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

ready?

Buy, trim, wrap, pack, chat,

Drive, snow, cook, eat, check, recheck,

You ready for this?

Well, Christmas is now two days away.  Titan is here for the holidays, and the tree finally got put up at home yesterday.  We had our family Christmas this morning.  I feel like my Christmas has been a little overshadowed by my efforts to prepare for Japan (speaking of which, my hair's purpleish now--http://picasaweb.google.com/VASavage/PurplePains#--I guess that bleach blonde + purple + purple + purple = brown with purple streaks?), so I'm trying to make up for it by being really spirited.  Cookies!  Elves!  Reindeer antlers! 

It's been good.  The roads are in awful condition, though.  It's a white Christmas!  The drive from Indianapolis to Joliet, which is normally ~3 hours, took 6-7 hours.  I think I topped out at 50, and that wasn't for very long.  Titan, Venus, and I saw 15 wrecks between Indy and mile marker 201 (normally about an hour away).  People got a little too crazy, and it was wicked slick.  We made it alright, though.  Just waiting for Mom and Dad to get in later tonight.  They left a few hours after us, and it seems like their going is even slower.

Japan plans are almost here!  I'm nervous that I've forgotten something in Columbus or Bloomington, but I've repacked my bag so many times I don't know how I could have.  I guess we'll find out for sure in THREE DAYS.  <3!

holidays

There's no place like home

For the holidays!  But I

Won't be here for long.

It's good to be home.  Finals done, hair cut, stress removed, bags packed, family visited, snow fallen, dogs walked.  It was worth the hard term to have this epic break.  I'm ridiculously excited about leaving on Friday.  But the time home is nice to have, too.  We visited family up in Chicago for a big pizza party ("oh, gosh!  I didn't recognize you with your short hair!"), I went to a party for Ryan's birthday, ("oh, gosh!  you look so good with short hair!"), and Titan came home ("oh, gosh!  you have short hair??").

:)  Can't wait!

hair

It's gone for the cause,

And I don't miss it as much

As I thought I would.

My hair!  It's gone!  Lopped off!  Sent to Locks of Love!  I guess it's okay, though.  I don't mind as much as I figured I would...  11".  Hum.

http://picasaweb.google.com/VASavage/HolyHaircut#

finals

A big test for all

The marbles?  Wait, who thought this

Was a good idea?

Yeah, I can't say I'm a huge fan of the idea of finals.  I haven't had any yet; mine are all today and tomorrow.  It's less than thrilling to think about sitting in a room for two hours and agonizing over the fact that those two hours contribute 40% of my grade.  Seriously, it's an awful idea.

On the plus side, finals week means that there's lots of free time (no homework or classes!) to make sure I see everyone before I shove off.  ^_____^

And Christmas shopping.  Ohhhh... that.

winding down

No homework, more fun!

'Cept there's neither snow nor sun.

Oh, Indiana.

What the hell is this winter thing here, anyway?  I've been living here for... what... wow, like, 12 years or something ridiculous, but anyway I still don't know what exactly the harbingers of winter are here.  Sometimes it's snow.  It snowed over the weekend (while I was fantastically ill), but it's all melted now.  This week it's been sort of... grey and rainy.  Ick.  Thanks, December.

I'm happy to be much better now, though.  I can do things like... breathe.  And... eat.  I was super excited yesterday night, actually; I was famished for the first time since I got sick.  Apparently mono kills your appetite?  But mine is back WITH A VENGEANCE.

I'm also happy to be done with all my homework for the term.  All that's left now is a couple exams and a little presentation.  WOOT.  ^_____^

And then.... Japan!

ailing

Just in time for my

Finals to start, just as it

Snows for once, I'm sick.

It *would* happen this way, wouldn't it?  Of course.  As Sean just told me today, everything I do is epic.

So on Tuesday, I went to the IU Health Center because my throat and neck were starting to feel... off.  Once my body starts to feel off, it usually gets very bad.  So I figured I should get it checked as soon as possible.  I guess I went too soon; they did a strep test and it came back negative.

As the week wore on, I started counting the number of lymph nodes I could see and feel in my neck.  It was pretty ridiculous.  They're still grotesquely swollen.  -___-  I felt worse and worse, my appetite went away, and I couldn't swallow without wincing.

Today I woke up after 12 hours of sleep and was still exhausted.  I could barely make myself drink a glass of milk for breakfast after not eating dinner yesterday, so I decided that I couldn't wait another day to go back to the health center, and I went instead to a place called PromptCare or something.  The glorious news that they had for me was not that I have strep, but that I have both strep and mono.  Awesome.  Just in time for finals, just as Japan is looming, and just as we get our first real snowfall that I'd want to go out and play in.  Ridiculous.

>:|

that time of year

It's that time of year,
When Christmas spirit pours from
Everywhere. And how!

It's been pretty amusing to watch the transformation in stores. Some started Christmas in October, and it seems like prices are getting slashed in anticipation of the holiday season even more rapidly this year, probably due to the fact that consumer spending is expected to drop dramatically. I just read an article in the New York Times about Saks Fifth Avenue and how they're cutting some of their prices up to 80% already. Amazing.

I haven't actually done any Christmas shopping yet, myself, but it's looking like a pretty easy season. The internet now offers more gifts than ever, and I have some extra time to spend making creative gifts (i.e. spending less money). :)

I was pretty excited today; I busted out my Jack Skellington earmuffs for the first time this season and got lots of compliments on them. :D Winter is a fun season to dress for, haha. I'm also excited because I was talking to one of the guys from Dresden who was on the CC team, and he has promised to send me a Christmas care package with more chocolate. What he wants in exchange is... barbecue sauce?

Classes are winding down, which is nice. One of my profs has canceled all his lectures for next week, and I had two classes with him, so that frees up my schedule a lot. I also won't be (I don't think) teaching the lab that I generally teach, since there won't be any new work to do. The only nagging thing for me now is calculus. It seems like that work never ends. I can't say that I'm terribly excited about Calc IV next semester, but we'll see how it goes. Hopefully we'll be learning a lot more; I feel like this term I didn't pick up a lot of new material from 311. Meh.

Oh, did you hear that "meh" was added to the dictionary? It's a very recent thing. I was pretty excited. :3

Anyway, that's about all for the moment. I have calculus to do!

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. :)

sleepy

Who would have thought that

One can survive on just ten

Hours of sleep a week?

Well, I wouldn't've.  But it turns out that, not only is it possible, it's a helluva lot of fun!  The Cluster Challenge this year has been a really different experience from last year, but these German fellows are a (metric) shitton of fun.  :)  We've spent a lot of time with the cluster, but it's also been a good time to, like, learn about other cultures, yadda, yadda.  But, seriously, it's been interesting.  They've not missed a chance to make fun of me for the US university system; I'm missing a test and a couple homeworks this week, and my professors requested that I do them and fax them, which is apparently completely a completely unreasonable idea in their system.  I guess I thought it was sort of unreasonable, too.  Grr.  Anyway, we have been having a great time.  The organizers set us up with a trip to the Main Event, which is a place near Austin with laser tag, rock wall climbing, bowling, an arcade, pool tables, ...

The challenge itself went well.  We ran more (I think?) data sets than any other team, and we didn't run into any issues.  The MIT team didn't show up, and the StonyBrook team from last year essentially bailed them out, with help from Dell.  The MIT rack didn't show up; they thought that they were going to run a rack with GPUs in it, but there was no chance that they'd finish in time to present it here.  So the SB kids who were supposed to just be volunteers asked Dell for a rack and some nodes since they got here.  They scored an impressive... 16 GFLOPs on Linpack.  Ouch.  Arizona is running a Windows cluster, which is an interesting crippling in itself.  The Colorado team was running some hardware that was scheduled to be announced, but it didn't wind up happening, so they had to rebuild their cluster the morning the competition started lest they violate their NDAs.  Awful.  But the other teams (Purdue, Alberta, and Taiwan) seemed to do alright.

There's about a thousand other things that I could say, but I have to go and not sleep some more.  :)

more adventure!

We're off to Austin!

Computer adventure!

LOL.  We're nerds.

So Austin should be fun, no?  I'm pretty excited that I'll get to see Ben, Nick, (Ilya?,) and Aaron again--the StonyBrook guys--, and I'm ALSO super excited because some of the German guys from our team happened to find out that I... love dark chocolate.  And we all know what that means.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

update

Should I do it? Go
To Seattle? Or am I
Destined for elsewhere?


I just got a response from MS, and it turns out that both teams that I interviewed with have extended internship offers to me for next summer So..I could definitely go out to Seattle and make monies like I need to, if I want. But I desperately want to intern abroad! I need an opportunity, like, now...

seattle

A city of grey,

And cities of hot and cold,

Too many plane trips.

Seattle was fun. It was good to go back there; I remember when I was 12 or so I decided that that was where I wanted to live the rest of my life. So when Microsoft offered me a chance to interview, I jumped at it. There are pictures to be seen in my picasa album. The interview? Well, it was not quite as easy as the phone interview, but I wasn't impressed with its difficulty, either. A couple sample questions:

What's the best way to do a level-order traversal of a tree in which each node has arbitrary numbers of children, and there is an 80% chance that there will only be two levels?

What's the best way to find the previous node in an in-order traversal of a binary tree?

What's the fastest way to find the nearest common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree?

Design Expedia. (This question was unfortunate; I'm an Orbitz girl.)

If you have two sorted linked lists, what's the fastest way to merge them into one sorted list? How much extra space do you need to maintain pointers for this algorithm?

It was sort of like I was back in C343. I even got asked runtimes for all the algorithms I designed. Woot. Anyway, the moral of the story is that I felt like I totally nailed the interview. I'll know for sure later this week. I really hope that things happen such that I get the position in the Dublin dev office... but we'll see. ;)

I guess I still have to comment on the election, too! I'm really excited that Indiana went blue. AFAIK, it's the first time since LBJ that we've voted Democrat. I'm proud of you, Indiana! I'm also proud and not proud of California; they passed one bill that requires the humane treatment of all animals raised on farms within that state (i.e. Valkyrie could eat any meat that comes from California!), but they also voted yes to Prop 8? That's disappointing. I don't understand why homophobia is so rampant.

I got my new glasses yesterday, which is exciting. They're exactly the same as my old glasses... but not lost. Haha. And now they come with the added amusement that they're vaguely like Sarah Palin glasses. :)

I can't wait to leave on Saturday. My two-week adventure promises to be epic. I wound up buying a plane ticket to Toronto; since Mom offered to pay half of it (she's terrified that I would crash into a snowbank and die and then my corpse would be raped by wolves, then be stolen by Canadian lumberjacks and boiled down into syrup) it's actually cheaper than driving. Which is awesome because it saves ridiculous amounts of time (2 hours in a plane is way better than 20 hours in a car, imho).

Oh! The guys for the Cluster Challenge team from Germany--well, two of them--, are in town now. I met them yesterday finally. I think that this year is going to be lots of fun at SC! How could it not be? I mean, c'mon. It's frickin Austin.

Anyway, I think that's about all I have for the moment. Maybe I'll get better about blogging regularly sometime...

MSNBC

OMG, I'm on
TV! Why write a haiku, when
I can just show you?

chess

I finally won!

Perhaps I have strategy,

Despite what I do.

Hah!  Chess!  I won a game.  That means I get to cross it off my list.  ;)  Super awesome!

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

anticipating

Action! Adventure!

And no time to do it all!

Frickin triage time.

I can't believe how quickly next weekend is coming up! I spent way too much money on groceries this weekend preparing for it, and some cleaning, lots of homework... but there isn't time to get ready! There's a crapload of things to do now.

This past weekend: the Lotus Festival! It was pretty frickin sweet. Musical groups from all over the world came to perform. My favorite performances? Funkadesi (some kind of crazy punjab rock/rave band), Little Cow (rock band from Hungary), and the March Fourth Marching Band (from Portland, OR, a group of men on stilts and women dressed like slutty marching band performers doing silly dances to awesome jazz music). I also saw a group from Mongolia that did throat singing, which is teh awesome. Let's see... oh, there was a group that performed Celtic music that was pretty neat, and some Spanish a capella music that I liked. I didn't have a chance to see everything (the festival was sort of set up to make that impossible), but I'm really glad I dropped the $30 to check it out this year.

Also over the weekend was ridiculous amounts of working on the programming project due yesterday. Instead of building a game, we were instructed to build a game builder, which was... er... complicated. During our presentation, my team didn't choke as badly as I expected, haha.

Oh, man! The VP debates! I haven't had a chance to comment on them yet. I was fairly impressed with Palin. Not impressed in such a way that I'd want her to be the VP of my country, but from what I'd seen of her previously she was totally incapable of forming coherent sentences. She did a pretty fair job of that in the debate. Her issue was, instead, that she only had a few answers, and there were more than a few questions. So she continually fell back on things that she new that were laughably unrelated to the queries at hand. There were a few things that I learned about Biden, too. I have to admit that I was woefully undereducated on their positions at the start of the debate. But I didn't realize that he was opposed to gay marriage. I'm actually not sure that he is, even though he said that; his phrasing seemed to imply that he actually understands that there should be a separation of church and state. Wow! It's like our founding fathers designed it that way!

I spent a nonnnegligible amount of time working to get ready for my visitors next weekend, too. Shopping! Woot! And I found a place to get free-range turkey for the thanksgiving dinner I'm setting up. I'm so excited! And I just got wind of an interesting opportunity for Saturday night shenanigans when they arrive. Wouldn't want them to think that BTown is boring. ;) I've actually managed to convince myself of that this semester; it's kinda nice.

Oh, and what up with this bizarre heat wave? 80 degrees is way too hot for October.

walls

Why stay in the bounds,

Conform to the space-closers,

When I can paint them?

b words

Boys, boats, badminton,

Bread, breath, breadth, bacchanalia,

Breezy, bold, BAM!

Bad, I know.  But I feel like I've been exposed to bushels of b words lately.  Let's explain some!

Boys - Why can't I make girlfriends?  I guess it's probably because I'd much rather get filthy in a cave than get dolled up and go out for yogurt (cue Teen Girl Squad voice: Let's go get yogurt!).  Anyway, I've been meeting lots of guys and being presented with interesting opportunities--caving, stargazing, dance parties, live music shows, bike rides, and boat-building.  Which brings me to

Boats - Today was the Cardboard Boat Regatta, which I'd never heard of previously.  I guess it's to raise money for Leadership Scholarships or something, but I was excited to help the physics club build a boat out of cardboard and duct tape.  Then they raced it through a swimming pool.  lulz.

Badminton - How do you say this?  I say "bad.mitt.en".  I guess some people really pronounce it "bad.min.ton".  Hm.  News to me.

Bread - I baked!  It was pie, actually, that I baked (asian pear and pawpaw), but the crust was bready?  I think that counts.

Breath - I waited with bated breath to see if we would actually find another member for the Cluster Challenge team (we were having some difficulties because of technicalities associated with Andrew's graduating and annoyances due to Greg's nonpresence), but today we finally cemented Chris Beckley as the final member.  Woot!  It's like a (much) more complicated Goofy Giggles, haha.

Breadth - I'm glad that my education has spanned a lot of different areas.  I'm made more glad of this as I branch out and befriend people with majors vastly different from my own.  If I couldn't hold my own in a conversation about astronomy, what good would I be?

Bacchanalia - HAHA.  So at the career fair, Microsoft gave out ping pong balls with their logo on them.  So what do the CS students immediately do?  Play beer pong.  Oh, you sorry people.

Breezy - Have you noticed it's getting chillier?  I'm really thrilled about the advent of fall.  This humid summer garbage just ain't right.  It was nicer in California.  :o

Bold - It's unfortunate that not many people are bold any longer.  We seem to hide behind our little keyboards instead of owning up and interacting face-to-face like real people ought to.  I was reminded of this fact today at the regatta when a real, live guy actually came up and hit on me.  Crazy, I know.  And he even said he doesn't have Facebook!  Le gasp!

BAM! - I pretty much just like this word.  There's no sense leaving it out of a set of b words.  ;)

kiyaaaaaa!

A huge jump, scary!

Looking down, far scarier,

But frickin awesome!