I just got your Valentine's day card you left for me! THANK YOU!

happy birthday, Georgia!

You made it, at last!

Too bad the drugs make you odd,

But we like you still.

:D

spring???

Wait, what?  Spring has sprung?

How come no one told me this news?

I CAN WEAR SHORTS NOW???

So apparently nobody bothered to inform our lady Gaia that it's the middle of February.  Today was a balmy 60 degrees in the middle of the day.  Seriously.  It's awful.  All my beautiful snow, gone!  But whatever.  I guess that's how it goes sometimes.

Georgia's surgery was today.  I haven't seen her yet... but I'm sure it went fine.  :)

This semester is making me horrifically lazy.  I haven't got a lot of work to do, so I always put it off.  But the thing is that the work is pretty complicated, so.... it's just generally a bad idea.  Merp.

cookies!

Baking, delicious!

And ingredients can be

Faked, if need be.  *grin*

So Georgia and I met our neighbors, finally.  We noticed their wireless network a few days ago; ours is "Next to 666," and theirs is "Yes_it's_666."  :)  Anyway, we whipped up a batch of orange chocolate chunk cookies for them.

Ingredients:

1 cup shortening

1/4 cup light brown sugar

1/4 cup dark brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

zest of one orange

juice of same orange

2 eggs

2 1/2 cups AP flour

1/2 cup of crushed chocolate anything (we used M&Ms and Hershey bars)

some salt

some vanilla

some baking soda

These cookies go through the standard cookie-mixing steps: creaming the shortening and sugars, adding flour in stages, blah blah blah.  They bake for a really long time, though.  The recipe calls for the oven to be at 300, and it took a good 25 minutes for them to come out.  Maybe we just make bigger cookies than most folks, though.  ;)

Anyway, we took these to our neighbour.  He is evidently from Russia.  He opened the door, beer in hand.

"We're your neighbors!  We made cookies for you!"

"Is this for real?"

It was pretty funny.  I hope his daughter is around sometime, or that she at least likes the cookies.

Thursday Cooking Night: Georgia and Val make Potato Blintzes

So tonight Val and I had our weekly cooking night as usual, but this night we decided to do a blog about it! So we made Potato Blintzes, which is basically a potato/ spinach/ onion mixture wrapped in crepes. I had the difficult task of making the crepes, but they turned out only half way retarded! Yay! So here's the recipe, they tasted great! We put soy sauce on ours, or you can add in cheese.

Ingredients:

crepe filling:
about 2 medium potatoes
2 onions
1 lb spinach
salt (some) and pepper (lots)

crepes:
1 cup flour
1/4 cup water
1 1/2 milk or soy milk

Directions:
Mix all the crepe ingredients together and let sit in the fridge for several hours, or if you're a hurried improvising college student, stick it in the freezer for a while and then in the fridge!

Mash up the potatoes, heat up the spinach (if frozen) or mix it in with the potatoes or something. Saute the onions and add salt and pepper to taste, and voila! You have your crepe filling.

Make your crepes, stack them up on a plate, put some filling in each one and wrap it up. Cook them in a frying pan for a bit. Guess what?! You're done!

IMPORTANT NOTE: In writing this I assumed that you would use your common sense when making these. For example, spray the crepe pan with cooking oil before you start making them.

Also pictured is the batter for the cookies we made afterward, Orange chocolate chunk! Delish! But I believe Val is posting about those...

In other news, I have surgery Monday on my knee. Hmmm. Time to get all my homework for next week done before the painkillers make my brain all foggy.


-Georgia

age

Damnit, I'm so old,

You may say I'm in the prime of

Life, but I know.  Eff.

I was watching "Memento" at Carlo and Jaimie's last night, and two of its stars are Carrie-Ann Moss and Joe Pantoliano, better known as Trinity and Cypher from "The Matrix" trilogy.  We had a depressing realization: the first Matrix movie came out 10 years ago this year.  That's half my life.

;_______;

First Georgia Post!

Well, Valkyrie has been mentioning it off and on for a while about it now, and the time has finally come for my first blog post! Val has wonderfully described the adventure of breaking my knee, but the aftermath is far less amusing slash annoying. We'll leave it at that for now.

Today one of my classes was canceled (YAY!) and Kyle came to visit (double YAY!). We went to Mother Bear's, and we're about to start watching a movie projected onto my living room wall. And that, is the end to a short and sweet blog post.

event

Can it be?  Really?

People in my office now?

How did that happen?

Haha, it's an event!  I was just sitting in my office hours today, unsuspecting, and, suddenly, 3 PEOPLE CAME IN.  Crazy, I know.

And I am a fan of Punxutawney Phil's predilection for predicting 6 more weeks of winter weather.  <3!!

Additionally, Georgia is now an author on this blog, so hopefully there will be some differently-opined content on here shortly.  :D

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.

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!

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

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.  ^____^

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