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Dec. 14th, 2008 @ 02:13 pm 7-minute writing exercise from September
In September I had to take this 3-week writing workshop as part of my professional development for IGERT.  Almost every class, we started with "7-minute journal writing."  The instructor would give us a topic and for 7 minutes from the time she announced the topic, we were supposed to write non-stop without lifting our pencils from the paper (well obviously we were allowed to put spaces between words).  Thinking was discouraged; the only thing that was supposed to count from this exercise was how many words you could write in that time.  Our topics were: "You ideal job," "What would you be doing if you weren't in grad school," "You closest friend," and "What you like most about living in New York City."  Here is what I wrote for that last topic:

What I like most about living in New York City

is that I can’t walk down the street without hearing at least three different languages per block.  That I see large dogs riding in strollers on the subway and the people playing saxophone in the park.  I love the extreme sense of 3-dimensionality I get when looking up as I walk past at the sharp edges of buildings on a clear day. That sometimes I smell the overpowering odor of pancakes randomly on a street in the afternoon.  That I am Nuts 4 Nuts, but mostly just the smell.  That in the summertime, you can almost always hear a party in the distance.  That I can still get away and into the woods at Lamont, but still look at the lights from the GW Bridge on the way home .  That there is just enough room for me, Tony and Heathbar, so Heathbar is never hard to find.  I love the availability of arts and museums, even if I rarely go there.  I like knowing things are there. I like having friends come visit me because they want to see New York.  I like that I am only 2.5 hours from Tony’s parents, so it feels like I am close to family.  I love fall, changing leaves, crisp air, the impossibility of the thought that this sweltering city could ever be cold and dark, and even filled with snow, begins to fade.  Vortices of leaves and candy wrappers, swirling, gathering, like protostars, around the corners of buildings.  And spring – the park alive again.   Pinkberry.  Babies, transported in more ways than I knew existed.  Softball fields filled with 60,000 people listening to a philharmonic orchestra.  People. People. People. Unexpected mermaids, droves of Santas, hoardes of zombies, people you think are in costume for something, but who knows.  Looking up: arches, iron fences, grotesque faces, and all kinds of architectural flourishes I don’t know the name for above the familiar scaffolding and store-fronts. “Angels in the architecture… Halleluiah.”  Looking in the window of the preschool/daycare in the building next to mine.  Laughing at overheard jokes, getting a wink.



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Dec. 2nd, 2008 @ 01:16 pm November highlights
11/7-10 Parents fly in to NY, we drive up to see Laura' dance club show and see her house and kitten, volleyball tournament at Yale.  Yay family, yay kitten, yay awesome dance show, yay fun volleyball
11/11 Phantom of the Opera with Tony through the law school
11/20 Ice skating in Central Park with Tony through the law school
11/22-23 Natural History museum with Anna, lunch with my Arabic class, volleyball tournament in Philadelphia (stayed with Tony's parents; Tony's mom came and watched our whole tournament and came down to be our coach for the last game)
11/26-29 Thanksgiving with Tony's family in Massachusetts.  Delicious food, fun times (their dog Curly)

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Nov. 2nd, 2008 @ 06:13 pm September-October
9/19-26  Lherzolite Conference at Mt Shasta, CA.  Field trip before conference was fun: nice camping, neat geology, fun people, giant trees.  My favorite part was swimming in the gorgeous Smith River.  The conference itself had lots of interesting talks but pretty jam-packed schedule and it was kind of a tiring week.  I presented a poster about my research so far; I thought it went pretty well

10/3,4  Camping by the river at Lamont with some other grad students and Tony.  Tasty cookout, nice campfire, s'mores and hot cocoa, Kat played the guitar and people sang.  Oct 4 was the Lamont Open House.  I worked at the geochemistry exhibit, which was fun, but I had lots of work to do so I didn't see much of any of the other exhibits.

I've been paired with a "little sister" through Big Brothers Big Sisters.  Her name is Anna and she is in 6th grade.  We've had a couple outings together which were pretty fun.  We went to the Bronx Zoo a couple weekends ago and bowling last weekend.

My birthday was pretty good.  I got gold earrings from my parents, diamond earrings and USB-heated gloves (for fingers that get cold typing) from Tony, a home-knit hat from Meghan, and cards and such from other family.  Meghan had a birthday dinner for me at her apartment with some friends the weekend after my birthday, which was really fun.

I've done some more fun New York Cares projects like walking shelter dogs and making breakfast at St John the Divine, but I'm kind of cutting back on NY Cares projects.  I do a weekly project reading with kids (and dogs) at an elementary school in East Harlem at 7am on Thursdays and that runs until December, but I probably won't sign up for any other projects in November. 

Tony and I went to the Central Park Zoo last Monday.  In some ways it is better than the Bronx Zoo because you can get a lot closer to the animals and the animals were very active, especially the polar bear.  I think I'm a bit too gleeful about watching animals at the zoo for a 24-year-old.

I have a 4 day weekend for Election Day holiday this weekend.  Yesterday, I spent the whole day cleaning my apartment and doing laundry.  I wanted to devote today to working on my research, but that didn't happen :(  I was tempted in to doing a little more cleaning in the morning and going to the farmer's market.  Then in the afternoon, I tried to get some work done, but I need to transfer data to this old Mac to analyze it and I can't get the Mac to read the CD (or now, eject it).  Oh well, I always know I'm not going to get as much done over a weekend as I plan, and I'm just super excited to have such a clean apartment.
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Oct. 16th, 2008 @ 02:35 pm Birthday list
I will try to post an update about what I've been up to in the past month, but first let me address a time-sensitive issue.  My birthday is next week, so if anyone who intended to get me something for my birthday, hasn't  done so yet, consider the following:

-earrings
-volleyball shoes
-volleyball socks (knee-high cotton athletic socks)
-these socks (admittedly, I mostly just want these for part of my Halloween costume, but I actually like the look of them too)
-door frame pull-up bar
-ca$h monie$  =P
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Sep. 5th, 2008 @ 11:15 am End of Summer
Summer has ended (on a high note) and the new semester has begun (on some sort of warble?). 

I spent the last week of August in Maine with Tony's family (parents, younger brother + his girlfriend, grandmother, 2 pairs of aunts and uncles, 3 9-year-old cousins and an 11-year-old cousin, and 2 dogs).  We stayed in a large house right across from a sandy beach near Bath.  It really a wonderful vacation.  We went to the beach every day, where we played wiffle ball, re-engineered the beach to make a private island, swam and played in the water (but not that much, it was pretty cold), read, built a sand county that strangers stopped to take pictures of and was possibly visible from space, buried people in the sand, walked down to the Civil War era fort at the end of the beach, played with the dogs,  etc, etc.  At another beach we had to drive a short distance to get to, we could walk out to a rocky island along a sand bar exposed at low tide, and there was a tidal current/river thing running along the beach we could float down, and further upstream a big flat where we dug up some clams (and took them home to eat them, but then let them go after a couple days because everyone was kind of grossed out by their giant long necks and didn't really want to kill them anyway).   At the house, we played Rock Band, ate lots of food, celebrated a number of birthdays that didn't actually occur while we were there, watched episodes of Get Smart, made friendship bracelets, read, played with the dogs, etc, etc.  I ate a lobster and found it tasty (last time I tried lobster, it kind of grossed me out and made me feel kind of nauseous), but about an hour later I felt kind of nauseous, so maybe lobster just doesn't agree with me (though I was riding in a car on twisty roads, so that might have been the real cause).

From Maine, we went to Lake Winnipesaukee for the Labor Day weekend (just with Tony's immediate family), where we did typical lake things: swimming (water was much nicer at the lake than the beach in Maine), reading, riding in the boat, walking in the woods, picking huckleberries, jigsaw puzzle, eating too much food...

We got back Monday evening and classes started Tuesday morning.  The apartment is still a huge mess, and I haven't even unpacked my bags from vacation because I have a kind of hectic schedule this semester.  This is partly because of the way my classes are scheduled and partly because I'm doing lots of things outside of classes.  I have class until 7 on Mon and Wed and until 5:30 on Tu and Th, and I will often have softball games Tuesday and Thursday nights at Lamont, requiring me to leave the city around 6, so I think I will be making dinners in the morning a lot this semester and just heating them up at dinner time.  Things that are or will be making me busy: taking classes (elementary Arabic, geochemical thermodynamics, numerical methods for partial differential equations, academic writing workshop, seminars), TAing intro geology lab, Lamont softball league, Columbia club volleyball, scattered New York Cares projects, research (I need to make a poster for the conference I am going to in 2 weeks).

My most interesting class is definitely elementary Arabic.  In theory this is practical for my fieldwork in Oman, but it's not really necessary for that and I suspect I will not be able to learn enough to have any sort of useful conversation.  Really it's just kind of fun.  It hurts my brain in a very unfamiliar way, and I like that.  We are starting out just learning the alphabet, a few letters every day and learning a couple vocabulary words that can be written with the letters we have learned.  It's weird sounding out words syllable by syllable, then the brain clicks a moment later and puts all the syllables together into a word, and then a slightly longer moment later the brain the recognize it as a word we've actually learning as vocabulary and to assign a meaning to it.  It's very strange to read this way, and it's hard to imagine that I will ever be able to read full words at a time.  Is this how children learn to read?

Oh, IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT.  Well, not actually important, but I figured I might have lost you by the end of the post, and someone might be interested.  If anyone is interested in learning about where I work, the Lamont Open House is Saturday, October 4. (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is the earth science campus/research facility of Columbia and is located across the Hudson and north of Manhattan).  There will be lots of exhibits (some aimed at children some aimed at adults), public lectures, and campus tours.  I'm signed up to work at the geochemistry exhibit again, and I might also give a campus tour again.



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Aug. 20th, 2008 @ 04:03 pm spring and summer
I need to either update more often or completely abandon my livejournal.  Well here are the last 5 months:

-My first year in grad school finished smoothly.  This summer I finally started getting some research done.  Since I've been more productive I am feeling better about this grad school thing.  Throughout the year I have doubted whether I really want a career in academia or if I even find research at all interesting, but right now I'm feeling pretty good about it.  I am looking forward to this semester.  I'm not that excited about the classes I'll probably be taking (unless I get into the Arabic class; that would be fun, but I think it will fill up before my registration appointment comes up), but I am looking forward to TAing a class this fall (the Solid Earth System, which I think just means intro geology for earth science majors).

-I spent the month of July at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.  My adviser used to work there and still "spends his summers there."  The quotation marks are due to the fact that he was gone most of the time I was there, but it still was productive for me because he introduced me to people who helped me do X-ray diffraction (tells you what minerals are in a powdered sample), Sr isotopes (can tell me about where the water my samples reacted with came from), and carbon dating on my samples.  But also, since my adviser wasn't around, I didn't necessarily feel like I needed to spend long hours in the office/lab, so usually I spent about 5 hours at work and the rest of the day at the beach.  I bought a cheap bicycle and rode to work every day, for a total of 180 miles.  The weather was mostly beautiful, and it was a pretty restful month.  Tony came to visit one weekend and we went to Martha's Vineyard.  My friend Tom came to visit another weekend, so I wasn't too bored and lonely the whole time.  The best thing there was definitely the bioluminescent ctenaphores, or comb jellies.  They look kind of like jellyfish, but they don't sting.  In the daytime, the sunlight reflects and refracts off lines that rib their bodies, so they look kind of like disco UFOs.  At night they light up a greenish color when you brush against them, and in late summer, the water is full of them, especially very tiny ones, so that if you swim at night, the water glows in a trail behind you.

-I've had lots of visitors this summer!  Dan and Lisa came in June for a couple days on their way to Europe.  We saw the NY Phil in Central Park, checked out Chinatown, Wall Street, Battery Park, and took the Staten Island ferry just to get the view of the Statue of Liberty and the city from the water.  Since Laura was working in New York this summer, I got to have fun hanging out with her (she and her friend Laura also stayed at our apartment for a week or so before the start of their lease).  Laura left last week, but before she left we saw Chicago on Broadway (I want to be a "jazz killer" now!) and had brunch at Max Brenner ("chocolate by the bald man," a restaurant that specializes in chocolate, though we had savory meals with just a fantastic hot chocolate on the side).   Franklin, a friend from Caltech, came to visit last week.  He joined Laura, Tony, and I for that brunch at Max Brenner, then I toured around midtown with him for the day.  We went to the Top of the Rock (top of Rockefeller Center), which is much better than the Empire State Building in my opinion, good views even though it was somewhat hazy out.  Tony joined us that night to see Gypsy on Broadway (I want to be a stripper now!).  Becky came to visit the next evening and all four of us went out to see Angie Aparo at the Living Room downtown.  Becky's bus was late, so she ended up having to go straight from the us station to the concert, with her big hiking backpack, duffel, and day pack.  Franklin left the next day (Sunday), so the only remaining guest was Becky.  Oh, that's not true, Tony's mom came Sunday afternoon and stayed overnight, and took me and Becky out to lunch, and she stayed over night and we all ate Pinkberry and played Boggle.  Monday, Becky and I walked through Central Park and saw the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway in the evening (I want to be a phantom now!).  Yesterday, I took Becky to Lamont, but I didn't do any work there, it was strictly show and tell and recess.  We hiked down to the waterfall and then played volleyball for 3 hours.  Extremely fun, but we wore ourselves out and went to bed before 10 last night.

-NICARAGUA!  In May I visited Becky in Nicaragua, and had an awesome time, but I never bothered to update about it because Becky's account was quite sufficient.  (Read the entry from May 18th "In which Lisa visits me in Nicaragua and we slide down an active volcano in a thunderstorm" from [info]beccabunny42)

-This week and last week, Tony's been having tons (around 30?) of "on-campus" interviews for firm jobs next summer. "On-campus" interview = short interview at a hotel in Time Square.  He's been getting lots of call-backs (longer interviews scheduled for later at the firms) because he's awesome.  Anyway, today he had a gap in his interview schedule, so I met him in Time Square and we saw WALL-E.  I really liked it; it was cute and funny though I can see some people might find it annoying that most of the dialog is just "WALL-E!" "Eve-a!"

-Today I went to the dentist.  I love the feeling of clean teeth!  Seems I may grind my teeth at night and this may be related to why my jaw feels like it cramps sometimes when someone makes me smile while I am eating/drinking, so I have to go back Friday to get impressions for a night guard, which will cost $200, bleh.  I wonder if I should cancel that appointment and just try wearing the $5 mouth guard I got for softball?

-I went to Tony's grandma's lake house on Lake Winnipesaukee for Memorial Day and 4th of July weekends.  I have to agree with Tony that the Lake is pretty much the best place in the world; I can't wait to go back for Labor Day.

-Well, really I can wait to go back for Labor Day, because in the between time I'll be going to Maine with Tony's family for a week at a house on the beach.  Fun fun fun.

Since I am getting to things that will be happening in the future, I will stop writing for now.  You can here all about those next time I update (in another 5 months??).
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Apr. 2nd, 2008 @ 02:24 pm It's been a while (nsf, spring break, earrings & more)
In case you have no idea what I've been up to:

-Grad school at Columbia is pretty good.  I am just barely starting doing anything research-related and have mostly just been taking classes.  The classes are okay and fairly interesting, but not as challenging as my undergrad classes at Caltech and a lot of the material I am seeing is review for me.  I always thought my ideal career would be just to remain a student taking classes forever, but really I'm starting to feel like it's just kind of drifting.  Maybe my real ideal career is to remain a student and take classes forever but changing subject areas every couple years.  Shrug. 

-The big grad school related news is that I got the NSF graduate research fellowship, which is pretty prestigious and gives me a $30,000/yr stipend for the three years after my IGERT fellowship runs out (which is really more important to my adviser than to me because I would get a stipend anyway).   I really wasn't expecting to get it, so I was pretty excited when I found out about it a couple days ago.

-During the second week of March, Tony's mom came up for a couple days and we went to a taping of the Colbert Report one night and to Vienna Teng (+ Amber Rubarth + Alex Wong) show the next night.  Very fun.  Tony has Daily Show tickets reserved next week, but I will be seeing my sister's dance show then.  However, I have Daily Show tickets reserved for April 28, when Tony has class (want to come with me?)

-The next week was Spring break, and I spent half of it at home in FL and half here in NY.  It was really nice to be home reading in the sun by the pool in the sun, and doing all the home sorts of things.  For the second half of the break, my family came up to NYC.  The highlight of the visit was seeing Wicked, but of course the general silliness that occurs when my family gets together is just as fun.

-March was visiting prospective student season, so I went out to dinner a few nights with visiting students (on the department's dollar).  The most fun was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to go to a good pizza place and an ice cream shop.

-I got my hair cut again today, and it was such nice weather I decided to walk up through Central Park for a while instead of just getting on a bus near the salon.  On my way from the park to a subway station, I saw a Claire's so I decided to go ahead and get my ears pierced.  I'm not sure it was a good decision.  I think the earrings are too big and flash too much, and generally just don't look right on me.  I should have at least chosen smaller ones.  Oh well.

-Yesterday was my last volleyball game for a while.  I play on the Columbia club team and we play in an NYC rec league, but we're going to skip the spring season because it overlaps exams/graduation/etc.  We really sucked and lost 2/3 games to a team we should have destroyed, but we haven't been able to practice for 3 weeks because the gym we normally practice in is being rennovated.  This past weekend we went to a tournament at Rutgers and got second place, but there were only 4 teams there, so I guess it's good, but it was a kind of lame tournament.  Hopefully I will not become entirely inactive for the rest of the semester.  Tony and I keep playing squash at least once a week, and now that the weather may gradually be getting warmer, maybe we can play more football in Central Park with other Fleming alums.
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Feb. 22nd, 2008 @ 09:33 am Snow day
Lamont is closed today because there is too much snow for the shuttle to run!  So on one hand this means my day is no longer broken up by 2 1-hour bus rides, so I can work uninterrupted... On the other hand it's my first snow day so maybe I should go to the park and play in the snow...
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Feb. 13th, 2008 @ 07:46 pm The darkness strikes again
After I complained about the darkness of my apartment killing my orchid, I received some plant lamps for Christmas.  Then in late January, I acquired some plants (2 ornamental pepper plants, a zebra plant, a spider plant, and a polka dot plant) and have been letting them bask happily in the lamp for about 10 hours a day for the last couple weeks.  Today I got my electric bill and our average daily energy usage for January was 40% higher than our average for the last few months.  To be fair, this can't just be due to the lamp, because I checked the box and the lamp is 150W, on for ~10hrs/day -->produces an extra 1.5kWhrs/day, which is only 30% higher than average (and translates to ~$10 extra/month), and the lamp was only introduced for less than half the billing period.  (I suspect the extra difference is due to Tony's desk top computer, which he was able to start using again after I got him a big monitor for Christmas).  Anyway, the point is that I'm left with a dilemma: is it worth $10/month extra and the guilt of increasing my energy use by 30% just to have live plants in my apartment?  (If I decide to turn off the lamp for good, the plants will not be left to shrivel in the dark, I'll take them to my new office, which has an entire wall made out of window.)

Fate seems to have weighed in with the opinion that should cut down my energy use - for the last 3 hours the power's been out in my apartment (except in the kitchen).
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Jan. 23rd, 2008 @ 03:33 pm Oman
Current Mood: jet-lagged
This entry was written earlier this past week, when I first got back from Oman, but I was slow to add the photos, so it is just being posted now (a week after I got back):

For those of you who didn't know, I spent the last 3 weeks in Oman, doing geologic field work with my adviser and about 10 other people.




I have more labeled photos on facebook (though many are the same as here), and all of my photos are on photobucket, but those are unlabeled and I will have to link you specifically if you want to see those.
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Dec. 20th, 2007 @ 10:42 am Things I need to buy for Oman
* Polarized sunglasses
* Car charger for my cell phone
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Dec. 13th, 2007 @ 09:54 pm I'm not in California anymore
I could have sworn I just felt a small earthquake, but I don't think that's supposed to happen in New York City.  I'm convinced something was making my chair shake though...

It was sleeting or slushing or something all afternoon today.  It was very difficult to walk on the sidewalk without falling down.

On Monday, I collected a bunch of pine branches from Lamont, and today I made them into a Christmas wreath which is now hanging in my hall.

I miss sunshine.  This is partly the fault of latitude, the sun really does set at 4:30pm, but it is also largely the fault of my apartment whose only windows open on a deep air shaft, so that at 2:30 in the afternoon I think it's already nighttime.  My new time waster is clicking through rental pages looking at apartments whose descriptions include the phrases "sunfilled" and "bright exposures."
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Dec. 2nd, 2007 @ 08:41 am I'm not crazy, just from FL
so it's OK for me to go out on the street in my bathrobe to take pictures of snow in front of my apartment first thing in the morning:





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Nov. 27th, 2007 @ 12:16 pm A balanced budget
Hmm, if I spend $200 more before I get my next paycheck in January, it will mean that since coming to NY I will have spent more money than I've made.   Not that this is a problem; I have sufficient money in my savings account to easily cover Christmas shopping and the next two months rent...perhaps just an interesting observation for people who think it's a good idea to buy themselves lots of expensive gifts and deplete their bank accounts before going to grad school...  =P
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Nov. 26th, 2007 @ 03:46 pm Thanksgiving
I had a great time in Germany with my family over the Thanksgiving break.  First we stayed at Schwangau, in Bavaria, where there were two pretty 19th century castles, Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein, and lots of snow.  We also went to Ulm, where my dad drove his car through the farmer's market (which was very nice) and we went to the bread museum which had not bread (the founders "firmly believed that bread is not an artifact to be displayed, but a food"); Nordlinger which is a pretty town with a meteor crater nearby; and Rothenburg which was very pretty but sadly both the Medieval Crime Museum and the craftsmen museum were closed.  Once, Rothenburg was attacked, and on a whim the attacker declared that if one of the councilmen could drink 3.25 L of wine in one go the town would be spared, and he did, and it was.  Supposedly.  Finally, we went to Freiburg where Laura is studying abroad and celebrated Thanksgiving there.  We stayed at a super nice hotel and had a ridiculous (but delicious) dinner that included strange appetizers (it was a 'surprise' on the menu, so I don't remember what the waiter said it was), quail, fish, venison, sorbet, and dessert, with each dish looking like a work of art.  We got to spend a couple days hanging out with Laura, lots of fun.  I love spending time with my family because we are all a bunch of sillies and silly is fun.

Now that Thanksgiving is over, I need to start working on acquiring things to be thankful for next year =P  Here is a my list of things I want (kind of a combination of a Christmas wish list and a shopping list for the next time I go to Target):
Flannel PJ pants
Long-sleeve t-shirtish shirts (though not the really tshirty ones like my caltech vball shirt)
Spices
Fondue pot
Something to decorate my empty hall wall
Wall clock for the oven closet
Step ladder/stool
door mat
long narrow hall carpet that actually fits in my hall and doesn't slip
new bras
new hair clip things (I broke both of mine)
removable showerhead thingy
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Nov. 15th, 2007 @ 09:54 pm Last weekend
Last weekend I Tony and I drove out to the Catskills on Saturday to see lots of fall leaves before the peak colors were totally finished.  Wanna see some pictures?

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Oct. 28th, 2007 @ 08:15 pm teh poles r hott
The radiators clicked on today.  Well, not the actual radiators because I have the knobs turned to the off position, but the weird metal poles in my apartment are now hot, so I could  turn on the radiators.  Hooray, I now risk burning my knees every time I sit down to use the bathroom!

(also I had a swiffer stick lying the corner of the living room where the other metal pole is and it melted to it...also the radiator in my bedroom wasn't all the way off at first and it made hissing and clicking noises, which Heathbar did NOT appreciate)
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Oct. 28th, 2007 @ 01:53 pm A Message from the Minister of Well-Being
Current Location: Apt 4E
Current Mood: working, yet silly
Current Music: the electric buzz seems louder this weekend
"A simple cup of green tea imbued with a wisdom beyond wisdom, capable of enlightening both mind and body.  We invite you to heat the water, brew the tea and sip its greatness, taking in its teachings."

Yesterday I drank hot chocolate and got very little done.  Today I am drinking green tea and have been a least somewhat more productive.  A mere coincidence?  Unlikely.
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Oct. 26th, 2007 @ 06:03 pm My birthday and beyond
Current Location: Apt 4E
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: drizzles
Last weekend I went home for the Herald Hunt, which fell on my birthday this year.  We solved the whole thing, but had made a mistake in one of the 5 initial puzzles, which slowed us down a bit, so we didn't win a cruise, but we came in 7th out of thousands of people so that's not bad.  It's always fun just not to be totally stumped at the final clue.  I think I may try to see if other grad students would be interested in doing a mock version of the Hunt at Lamont or on the Columbia campus like Daddy and Dan have done for me and Becky at home the last couple years we couldn't go to the real Hunt.  There's going to be a Herald Hunt in May in DC, which hopefully I'll be able to go to.

I got a big fluffy bathrobe for my birthday, but it's been too warm here to wear it.  Monday the high was something like 78, but it's been drizzly and cooling off the last couple days, so hopefully I'll get in some quality lounging time in my new bathrobe this weekend.

Tony's gone home this weekend to fetch his car, so I'm home alone with Heathbar.  I've actually managed to leave my schedule for this weekend completely clear, so I'm planning to finally finish my NSF application, which I figure I have a less than 1% chance of winning, but why not (it's like playing the lottery to win external funding, only it's free to enter...if hours and hours of my time are considered to be worth less than a couple $).  I meant to devote the weekend before last to this, but I ended up having homework and doing some really thorough house-cleaning; so all I accomplished then was reading advice on what the essays should be about, asking for reference letters and requesting transcripts.

My volleyball team has a game on Halloween, and I think we should all dress up somehow.  Problem is face paint will run when we sweat and mask sort of things will impede vision/speaking/breathing.  If it weren't for the facepaint problem, I think it would be awesome if we dress up as mimes.  (I just decided that as I started typing that sentence.)
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Oct. 9th, 2007 @ 07:19 pm The weekly update
I feel like my livejournal has probably gotten fairly boring because it's always just me saying "Wheee, my life is so fun, here's what I did this past week," but that's how it will continue to be, so too bad for you people who come to the blogosphere looking for drama.   Anyway.

Saturday was Open House at Lamont.  Tony's mom and grandma came up for it, and of course brought us goodies too (I never knew how much I liked pumpkin pie!).  It was a very nice warm and sunny day for Open House (at least in the shade it was nice).  I didn't get to see a lot of the exhibits because I was volunteering, but I did get to see Marc Spiegelman's famous mantle rheology exhibit (a bathtub filled with cornstarch and water).  I volunteered in the geochemistry tent from 1-3 pm, showing people how earthquakes work with a block and spring model and letting them play a name-that-rock-type game to win a piece of candy.  From 3-4pm, I led a tour of the Lamont campus.  I had spent about 2 hours the night before planning the night before where I would take people and what I would tell, but I ended up only having 6 people on my tour (3 of which I had brought).  Oh well, I'm glad to have learned about Lamont history in preparation for it anyway.  After Open House, we drove back to the city, walked around a street fair on Broadway and went to dinner.  A couple hours later, I met Phong (one of the other students in my program in Nepal) and one of his college friends for second dinner and going out to see 'The Darjeeling Limited.'

Sunday Tony's family left about 5 hours before I woke up (I got back from the movie after 2 am, so I slept in past 11).  Tony and I played squash for a couple hours, thoroughly exhausting me, but I feel like I'm getting much better at squash.  They still haven't set the schedule for intramural squash...I'm thinking of demanding me deposit back.  In one of the games, Tony started trying to distract me during my serve, which I found unsportsmanlike and infuriating, so I hit him intentionally on a couple shots, which made me feel much better.

Monday's volleyball practice went much better than any so far.  I found last Tuesday's match kind of frustrating (people not knowing their defensive positions, no one sure of what to do for serve receive rotations), and in general I've found club volleyball to be kind of low intensity.  It doesn't help that I'm on the second team (most of the new people and the not as good people).  But Monday we got to go over rotation and then in our scrimmage we were playing sooo much better.  I've also been named co-captain of my team, so now that we have 2 of us who can make authoritative decisions about rotations, I think we can start playing even more smoothly in future matches.  We were actually beating the first team for most of the scrimmage (we let them catch up around 15 and  ended up losing 25-23), and we were playing with lots of energy and communication, so I'm not as disappointed in the club anymore, though I still miss the Caltech team

...with whom I will soon be reunited!  On November 4, Caltech is having alumni games for soccer, volleyball, and basketball, and I'm using my frequent flier miles to go.  It works out really well because I have Monday and Tuesday off that weekend for Election Day holiday.  Becky's going too, and we're both flying in Friday night and staying until Monday night.   It's going to be great!  I know Vi, Meghan, and Aimee are going, and I would assume Kristen and probably Delia will come too.  I think we should get coach Brent to come too.  The volleyball team was so great freshman year (well, we were still terrible in terms of our actual record, but we all practiced hard and had a great sense of team).

I am suddenly feeling somewhat swamped with work for this weekend.  I am going on a catamaran and out to dinner with the other first years on Saturday, but I had to cancel marfage with Tom because I have too much work... oh well, it's about time I feel a little academic pressure because up until now, the balance has been strongly tilted towards too much fun.
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