A backpack and a Bike. (and lots of rain)

I came back to DC for the school year on the 24th of August. I traveled from 7 in the morning until 7:30 or so and then Sue Johnson, the person I am staying with, picked me up from the metro station. We went back to their house and had some delicious wheat free pizza. Sue’s husband had read the book called Wheat Belly, which apparently describes the negative side-effects of eating wheat. Anyway, the pizza had an almond/flax crust and lots of olives, mushrooms, onions, peppers, pepperoni, and real mozzarella cheese. Like huge amounts of it. It was really delicious, which surprised me, since I usually don’t like mushrooms or olives. Sue showed me around the house and my room and I unpacked my suitcase. The next day, I put together my road bike and rode into Bethesda to get some groceries and to go to the bike shop since my front wheel wobbles a little bit. I found the bike shop and waited a bit, being to nervous. When I finally got up the nerve to go in, I found out that they wouldn’t be able to get to me until the next week, since they were so busy. I just said I might call back later, but actually, it wasn’t that bad of a wobble anyway! I went to Safeway and loaded up my new Swiss Gear Backpack with snack foods and some sandwich making materials for my lunches. Later that day, I took my bike route all the way to American, then down to Georgetown and then all the way back up to my home. It is about 7 miles to American from the house, and another 3 to Georgetown. On the way home, I ride the bike down towards the river, since there is a nice bike trail that goes from Georgetown all the way up to Bethesda. I get off on Bradley Blvd., which has quite wide shoulders ideal for bikes, and that takes me all the way to Burning Tree road, where the house is. On Sunday, I went to church and then got all of my things from there. I brought them home after bringing some of Amy’s things down to her apartment, since she wouldn’t get there til the evening before her classes started. I originally had a bit of a scare, when I thought I had put all of my hanging shirts and things in one spot. When I went to get them (my tux and dress shirts) there were only the suit coats and 2 nice shirts there. I thought there should be more there, but I later found them in one of my boxes. What was worse was that several ladies in the church were worrying about the shirts too, since they had been moved around several times while there was a large gathering at the church. Anyway, I made it home, unpacked the boxes and then ironed my shirts. Monday was my first day of classes. Since I already have my schedule typed out for some other thing, I will just use that. Here is my schedule: Monday: PHYS 110 8:55-10:10, Differential Equations 1:10-2:25, Chamber Singers 2:35-5:15, Physics tutoring 6-8 Tuesday: Math and Computational Physics 11:45-1:00, Number Theory 2:35-3:50, Introduction to Modern Algebra 6:45-8:00 Wednesday: Experimental Physics10:20-1:00, Physics front desk 11-4, at Georgetown 4-9 Thursday: PHYS 110 8:55-10:10, Physics front desk 11:00-1:00, Differential Equations 1:10-2:25, Chamber Singers 2:35-5:15, Introduction to Modern Algebra 6:45-8:00 Friday: Math and Computational Physics 11:45-1:00, Number Theory 2:35-3:50 I also am doing some research with Nate Harshman concerning few body quantum wells. I like all of my classes so far, but they will be pretty difficult, I think. All of my math classes except differential equations are pretty theoretical and proofy. My experimental physics class will be pretty interesting. The first experiment that I am doing, with one partner is measuring G the gravitational constant. We are using a torsion balance, which essentially is a tiny thread that has some force as its twisted. There are different sized metal balls that are attracted to each other a very tiny amount, which we try to measure. I am also a TA for the Physics 110. It is nice to get paid to go to lecture and it is also fun to take the class again with a different professor. I even help with things sometimes. Today was a big day. I had been down at Georgetown with Amy working on homework and such during the day. Then it started to lightning outside. I didn’t think that it would rain too much, so I didn’t worry about it. PS, I like to ride my bike in the dark, because there are less vehicles and people using the paths and it is also much cooler. So, I made the mistake of waiting until it started to rain a lot. I then waited in side longer until the rain had at least slowed where I was and then I began to ride my bike home. Amy helped me rig a trash bag over my back pack to protect everything from getting wet. As I rode, it made flapping noises a lot. The roads were quite wet as I left but it wasn’t raining much at least. There were flashes of lightning about every 3-5 seconds. After I was probably 2 miles down the trail, there was a large tree branch on the trail. I was able to miss it, but when riding a bike quickly in the dark, everything seems to come quite quickly at you. I even had my 350 lumen bike headlight on high (not turbo, but high), Right after this tree, it started to rain really hard. This is like Montana Super hard, or the eastcoast/Midwest moderate, but still, I got soaked in less than a minute. Then there was the remaining35 minutes of riding in the rain… That was fun. On the way, my headlight shown like a beacon in the night, casting a beam through the rain and fog. Spider webs even got stuck on my handle bars and I could see the single strand of webbing. I also saw 2 deer, a rabbit, and lots of toads on the bike path. PS, I have seen 6 deer already and a fox on this very trail. Anyway, the power has gone out at this house, so I suppose I should stop wasting my battery and go to bed. More updates later. Today (a different one than above), Sunday the 2nd of September, I went to church with Josh and met Amy there. We brought my bike in his car so I wouldn’t have to ride it. After Church, Amy and I moved her remaining things from the Church to her apartment and then Beth took us to lunch at Leo’s with Rena Lu, another one of Amy’s roommates. I think all of her roommates are pretty cool, so this year should be pretty good as far as that goes, I think. It was nice getting to go to a dining room where you can eat whatever and however much of anything you want. They recently got a Froyo (frozen yogurt) machine in their dining room. After this, Amy and I went to walk Buffy, an English Mastiff she is watching for the weekend. Then we went back to Georgetown and waited for the shuttle bus that would take us and the rest of Amy’s roommates to Target. A campus organization sets up the buses 2 times a year to take kids to Target for only 1 dollar. Lots of kids went. Anyway, I helped them shop a bit for their apartment. They got nearly all of the essentials for decorating, storing, trash, cleaning, and eating for less than $70 apiece, not too shabby! After the shopping and delicious Safeway Selects pizza for less than 4 dollars for 2100 calories of 4 meat goodness, I headed home once again. I did the 11 mile ride today in 43:33 which is an average of about 15 mph. I got rained on a little bit again, but it wasn’t too bad, and truthfully, it made my shirt less wet than my own sweat does… (its gross here). For a downhill section I averaged nearly 22 mph, but don’t worry, I have my helmet on. Ok, now the posts should be smaller than the first 3 since I am officially caught up for the first time in about 5.5 months.

Summer Break!

Ok, now for the summer portion of this blog post. I really enjoyed this summer a lot more than last, yet I even would dare to say that it will be every bit as memorable, though not as interesting to tell people about. This summer consisted of 3 main things: Work, Family, and Amy. First off, as far as working goes, I kept rather busy but didn’t have to work a single 15 hour day. I charged $15 per hour, so I did quite well in the hours I did work. At the beginning of the summer, I worked at the Meadowlark Manor (an assisted living home) in the mornings doing landscaping around the building. There are sidewalks near the building, but there is a gap between the sidewalk and building. My job was to take out what plants remained in the mostly earthy middle ground and to slope the ground slightly away from the building. I then had Erica’s help while putting down the black landscaping fabric. We put two layers down to provide extra protection from the weeds that may grow back. I then put a light layer of river rock onto the fabric and waited for the owner to plant the plants. They took about 3 weeks to do so, but then I started to shovel/wheelbarrow the rest of the rock (about 10 yards) onto the area, making it around 3 inches deep. I only did about 3/8ths of the entire area, but they never planted the remaining plants so dad will have to finish the job later. I also did many small jobs for people and also a LOT of work for some folks west of Whitehall, including but not limited to pulling weeds, digging holes, doing more landscaping, shoveling gravel, shoveling compost, raking grass, transplanting plants (without water woops!), picking rocks, pulling grass, etc. You get the picture, basically I was a landscaper and mowed lawns with my dad as a side Job. In the afternoons, I would help my dad mow lawns when he was going to do them. We had 26 that we regularly did, but regularly in Whitehall only means that we did them more than once during the summer. We had around 10-15 that we mowed at longest every two weeks and several others were even longer between times than that. We have amassed quite the arsenal of lawn mowing equipment to date. Our newest addition is a Stihl (pronounced steel) multi tool. The motor looks like the back half of a week eater, but it can also have other ends, such as a hedge trimmer we have and also a little miniature chainsaw. We even have an extension so we can reach really high branches. During the beginning of the summer we also bought a Core ™ electric weed-eater, but it was not powerful enough for us and the battery life was not exceptional. It was powerful for a battery powered device, and utilized a unique technology. It had a very compact motor, since the wire windings and iron laminations were eliminated from this motor. It was really quiet and had decent power in the turbo mode, but then the battery really did not last long. Anyway, by the end of the summer, there are the tools we had. Walker lawnmower with a 60 inch deck. A Toro push lawnmower with a bagger or side discharge. 4 trimmers, including the new Stihl one and an older Stihl one with a metal blade for tall weeds, a curved handled Echo trimmer for mom or the sisters if they come to help, and my personal favorite, the Echo straight shaft trimmer with a bump feed head. We also have a Stihl blower that we use as a sweeper after we are done, and 2 red rakes to get the extra grass from ones we were either late getting to, or the people like their lawns extra tall. The landscaping job I mentioned west of town was quite the project. I worked out there for 4 hours in the morning as much as I could or felt like. My first project was to clear away all of a large sloped bank or unwanted weeds and plants. I used the garden pitchfork to pry the root-base free and to then shake off as much dirt as I could. I left the shrubs while getting as close to them as I could. Then, I covered the entire area (approximately 50x15 feet) with one layer of landscape fabric, after which I applied a generous layer of mulch. There were several other projects, but pretty much more of the same. I also got to see my family a lot over this break, which was great! In the beginning of the summer, Darcy and I ran together a bit. She did it to get in shape for soccer and I was just doing it to get in shape. I had many great meals with my family and we also went to the mountains and floating several times. We also went on one of Amy’s dad’s tours of Butte. As an architect and previous preservation officer, he knew many things about the old city of Butte and about the houses which made it up. When Dad, Darcy, and Erica were at Spec, I got to be home with just mom. We played cribbage and ate food. We tried out a new recipe for apple cobbler which just had croissants, apples and mountain dew (and flavor adding ingredients). We played pinochle with grandma and grandpa some too. Byron was also around Whitehall this summer. He got a job as a tour guide up at the Lewis and Clark Caverns. He really liked his job up there and he would hike the 2 mile tour 3 times per day normally. As a result, he got in pretty good shape, so we went hiking a couple of times during the summer, up the south Boulder. We hiked to Curly Lake and Lost Cabin Lake. Amy and I had wanted to hike Hollow top this summer, and I planned it and Byron was excited to do it too, but the day before, he jumped into the river and landed right on a rock with his tailbone. OUCH! Needless to say, he was not upto hiking hollowtop the next day. The Nilsens also came out in early July. We had a lot of fun playing pinochle, hiking, boating, and playing in water. It just so happened that Amy’s cousins were in town at the same time as mine, so we did several things with them, such as going to Harrison Lake, hiking Hollowtop, and playing the Salad Bowl game. The salad bowl game is really simple, yet fun. You write down random objects or sayings or anything and then put the papers into a big bowl. Next you divide into 2 teams. There are then 3 rounds. First, you draw words and describe them using anything but the words on the card. Your team must guess the entire phrase successfully for you to move on. Each person gets 1 minute to get as many cards as possible. The next round is charades with the same words as last time, so it is a little easier. For the final round each person may only use one word to describe the phrase. It is really tricky, since if you choose a bad word, your team may never guess it, and the minute will run out. Ok, enough of game descriptions. Hollow top was really fun and intense, since at the end we were running out of water. We had had a nice lunch at the top of the mountain at 10,622 ft, but by the time we were almost down the mountain, the energy and water had run out. The final main part of my summer was Amy She went to Ecuador for a study abroad summer program, so she was gone for 6 weeks towards the beginning of the summer. She had a really great time and her Spanish improved greatly, but it wasn’t too fun for me, since I could only see her on the computer once in a while. Anyway, she finally got back and we had the rest of our summer together (not literally, but quite a bit). In early July, we went to Nicole, her dad’s ladyfriend’s, house to watch the 3rd of July fireworks in Butte. Jim came over too, and we had burgers and home-made FroYo. The fireworks were pretty great too! We also went to the Montana Folk Festival, which was in Butte. There were lots of great artists and even some international ones, which are usually my favorite. We went several afternoons and also hung around with her dad a bit. He designed the bathrooms that were built to accommodate the crowds of the event. The main stage usually had the most popular events and the stage itself was pretty cool, since it is under one of the old mining headframes. Near the end of July, we went to a little of Evil Knievel Days. We watched a lady get shot from a cannon and also one of the famous Wallenda tight rope walkers. Not the one that went across Niagara falls, but it was his cousin. Amy and I and sometimes Willis watched most of the Harry Potter series, this summer. Another interesting thing we did was go to her Uncle Bill and Aunt Tamara’s celebration called Wet Year Dry Year. It was a story of the rain seasons and irrigation and such in Montana and the idea was sparked when they found an old boot in the mountains. It was also the grand opening of her newly finished dance hall, which had been converted from one of their barns. Ok, I really must move on in time now, but basically, this summer was awesome!

End of Last Year Catch Up

So, as the title suggests, this will be my third year of this blog. I cannot guarantee that I will post often, or that the posts I have will be of high quality, but I can promise that they will contain some bit of information about my life in Washington DC (or in Montana in the case of this summer). Since there have been no blog updates in a very long time, I figured that I should let those of you who don’t have everyday contact with me know what I’ve been up to. Since the last time I have posted anything was in the middle of last semester, I should probably start at that point. There was the usual homework that I had been doing, but aside from that there were several interesting things that I had done. On Saturday the 24th of March, Amy and I and some of the other Chi Alpha girls decided to watch Mackenzie play Softball. She is on the Georgetown team. It was looking rather rainy for the most part, but we thought that we would attempt to watch it anyway. We loaded up in Brooke’s car and then went up Wisconsin Ave. and looked for a place to park. We saw that the field had a big tarp on it, so it obviously was not going to happen very soon. We then went to eat at Surfside, a restaurant on my usual scooter route home from Georgetown. Amy and I had brought some pasta-roni since we were already going to spend a bit of money on the basketball game the same evening. It had rained quite a bit at surfside, but we managed to find some tables on the balcony that were somewhat dry, and after many napkins, several others were quite dry too! We went back to Amy’s apartment for several hours to do homework, but in the evening, a bigger group of Chi Alpha kids went to the Pro basketball game… (dang! I can’t remember the name of the team) We had bought some tickets, but there were several extras that were not sold, so Hayley sold them to some scalpers. We didn’t get a great price, but it was better than nothing. The game was pretty fun, and there were some interesting characters on the team. One huge guy was named Nene, and we had fun cheering for him, but Amy was embarrassed, since at first she pronounced it Nee-Nee. This was so long ago that I can’t even remember if the team won or lost, but I do remember getting some delicious pizza and an ice cream cone! The real memories were made afterwards when we were waiting for the circulator bus. We didn’t realize that the bus actually didn’t run all the way to the Verizon center late at night, so we waited for 5 minutes and then we gave up and started walking. We eventually thought to try a Metro bus, since they had a route that would get us close to Georgetown, but after looking up the route and realizing (after some amount of waiting) that the stop we needed was in an area under construction, we decided to walk to a metro station instead. We then rode the Metro to Foggy Bottom, but that is still more than a mile from Georgetown (since the original Georgetown dwellers didn’t want a stop nearby, because it would supposedly attract the wrong type of people). We then walked the remaining mile and stopped at a CVS on the way back for something to drink. We were all somewhat sore from streetwalking and also tired by the time we finally made it to our dwelling places. On Saturday the 7th of April, Amy and I decided to go on a long run together, since we usually just meet in the middle and then go back to our respective campuses. I met Amy at Georgetown and we ran down to M Street and then along the Potomac all the way to the Lincoln Monument. It was a beautiful day and it was a great way to start it. The next day was a particularly unproductive day in terms of homework, but we went to a lot of Easter Services and events. From Georgetown, Amy and I rode our scooters/bikes back the same way we went the previous day. There is a big lively, somewhat modern Easter Service at the Lincoln Memorial. We arrived and heard a snazzy band. During the beginning of the ceremony, they talked about the previous years when there was horrible weather, and they were freezing. The service itself was not too memorable, but it was at a great location. We sat on the Lincoln Memorial steps facing East and were able to watch the sun just as it was rising. After this service, we rode our vehicles back to Georgetown to warm up a bit with some hot cocoa, since even this year it was pretty cold. We then rode our vehicles up to Church and had a potluck breakfast there. It was really good and we talked to some people for a while. Then we had a little bit before church, so we worked on a bit of homework before church. The Easter service there was good. I think it may have been the service where Amy and I stood at the front and as little children brought up flower pots, we had to place them on some steps on a little stage. After church, we went to Lillian and Wendell’s house for lunch. Again, all of these things are a ways back in my memory, but I think there were quite a few people this particular lunch. If this was the lunch I’m thinking of, Amy and I went home with Lillian and Wendell and helped them prepare everything and set it out. Amy and I will really miss having lunch at their house, since they moved to Colorado this summer. The next week was my very intense Chamber Singers rehearsal week, since we practiced for 14.5 hours in preparation for the upcoming concerts. We performed 2 works by Bach and one by Handel. We were accompanied by a chamber group of professional period musicians. Their instruments were slightly different than the modern versions. For example the Stringed instruments had gut strings for some of them. We also had a nice old organ to accompany us for one of the pieces. The concerts were very fun and I really loved the music, since it was energetic and fast. At least my favorite one was so fast and fun! On the 18th of April, Amy and I skipped Chi Alpha and instead went to the play MacBeth, which was a collaboration by the Mask and Bauble dramatic society and the Department of Performing Arts. The Mask and Bauble is like the club, but it is one of the oldest continually running drama programs. The set was a crazy wooden structure that had many angles and sloped up towards the back. There were several huge old looking trees on the sides. Another interesting part of the set was there were lots of Trap-doors for people to randomly pop out of or disappear into. The play itself was very good, and there were several people that we know that performed. The costumes were great and it was just an overall excellent performance, though I reluctantly cannot describe it very well. On the 23rd of April, about half of the Astrophysics class had to do their presentations. They could be about any topic we chose as long as it was somewhat related to space or astrophysics. For example, one person did his presentation on the different flavors of neutrinos while someone else did theirs on the methods of space photography. You might think it is simple, but in order to get the clarity of photos that is seen in space books, many photo graphs must be overlaid and filtered to get the final beautiful picture. I did my presentation on the White hole, which is essentially the time reversed black hole, or the opposite side of wormhole, whose entrance is a black hole. They are defined as an area through which no matter or wave may enter past the event horizon. There were lots of theories about white holes, but no one has ever observed them, so they are as of now theoretical occurrences in the universe. For a large part of the last weeks of school, I had been doing a scholarship application. I now know that I didn’t get it, but it was a pretty good application I would say. On the 28th of April, I helped with American University’s booth at the National Science and Engineering Festival. It was in the Washington Convention center which is this gigantic building that takes up 2 city blocks. The theme of AU’s booth was Science in the Kitchen. The health and chemistry departments were also there. For the Physics portion, we talked about viscosity and the different types. For example, honey is a highly viscous fluid while water or alcohol is not. Corn starched mixed with water is a shear thickening fluid, because when a force is applied the water between the cornstarch pieces is forced out and the viscosity of the fluid greatly increases. Based on this, we placed a bunch of the mixture in a speaker vibrating at around 25 Hz and while the speaker moved up, the force was applied so the liquid thickened, and as it retracted, the hard chunks were left up. Basically it looks like alien creatures dancing around in the speaker. We also made plasma with grapes in the microwave and were able to find the speed of light by measuring the distance between the hot spots in the non rotating microwave using an infrared camera. We then multiplied this by the frequency of the microwave which is given and thus were able to calculate the speed of light. Amy stopped by our booth around the time I was done and we walked around a tiny bit of the rest of the fair. We went to Michigan Tech’s booth where you could run across a pool of corn starch and water. They also had super frozen graham crackers that gave off a bunch of nitrogen as you bit into them (they were frozen by liquid nitrogen.) There was also a booth by CERN and lots of other high tech laboratories and companies. The next fun/interesting things I did were going to the Math and Statistics award ceremony and receiving a $100 book award, and also receiving the Outstanding Sophomore award for the Department of Physics. The math department definitely has better food, but I really do like the Papa John’s pizza that the Physics department had. The last part of my semester was the hardest, as usual, and consisted of studying frantically for the final exams. I did well as usual, but it is always really stressful! Then, I flew home and began my wonderful summer vacation!