Pumpkin Carving Festivus 3

This past weekend was our third annual Pumpkin Carving Festivus. This is the hands-down favorite party amongst me and my friends, to the point where several people who graduated last year traveled several hundred miles just to make it this year. How we have fallen in love with taking giant gourds and carving intricate patterns into them above all our other activities I don't know, but when people come in from Chicago or Syracuse to do it you'd better show up!

And of course it was great fun again. I have an established reputation as "the artsy one" when it comes to pumpkin carving, which I blame my uncle for because he bought us a book of pumpkin carving patterns and tools when everyone else in our area was still stuck on doing plain jack-o'-lanterns. As I am never considered exceptionally artsy in anything else because my drawing ability plateued around age ten this means I spend a decent amount of thought on how to do a good pumpkin...
I decided a ghost rising from his grave would be a good starter. After a bit of work, here's the final product-Of course, later on a friend of mine busted my bubble by looking at this photo and saying "did you carve a turtle on your pumpkin?" Sigh... Perhaps I don't get to call myself artsy after all.
My gravestone+ghost pumpkin when illuminated. I think it turned out nicely.
Partway through work for Pumpkin #2, which is wolves howling at the moon (for full disclosure, this was partly inspired from a pattern). The main problem here was my little pumpkin carving tool decided to break not too far into things- some of the guys had been pretty rough in using them- so I was suddenly faced with using a tiny saw blade with duct tape wrapped around the end in order to get the fine details. Which I did eventually, but I probably spent nearly an hour carving everything out as it was so painstakingly slow...
Wolves howling. I'm satisfied, though I should note that my favorite pumpkin of the night was a joint project from several people. Ever wonder what happens when a pumpkin drinks too much pumpkin ale?
Even better, a few of his pumpkin buddies looked downright concerned about his condition-
Unfortunately, later this night marked the first and only time my pumpkins got destroyed by pumpkin smashers. (Except the vandals left drunken pumpkin and his friends. Who would have guessed the sort of person who would smash pumpkins on a Saturday night would identify with such a state?) Quite understandably, this makes me sad. Stupid cretins.

All is not lost however- today one of my suitemates recieved a Pumpkin Lite-Brite set in a care package from her mother. You either recall why this is brilliant from your childhood or you don't. It cheered me up at least, hopefully enough to last until Pumpkin Carving Festivus next year.

Testing Physics

Um, yeah. There's really no way to display this picture without giving away that I went skydiving this past weekend, is there?

Basically, this is something that I've wanted to do even back in New Zealand, but we just never got around to it. A few other students here in the program were keen on going, though, so we joined up and finally did it halfway towards Sacramento from the Bay Area. Mind it was $100 for a tandem jump from 13,000 feet, which is a relative steal as far as these things go...
Our motley crew, waiting for the plane to take us up. Mind I didn't notice at the time that I was the only one of us with a purple harness; this was only pointed out to me later...

It should also be noted that it turns out that the sort of people who decide to be professional skydivers are really the sort to get excited upon the word that they're ferrying a bunch of students working at the SETI Institute. As in they get very much into the joke of which one of them we've come to take away, and appreciate responses like "sorry, we're only looking for intelligent life..." and "I could tell you the truth [about aliens], but then I'd have to kill you."

Which raised the obvious question in my mind of why exactly people who professionally do SETI and people who professionally skydive are probably considered mildly crazy (probably in slightly different ways, but not much), and why at the same time you would trust someone society at large considers a bit crazy to jump out of an airplane with you and make sure you land safely. But I digress...
On the ride up- the guy sitting in front of me was the guy who took all the pictures you see here (I ordered them, seems kind of silly to go skydiving and not have pictures!) and the guy behind is the guy who operated the parachute and all that... This plane btw was a little one, just big enough to hold 15-20 people, and we were sitting crammed in on two benches by the window like they do in WWII movies.

And because it's inevitable to be asked, no, I really wasn't scared at all- there might have been a bit of a "huh, I'm actually going to do this" thought when the plane was taking off but I never gave it another thought since.

To be honest, I am almost worried sometimes about my inability to get scared about things a lot of people get really freaked out about. This started when I was in New Zealand last year, where I never thought I could do bungy jumping but ended up realizing that rationally there's nothing to be scared of. You know the physics and how it works, you know the statistics of something happening, so why be afraid?

Skydiving is, to me, the same idea- you are about twenty times more likely to die in a car accident than jumping out of a plane and you know the physics works, so what is there to be afraid of? Just a simple kinematic equation is all.

(Yes, I realize I'm essentially saying something along the lines of learning physics helped me master my fears. I don't think that was the intended consequence, but it's definitely a nice one.)
So for anyone who is curious, in my experience it is a lot easier to skydive versus bungy jump. This is because first of all you don't have much time to think in skydiving- they open the door and everyone hops out in pretty quick succession- and because unlike bungy jumping the ground is really, really far away so that instinct of "maybe this isn't the best idea" doesn't cut in as much. Even better, in skydiving once you hit ~50 mph (terminal velocity is 120 mph when you're on your tummy) the wind resistance makes you feel like you have some weight, meaning after about a second you don't even feel like you're falling. You're just... floating, I guess, which was so great that I spent the entire time alternating between laughing and grinning like an idiot.

One cool thing I really liked about all this by the way is how we did some sort of backflip on the way out, meaning I spent the first few seconds watching the plane go away. Per my frame of reference, however, it felt like I wasn't moving, so I watched the plane go up and away at an odd angle all the while thinking "huh, that's mighty interesting!" And then I got even more excited, as it was by far the best demonstration of relative reference frames I have ever experienced and physics has destroyed any chance I have of thinking normal things even when falling out of an airplane at a hundred twenty miles an hour.
Falling. It was the most absolutely lovely sensation. In fact, he photographer spent some time towards the end trying to get me to do a thumbs up or some other gesture for photographic purposes, but honestly I was only vaguely wondering who the hell this guy was and what he wanted because I wasn't even bothering to pay attention to anything more than the moment. There's just too much to process... Now I'm told if you go skydiving again it's a lot easier to figure out what's going on the second time, but we're going to ignore that line of thought because my mom still has yet to progress beyond saying "I'm glad you survived."
Parachute deployed! This is a rather abrupt stop- taking you from 120 mph to a less splattering descent is guaranteed to be- and I was frankly amazed that it was over that quickly. I was told that free fall lasts about a minute, but it definitely seemed much shorter.

And here's something that I only remembered later, on the ground, while rethinking everything. Somewhere along the way, probably right before the instructor deployed the parachute, he shouted in my ear, "do aliens exist, yes or no? I'm not pulling until you answer!!!" Such wonderful senses of humor, those skydivers... And fyi no, I didn't answer, as a. I wasn't processing what he was saying, b. it's not like he would've heard an answer due to the wind, and c. I was too busy smiling and laughing at the awesomeness known as skydiving.
Gliding through the sky, ho-hum. Still very awesome though, it lasts maybe three or four minutes and I got to steer the parachute. Pretty simple, you have two ropes, and you pull the one on the right to go right and the one on the left to go left. If you pull one of them really, really hard you go into this nice looping spiral, which is similar to the scale of a looping decent on a tall roller coaster. The only problem I had with the parachute part is your weight is essentially held entirely in check by the straps on your legs, which isn't the most comfortable thing in the world but is obviously necessary and doesn't last long so we'll let it slide.
Coming in for landing on the landing field. Landing is so gentle that we ended up standing (slight winds and you might end up sitting instead) and you're unsteady for a second or two on your feet until you remember how to deal with real ground again.

So that is skydiving, or at least the best description I can possibly give of it. I must say explicitly though, in case it wasn't clear, that skydiving is wonderful and you all should most definitely go do it when you have the chance. Trust me on this. After all, you'd trust the astrophysics student who searches for aliens and goes skydiving on the weekends, wouldn't you?

Fun in the Snow

We had another snowstorm yesterday here in Cleveland, but what made this one interesting was how the temperature was very near freezing, making the snow ideal packing snow. So while we got several inches the snow sculptors have been out, and some of the results are really great! So last night, after a physics department mixer in a nearby coffeehouse, me, my friend Nick, and Dan Akerib, a friend and incidentally chair of the department, took a few minutes after the caffeinated chatting to take a look around.
First stop: an igloo! I'd never seen one in person before and here it was, in the part of the field usually reserved for volleyball in warmer seasons, and it was pretty darn sturdy (Dan's in the picture for scale). The only question that remained was if we could actually fit inside as the builders were nowhere to be seen...
Answer: yep, the three of us could fit quite nicely.

Nick: (after the fact) You realize we were just in an igloo with the chair of the physics department?
Me: That sounds like some sort of code for something.

Nick also mentioned to me that last year when I was in New Zealand some enterprising students built an igloo that could sleep seven: five on the ground floor and two on the first floor (naturally they tested it one night). Last year they got a LOT more snow though.

Near the igloo there was this nice chap sitting on a bench, so Nick decided to keep him company. There was also another similar gent sitting on a bench closer to the main pathway, but unfortunately some vandals had gone in and smashed him up...
Last but not least, the snow dragon! Ah! He really was a marvel, and one of the art students spent a good amount of time working on him. I'm hoping the student later went back to add a hump or two but haven't gone to check.

There are a few other sculptures that popped up today but I didn't have my camera on me. The campus is a bit more unique, though, which I think is great because winter gets pretty unbearable otherwise this time of year.

Small World

Yesterday I met up with my mentor, Mike Lemonick, who is a wonderful writer and is great fun to follow around and ask random questions from. Everyone stops to talk with him, or at least say hi, and he's teaching a science journalism grad class at NYU this semester so I went out to lunch with them.

The most entertaining thing out of all this, though, was how last night during the science writers party at Fenway Park he mentioned that his brother was from Pittsburgh, and did I know Shady Side Academy because his nephew and niece went there. "What year?" I asked.

"The nephew's a senior in college right now and his sister is two years younger," was the answer, and I promptly felt like an idiot for not thinking about Mike's last name more.

"Your nephew is best friends with my brother," I explained, "and he was over at my house nearly every day in high school. And I still see him, a bunch of us went to Penn House Brewery over winter break."

This of course resulted in a prompt comparison of notes on every angle of the subject, including the conclusion that we both knew Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire very well as Mike had worked on Three Mile Island several summers ago. Which isn't surprising at all, because I knew his brother had met his wife there and my brother's friend did as well... I will note though I did feel a bit better at all this, because when I first saw Mike he looked strikingly familiar and I couldn't figure out why!

Oh, and if we're keeping track of the "does Yvette like scientists or science writers more" tally, score one for the science writers last night as their party at Fenway was just awesome. They had a plethora chocolate covered strawberries, free drinks, and a great band and dancing, and I can't say the scientists have ever really done any of those.

Light Skiing: Brandywine and Seven Springs

I've said before that I don't really like the Ohio winter because it's cold and dreary and you can't bike everywhere. To be fair though, all this would be forgiven in my mind if there was one decent-sized hill anywhere in the area because then you could at least go skiing or sledding or commit other friction-defying acts of winter mayhem, but there really aren't so we have to make do with what we have. So it goes.

Anyway, last week we had off for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day so to celebrate our free day a few of us decided to go skiing. My friend, Alison, lives about 40 minutes outside Cleveland near the tiny ski area called Brandywine, and has connections that let us get free ski tickets. Hooray! As you can't beat free, a few of us headed out to Brandywine to spend an afternoon of skiing. It was a fair bit below freezing (in case you haven't detected a general trend in this observation) but the sun was out and blazing, and that can make all the difference.

So how tiny is Brandywine anyway? Well here's the view from the top-
Ok to be fair, that doesn't really tell you much, so here's the view from the bottom-
Realize at this point that the first picture includes the top part of the second picture, and there you have the entire vertical (which I think is about 250 feet, compared to nearly ten times that at a place like Wildcat, NH). What you're looking at here is the "black diamond" run of the resort that probably has the same inclination as a more difficult intermediate trail nearly anywhere else, and would be decent if it wasn't over in 15 seconds. I kept running an experiment to see if I could go down the whole thing without turning once, and would've succeeded except I was on rental skis and wasn't sure if I could trust them to abruptly stop as quickly as my own skis do.

Anyway, in our group three of the five were beginning skiers so luckily that only left two of us to commiserate about the lack of difficulty. We ended up doing the terrain park of sorts several times, except paradoxically you didn't have enough hill to do more than perhaps one jump of the five or six so you just coasted over the man-made ridges to make things interesting after your one jump. Somehow, this left something to be desired, but we still had fun hanging out and since it's not like I had to pay for the privilege of my lift ticket I suppose I should stop complaining. After all, it's not Ohio's fault that it's not, say, Colorado.

The interesting thing about skiing last week, by the way, is I actually went twice in one week! Yay! This doesn't happen too often due to a combination of work and geography, but I went home to Pittsburgh this past weekend and convinced my mom and dad it would be a great idea if we spent Sunday at Seven Springs (about an hour to the east of Pittsburgh). Seven Springs isn't exactly a giant mountain either if we're looking at vertical, but at 750 feet it's got Brandywine beat by a decent shot so it was fun. It was actually around the freezing point, and snowing-
It was fun to ski at Seven Springs because I used to go there several times every season right until I left for uni (I started skiing when I was 5 years old), so this was my first time skiing there in four years. The only annoying part about the whole thing was there were quite a few snowboarders who didn't know what they were doing- I don't mind snowboarders who are actually in control and are not idiots (no, really! I swear!) but there's something about boarders who go on trails too difficult for their skill level and scrape off all the good snow that really annoys me. (Such as the lack of good snow that there wasn't much of to begin with.) Now it really is kind of comical to be heading down a difficult run only to have snowboarders falling to the right and left of you, but this starts to become a lot less funny when one of them runs into you.

Yes, you read that last bit right. I was heading down my very last run when there was a Snowboarder Dude who was out of control and barreling down the slope, and boarded right across the top of my skis. Luckily I'm good enough at this to regain my balance and not fall when someone does something so asinine as run into me because he literally can't control his own actions, but Snowboarder Dude paid for this by falling head over heels a fair fraction of the slope before stopping. After noting to myself that he was all right I went past him without stopping, because to be fair I don't want to socialize with anyone who just hit me. I noticed later that he scratched up the top of my skis pretty well, too, so it's probably best I wasn't near him when I discovered that detail.

But anyway, to finish off I will note that I brought my skis and ski stuff back to Cleveland so anyone who wants to make a foray to one of the little places around here should let me know! And as my joke of the day, here's something my high school physics teacher used to tell me whenever I mentioned skiing while he was around-

Q: Why are skiers like crack addicts?
A: Because it's all they think about, all they talk about, all they do on weekends, they're obsessed with white powder, and it's going to kill them eventually.

We're Back

Clearly, I've been out of it. Sorry about that, it's been a busy and hectic beginning-of-spring-semester. Of course I am using the term "spring" lightly, as yesterday it was at least -10C on my walk to school with the wind making it feel a good several degrees less than that, so what little of my face showed felt either painful or numb (I have a rule about not biking when it never gets above freezing during the day). Can't say I like the Ohio winter very much...

Anyway, been keeping busy with summer applications, turning 22 (and we went to see Avenue Q!), skiing (more on this later), class, and things of that nature. There is also a new Quarked column titled "Form Letter for Presidential Candidates" to read through... And with that, I will upload my large backlog of pictures and try to get some order in them so I can share them with you all. Cheers!

Two Stories

1) Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in a year with my best friend from high school. I used to do this a LOT, but stopped going as frequently in high school for a variety of reasons so it was interesting. I was rather uneasy on the ice, and my brain immediately thought "wow, that looks really cold and hard!" to which my stomach thought "hey, let me see!" I then remembered that I never really liked ice skating very much, but it does provide the good opportunity to chat with an old friend so we stuck with it awhile longer. In the end I was nicely humbled by all the little kids speed-skating in circles around us and have some really impressive bruises on my kneecaps for my effort.

2) Tomorrow the Cendes family will climb into our car for the exciting 12-hour drive to New Hampshire. We tend to avoid NH at this time of year (because the low next week will be 8F, the high will be 12F and the like), but I have a cousin getting married in a huge multi-day weddings this weekend in Portsmouth, NH, so away we go. It'll hopefully be fun- I have a pretty fuchsia dress, my cousins are a fun group to hang out with, and odds are there will be one or two entertaining incidents we'll all talk about for years to come. Hooray!

If we don't freeze to death, we will also try and get a few ski runs in the week after the wedding. Unlike ice skating, I have no qualms with barreling down a hillside as fast as a car so I'm really looking forward to this! Hopefully there will be pictures assuming I find my camera charger between now and tomorrow...

Come On Babe, Why Don't We Paint The Town...

Just so you guys don't hear any wild rumors, I auditioned for Chicago earlier this week. Explanation: every semester there is a musical on campus for students, and next spring the musical is going to be everyone's favorite musical about 1920s murderesses and flapper girls. It's really a great show and it just so happens that there's a small role of a girl who only speaks Hungarian. The fact that she gets to be in one of the best songs in the show and it's a small enough role that a physics major can manage it didn't hurt either!

So Monday evening I went to tryouts with the song 42nd Street prepared (and by prepared I mean I sang it a few times to myself over the weekend sitting in my room and got a suitemate to listen a minute before I headed over). The hall was teeming with theatre people who are not quite like the average student from these parts: they're all rather loud and interesting, I'd say, and a lot of them were borderline annoying because they liked to be overly dramatic. (Go figure.) I think what annoyed me most was how every girl in the place was auditioning for either Roxie or Velma, the two leads, meaning perhaps 20 girls auditioning for those parts. My mathematical skills indicated that perhaps a few of them should try for secondary roles but I suppose you can't tell that to a drama queen... Oh, and they all were saying "ohmigawd I'm so nervous!" like they suddenly weren't going to be for the actual production.

When I go into the audition room the auditioning board (ie perhaps 7 students) immediately noticed off my form that I speak fluent Hungarian. "Have we got the part for you!" they gushed, and I sang my little song and I think it went alright.

Then they handed me a typed sheet that they'd copied monologues from various roles, including the Hungarian part. I started reading it aloud but stopped a few words in, saying "wait, this is formatted wrong!" Everyone laughed really hard, and the one guy said I get 30 extra points for that comment alone. (Yay!) I got to read from the actual script instead, but unfortunately stumble a little because it's Hungarian and I'm not that good at it. Hopefully they understood that was the problem.

After I finished they asked a few clarifying questions (dance experience, if my email was properly written), so I left the room grinning a bit since I thought it went well. It left all the nerve-wracked theatre kids wondering what on Earth I'm so happy about because you're not supposed to be happy after an audition dammit!

So that's where things stand right now. They said that the callback list will come out Wednesday (as in, in the next few hours) so with luck I'll be very excited soon, and callbacks themselves will be Saturday. Even if I don't get it, though, it was definitely fun to delve into this world I haven't touched since doing musicals in high school and I'm glad I tried it!

The Old College Try in Gardening

I'm going to start this off with the disclaimer that I am not much of a plant person. Really. If you want to meet a plant person you should introduce yourself to my mother, who is the sort of person who knows the name of every plant you'd ever come across and goes on about them the same way I am capable of going on about stars. During my childhood it was a given that my mom would carefully nurse a stray plant or two from wherever we were so she could replant them at home, customs be dammed, and that we'd need to set aside a day to visit the local botanical garden. Trust me, there is no way I will ever count as a plant person in comparison to my mother.

But regardless of the extent of my green thumb some of those genes certainly passed over, and compared to the average college denizen I am a plant person. Here's what my motley little garden looks like-

In the back, the big one in the middle is an African violet with pretty purple flowers, the one on the right is a crawling ivy that grows incredibly quickly, and the one on the left is a potted palm that I got at the poster/plant sale at the beginning of the year. (I called my mom up at the time to see what she'd suggest. "Get the palm," she recommended, "because they've been around for millions of years, so it will be hard for you to kill anything that evolved to be so tough.") The front row seats next to the window are given to the pepper plants I grew from seeds acquired at the cafeteria of all places- I started the one on the right at the end of August, and the two on the left in early October.

The next immediate question, of course, is what's with that odd-looking shelf they're sitting on? Originally the plants were all sitting on that windowsill in the picture but they kept getting knocked off when I closed the curtains, so I decided to build a nice shelf for them a few weeks ago. I, ahem, commandeered the wood from the discarded scrap in the physics shop which is why it has holes in it- beggars can't be choosers! For the legs I raided my bookcase, which is filled with these lovely thick physics textbooks that I need to hold onto but only use for reference perhaps once a semester, in which case I can temporarily dismantle said shelf until I find what I need and then reassemble it. All in all this works great on two levels because it leaves much-needed free space on my bookshelf and allows me to quickly disable it when it comes time to move out (because when you move around as much as I do, a concrete piece of furniture is the last thing you need!).

So that's the current plant situation in my room. I might add one or two when the second semester starts (a cactus would be nice, and I used to have this wicked red clover...) because once the snow really flies a bit of green is always appreciated.

Halloween Begins

So if you care to find me
Look to the Western sky!
As someone told me lately,
Everyone deserves a chance to fly...

The comment I get most about my bicycle from people is "you look like the Wicked Witch of the West on that thing." I decided to have a sense of humor about this, with damn impressive results if I may say so myself. (Though I was going more for the Elphaba from Wicked type of witch rather than the one from the movie.)

This picture's from a Halloween party I went to last night. If you missed my dressing up I'll be doing it again on Wednesday, of course.

The pumpkins my friends and I carved yesterday afternoon. It was a fun time.
My pumpkin this year- my family traditionally didn't do jack-o'-lanterns but rather pumpkin carvings even before that idea spread, some of which were incredibly intricate. We didn't have really nice and proper pumpkin carving tools yesterday and I was a little late, so this is what I did on short notice.

Though for the record, I think everyone was a little disappointed. You see, my design last year might have not been too complicated but it was certainly the one that everyone talked about-
This was only exasperated by the fact that one friend who shall go nameless promptly picked up the pumpkin and went around with it pretending to be the Headless Horseman. Ah, memories!

(And before anyone asks, that's my friend's ball python on my wrist. He's a great snake, though a great deal bigger now.)

There will probably be more pictures here on Wednesday, when it's actually Halloween and not just the Saturday closest. Stay tuned!

Chalking it Up

Today was a fun day! Gorgeous weather to counter those hurricane remnant clouds passing through last night, so I headed over to the 18th annual Chalk Festival hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art. It's ongoing all this weekend (Sunday's hours are 12-5) and the artwork will last until the next rainfall, so you should all go check it out as it's really awesome.

As you can see, most of the people who participate are just families from Cleveland and such- you can pay for a certain-sized square and they'll give you some fine-quality chalk, so you can just get to work on doing whatever you want. There are also a few professional artists working too-
But yes, lots of creative chalkers! Here's one I particularly liked, titled "Snakes on a Plane"...
Here's another gorgeous set, which honestly look for all the world like a few Monet paintings just walked out of the art museum and laid themselves on the pavement-
Here's another nice one, which is clearly a work in progress and wont' be finished until tomorrow. A lot of people get really serious about the chalk festival, and are there the whole weekend. (For those who don't recognize it, the building is Adelbert, the CWRU administrative building where the president and provost and all those lovely people hang out.)
After seeing all this great artwork, I decided to throw my lot in the ring and do my own chalking. I was a bit intimidated by the other artists to be honest- I can't draw most things at all, and forever envy those who do- but I do have a good cartoonish style of many a deep space object thanks to years of doodling in my notebook margins and having a one-track mind. So after two hours, here's my end result-
Hooray for the Mars rover! This is probably the biggest piece of artwork I've ever done by the way- here's a picture with me in it for scale-
So anyway, I am quite proud of my piece and now get to obsessively worry about the prospects of rain for a little while (luckily we're in that time of year with perpetual blue skies, so it says "sunny" for the next ten days of forecast!). I had a lot of fun though and still have quite a bit of chalk, so perhaps tomorrow I'll be heading back to do another square. And if I don't, no one will complain too loudly if I use my meager artistic skills on some other nice piece of sidewalk around campus, right?

Physics Department Picnic

Who says physicists don't have a good time? Yesterday was the annual CWRU Physics Department picnic, where they coax everyone out of their laboratories and invite them, still blinking from the sunshine, to an afternoon of hanging out at the farm owned by the university. Hooray!

This year, however, there was a twist as to the method of transportation for the 12 miles to the farm. Despite the hot and humid conditions, all the cool kids decided to bicycle-

Hey man, Jaws was never our scene and we don't like Star Wars.

(For posterity, from left to right the members of the bicycle posse were Tim, Miriam, Pat Dave, Alison, me, Laura, and John. )

As I noticed from the odd looks several car drivers gave us, we were just like a really cheap motorcycle gang. Amusement about the unique nature of my bicycle was also prevalent in the group, particularly thanks to the recent installation of my awesome bicycle bell, which performed marvelously in both passing and in doing the Bicycle Race solo. Let the record also show that we were the first group to arrive, as Dan Akerib and his family used gasoline-propulsion and just barely beat us. But hey, this way we got first dibs on the drinks!

Anyway, everyone else affiliated with the department showed up pretty quickly, and there was much merriment in the form of conversation and consumption of foodstuffs. There was also the constant threat of attack via water gun (or, in my experience, getting rugby-tackled while running with a water gun), but we did not give in to terrorism so the picnic merrily continued until the faculty-student softball game towards the end of the afternoon.
Due to numbers it wasn't perfectly faculty vs students: it was actually faculty and grad students vs undergrads and children of faculty members, so I suppose "degree haves" vs. "have nots" is more appropriate. Either way, the stakes as I understood them were that if we won us undergrads would be permitted to graduate, so clearly there was a bit riding on this, but we won by two runs in the last inning. Victory!

Above is the fearless undergraduate team, or at least what was left of it because most people had begun to wander off as it was late. Pretty soon, the bicycle posse left too- we had an hour of cycling ahead of us- and it was fortunately easier on the way back as it's predominantly downhill (with the exception of a few inclines toward the farm end of things). All in all, it was a great way to go out and enjoy the summer sunshine.

(PS- I do have more pictures if anyone wants them. They'll probably make a Facebook appearance soon too, particularly if someone reminds me to upload them!)

Incubus!

Forgot to mention that Sunday, my last night in New Hampshire, I saw Incubus! Yay! They were doing a concert in Guilford, New Hampshire of all places, so my siblings and myself went to check them out.

(By the way, if you are culturally illiterate and have no idea who Incubus is, please go listen to Drive and Stellar and then come back when you are properly enlightened. You'll thank me for it, I promise...)

Now I will confess upfront that we were unfortunately not setting our hopes too high for this concert: the previous year we'd seen Counting Crows at the same venue where they played all slow, whiny songs not even on the CDs, and then refused to play Mr. Jones despite the crowd chanting it throughout the whole encore. (I understand that bands can't play all their famous songs at once, but if you ever reach #1 with a song you are required to play that song at all subsequent concerts because that's what people pay to see. Or at least any songs you are generally known for!!!) Thankfully last year's concert wasn't a complete waste as Goo Goo Dolls played before Counting Crows and were much better, but that didn't stop us from joking the whole way "man, I hope Incubus doesn't pull a Counting Crows on us..."


Thank goodness, Incubus delivered: they went through Drive, I Wish You Were Here, Megalomaniac, Oil and Water, and even Stand by Me as a cover. They even played a song from their next album during the encore, which was called Punch Drunk if I recall correctly.

The other noteworthy thing about this concert is how we ended up with really good seats: earlier last week my brother dropped a pair of shears on his foot and needed nine stitches, meaning he was going around with a golf club cane during the concert. His limping meant he (and my sister and I, as an extension) got VIP treatment from pretty much all the staff, and even got front-row seating on the lawn which was pretty sweet. To quote my brother who bravely hobbled without complaint, "I really don't like political correctness, but I really like it when it's in my favor."

So yes, good concert. It would have arguably been better if, in the aftermath, I didn't have to get up at 330am to catch my 6am flight back to Cleveland the next morning, but I guess you can't be too picky when such opportunities make themselves known. Plus it was so worth it.

My New Wheels

Isn't it just gorgeous?

For those of you who don't know, I have been in the market for a new bicycle ever since I came back from New Zealand. This is because the old one was distinctly non-ridable when I left last winter: I'd bought it at Toys 'R Us for ~$100 when I was thirteen years old, and the lack of working breaks and plentiful amounts of rust sort of deemed that bike a public health hazard. I mean, it's borderline-excusable for college students to have bike a bike audible a block away due to five individual noises, but it's probably not so cool when you start realizing your legs are more efficient at helping you stop than the breaks.

So then I started looking into what sort of bicycle I wanted, I decided that I wanted one with style. I don't have a car, meaning my bicycle is my primary mode of transportation, so why not spring for a pretty one so long as it can get you to class or the grocery? And why not get one that's fun to ride while you're at it? Many bicycle stores and catalog-searches later, I finally found a bicycle store on the West Side that had a Raleigh Retroglide 7, which is a cruiser bike that looks lovely and has seven speeds to boot to tackle the primarily flat terrain of Cleveland. Hooray!

But anyway, I am in complete love with this bike, as is is the sort of bicycle that makes you feel like you can conquer the world while riding it, or at least the hill on the southern side of campus. You know how Plato had his idea that everything in the universe is an attempt at a perfect idealized object, and the ones we find most pleasing are the ones that approximate this idealized object the best? Well I am fairly certain that this bike is the "idea bicycle" of Plato's world, as it's just perfect. Now all I need to do is get my bicycle bell and basket out of storage...

In Da 'Burgh

Exactly 24 hours transpire between your plane taking off in Auckland and your final one landing in Pittsburgh. At minimum. I mention this because travel to and from New Zealand takes a blasted long amount of time regardless of where you are in the world, so I might as well save you a day of your life to discover this fact. Further, it is forever easy to lose track of how long you're travelling, as it involves two night flights over the date line, meaning at one point you go backwards in time in a physics-defying way and skip ahead a few hours the second leg.

But hey, once you sort that all out you might as well hit the beach in Los Angeles!
More specifically, I headed to Venice Beach since I had a 2pm-11pm layover in LAX and I'd never been to the beach before. Plus the idea of seeing both sides of the Pacific in one day (not to mention two sunsets!) sounded greatly appealing to me.
While I wasn't planning on it, Venice Beach is probably the best place to reacclimate yourself to American culture after being abroad. It's primarily a boardwalk filled with crappy gitch and food classified as "only in America and all bad for you," and has a decent assortment of hippies. In these enlightened times, however, they just hold signs saying "will work for marijuana" and "every time you don't spare change, Chuck Norris dropkicks a kitten" instead of lying about their intentions with your money.

Alas, had I taken a picture of the hippies they would have berated me for spare change for the honor, and thus I refrained from doing so. However, the most amusing part of my day was when some tourist lady decided for whatever reason to debate with one of the potheads that he shouldn't live his life the way he does, which is clearly a lost cause in any event. The best part was another tourist standing nearby during the whole thing, sheepishly shuffling his feet trying to show that he didn't know this woman despite very clearly being her husband.

Anyway, reaclimitization over I returned to the airport and flew the last leg home, arriving here around 630am Tuesday (I left at 945am Monday in New Zealand), so I then proceeded to sleep most of the first day. It's kind of weird to be back though... everything seems normal because it's the way my autopilot remembers it, but everything is oddly green compared to when I last saw it! Here's a view of the backyard right now-
The other odd thing is how it is rather hot in a startling way (in New Zealand it gets hot too, but it doesn't invade every pore of your body and steal your soul like it can here), and the sun goes down really, really late!

Anyway, I should head towards bed as tomorrow my mom and I are driving 12 hours to New Hampshire. Cheers!

One Last Adventure- Waitomo Caves

Hey everybody, last exam was today! Hooray! So now I can come home, which I will do day after tomorrow. (Except I haven't packed anything yet. Good God, this is going to be fun...)

Anyway, my friend Jenny and I went to Waitomo Caves yesterday as one last New Zealand adventure. This was exciting for two mutually independent reasons- Waitomo Caves have glowworms and we were going to blackwater raft (ie float down the cave river on inner tubes), and I was going to drive as there was no other way to get there and Jenny doesn't have a license. Now it's not like I'm a bad driver or anything, of course, but the last time I drove prior to this was in February and that was on the other side of the road, so I was admittedly cautious about this prospect beforehand.

Fortunately we survived, I didn't destroy anything, and concluded that the nice thing about roundabouts is at least with them you don't get confused as to what lane to pull into at an intersection. The main problem with driving on the wrong side of the road, for the record, is a. you have a tendancy to veer left off the road and b. your turn signal and windshield wiper are backwards, and even worse you flick down for right and up for left. But hey, as long as the break pedal is where you instinctively know it should be it's not too bad! It was quite a pretty drive too of course, and reminded me a bit of the border of northern Hungary and Slovakia (which makes sense as they are both huge caving regions).

So onto pictures! Sorry these may not look as good as I'd like, as you're obviously not taking your own camera through the wet cave system, so Jenny and I split the cost for the picture CD they hawked at the end.
Our group fashionably dressed in caving attire at the cave entrance (Jenny's the furthest on the left, I am just to the right and a little up from her). The water in the cave is really cold (ie, 10-14 degrees C), meaning in addition to the bathing suit you have a thermal sweater and several layers of wetsuit. All in all it's enough gear to ensure that you have serious problems reaching down to pull your boots on, and while your body stays warm your fingers get pretty numb (as in, I couldn't manipulate them to undo the helmet clasp at the end numb). Fortunately the company that runs this are geniuses who know enough to provide hot showers and hot soup afterwards, so we thawed out pretty quickly.

Anyway, the cave entrance I'm referring to is a little slit in the ground just to the right where the little stream goes underground and the cave begins. We followed it until it came out again.

Me splashing over a waterfall- there are a couple of these in the cave system, and the only way to get over 'em is to jump! Yay! You also don't just get to float down your inner tube all the way either as this is a cave, so you get to do some spelunking (ie hiking in the riverbed) through the more shallow parts.

I will admit though, some parts of the cave were a little intense. First of all, there are some parts where there was only perhaps a foot between you and the rock ceiling, meaning you sorta tilt your head to the side so you can breathe. Second of all, this trip has a weight minimum of 45kg for good reason: at some points of the cave the water rushes really really fast, and it's all you can do to not get swept away.

Now as I'm sure the more astute amongst you noticed, I was pretty on the line here as far as weight goes- the last time I went to health services at Case, the doctor spent most of her time trying to figure out if I had an eating disorder. (Because no one in America is naturally thin. Ever.) So there were some points where I discovered that I just plain didn't have enough mass to stick my feet in the water and not get carried along with it, sort of scary until you resign yourself to it, meaning I took the "water route" more than once while the normal, non-twig people got to walk along the edge and stay a little more dry. Ah, fun.
If you click on the above, this is what glowworms look like (doesn't come through very well in the smaller version). You know what those fiberoptic cables look like that people buy to wave around at amusement parks and the like? Basically glowworms look just like that, but the source is a bit more fascinating...
What a glowworm actually looks like when you turn on the lights. First of all they're not worms, they're insects, and the ones in New Zealand are insects in their larval stage. Their glow is a chemical reaction which is supposed to attract prey like poor little flies that get lost in the cave, and the sticky strings hanging down snare these creatures in a similar manner to a spider's web. After 6-12 months of this, it morphs into its adult stage like a caterpillar does to a butterfly, but as the resulting adults can't eat all their energies go into having sex and laying more eggs for the glowworm colony. The result of this is you get cave sections which are beautifully covered in glowing dots, looking for all the world like an underground Milky Way.
The purchased CD has a lot of PR-type pictures, but this is the only one of them you get to see because firstly they're posed and secondly they have a LOT more light in them than there was in actuality (we only used our headlamps the whole time). But then if I don't use one of them you have no idea what the cave looked like or what blackwater tubing looks like, so I decided one such picture can't hurt.
The opening in the river whereby you return to the real world. It's a very wide opening compared to the one at the entrance, and it's really exciting to see natural light again after you've been in the dark underground! (Because it was easier to see the glowworms, we made do without headlamps wherever possible.)

So that's it, I survived going through a cave system and drove well enough to come back to Auckland and tell you all about it. Hooray! It was more than a little sad to end this trip though, knowing that I won't be driving through the New Zealand countryside in search of a crazy adventure for awhile now. But I suppose I've had so many good ones to remember that I shall never forget them for the rest of my days, and in the end that's what matters.