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!