Days of Summer > 6/26/16

a.     Sunday (today!! Well, not anymore; I’m burning the 1:19am oil)

                                                 i.     Sleep in, cook bacon. Delicious brunch. Family scheduling.

                                               ii.     Get dropped off at Public Market to hang with Grace. We take the long walk to Fairhaven, then to Fairhaven Park, stopping to visit my old house 812 Wilson. It is a beautiful day—we play some Frisbee at fairhaven, dunk ourselves in the sprinklers, then loop back to downtown Fairhaven for some delicious gelato.

                                              iii.     We mostly talk about our various romantic exploits and struggles—a conversation that I’ve only had once before with Grace despite our long history of multifarious conversations. It’s just fun to hear Grace’s subjective experience of everything—her descriptions of different types of crushes, her personal ethos and decision making process; a fresh perspective J We were planning to get back to Bham by 4:30 so Grace could pack for her family’s upcoming trip to England. But Grace has some extra time so we get back late. Dad picks us up, we drop Dad off at home, then I drive Grace back to her house in the Lynden area countryside. What a beautiful drive! Indescribable. End up picking cherries with Grace to take home, since their amazingly fruitful tree has more berries than they could process even were they not going to England.

                                              iv.     Say goodbye, hand Grace a book I’d got her for the trip (the Armageddon Rag if you’ll recall from the stuff I may have not posted yet). Then south on Hannegan to pick Izzy and Dad up at a driving range near Barkley. We pick up some pizza and mushu pork in Sunset square, then book it home and eat.

                                               v.     After that—it’s pretty late—the folks and I have another good conversation about Grace’s perspective on romance. They eschew the decisive and bald direct-asking-out strategy in favor of indirect but clear signaling methods and a drawn-out courtship phase where everything is still up in the air. I think I understand the perspective, but resist it since only recently have I summoned up the courage to apply the naïve strategy, let alone the fortitude and skill and uncertainty tolerance for courtship. (I mean, I’ll learn, but struggles ._. )In true GoebelPeters fashion, they proceed to back up their arguments with clips from Pride and Prejudice and Lost. Much edifying time is spent this way.

                                              vi.     Then we watch an episode of Deathnote, a beautiful anime about a high-schooler drunk on the power of judgment and death. (The first episode reveals a lot.)

                                            vii.     Sing Fallout Boy songs with Izzy. Then show emails to Mom and spend a good hour finally catching up on this log.

                                           viii.     Post and hit the hay. Night all!

Backlog > Finals Week > 6/10/16

a.     Friday morning, slept in, then got all my stuff together for one last brunch. Brandon had moved out, Xin was recalcitrant, so it was myself, Trevor and Alex.

                                                 i.     Remembered Alex was now vegan, grabbed oatmeal J

                                               ii.     Got a bunch of stuff at the DM, clearing out my dining account.

                                              iii.     Hit Maple. Alex was there and Trevor soon arrived, and after a few last minute errands for olive oil and paper plates, we fell to cooking.

                                              iv.     I made Alex Mom’s classic apple and brown sugar oatmeal, chopping apples into boiling water until tender, then adding oats.

                                               v.     Trevor and I cooked lots of really tasty omelettes. We tried forgoing the parboiling on the potatoes, with limited success.

                                              vi.     Finished up with a round of delicious French toast made from cinnamon bread. It was really terrific. Alex didn’t take part; she made some toasted bread and loaded it with fried bananas.

                                            vii.     It’s weird still hanging out with Alex—in some ways, it seems as though nothing has changed; she’s so friendly—but this leaves my poor system 1 befuddled. I have to keep telling myself that things are different. Which, in the big picture, is really a good thing. It’s exactly what I would have wanted. But taking her off the system 1 books is incurring substatntial emotional resistance.

                                           viii.     Return to Haggett with all my stuff and start packing.

                                              ix.     Have dinner with Jamie. Convince Xin to come along; Siri joins us on the way out. It’s fun—Jamie hasn’t changed a bit. Still a bit cynical but self-assured and optimistic, still checks his phone randomly every five minutes, still having fun with Film Club and now with TedX.

                                               x.     Go to the Friday dance. Trevor gives Alex and myself a ride. It’s fun, but man, at this point I’m feeling really exhausted. Mentally, not physically. At the end, when the floor is almost empty, Trevor and I get into this crazy dance of high fives and synchronized jumping. It’s great how Trevor feeds off my goofy insanity—he’s not confident enough socially to start doing some random dance himself, but when I start bouncing off the walls he gets into it.

                                              xi.     Return to campus.

Backlog > Finals Week > 6/9/16

a.     Thursday: last final (Thermal) in the morning, fun final.

                                                 i.     Sat in the SPS lounge and worked, emails, etc. Went to CENPA and made some measurements with Ricardo so that I could model them over the summer. The He6 guys were prepping for a run so we couldn’t take any magnetic field data (which would have required turning off all the coils except the one we wanted to measure), we could only get the dimensions.

                                               ii.     Bought Ricardo lunch at the 8. His past was pretty crazy—grew up in a really religious family in Florida, left town after high school to find a different life all the way across the country, gravitated to physics as an alternate way of explaining the world. He’s been with his high school sweetheart for like 7 years now, and they’re both moving to a grad school across the country at the end of the summer.

                                              iii.     Grabbed a book, Diaspora, for Brandon at the UW bookstore, got it wrapped. The poor older woman doing the wrapping was desperate for conversation, did an amazing job.

                                              iv.     Ran over to West Campus to catch a bus out to Golden Gardens, where Jacob had invited me to hang out. Missed the bus with Jacob on it. On the long bus ride, got into bizarre conversations with some randos. Started when this dude in front of me—older guy—struck up a chat. Topics bounced from hacking computerized cars, to virtual reality, to educational technology as various people—the bus driver, a guy who worked at Lowe’s—dropped in and out.

                                               v.     Golden Gardens! Hiked down to the beach, found Jacob and his buds goofing off on the play equipment. We chatted, ate some oranges I’d grabbed at the DM. Eventually, we got a game of ultimate going. But I had to hustle back after a few points. Barely caught the homebound 45 in time, downloaded a bunch of Greg Egan short stories, read all the way back to the UW.

                                              vi.     Hustled to Haggett, took a shower, then Xin, Brandon and I set out for the light rail station, to celebrate Brandon’s upcoming birthday at the international district. Managed to coordinate the timing so Brianna could surprise Brandon in the station.

                                            vii.     Caught up with Brianna on the way down. At the intl district, we wandered around, picked a whizzy hot pot restaurant called Boiling Point, put in our names, then stopped in at Uwajimaya. I bought a mango.

                                           viii.     Boiling point was pretty amazing. I ordered a lamb hot pot; we also got an order of wasabi tofu and some bubble tea. Our hot pot was served on proprietary Boiling-Point designed individual grills, so that the soup was literally boiling the entire time we were eating it. Needless to say, my nonexistent heat tolerance struggled—I had to take stuff out several minutes in advance of eating it, put it on rice, and let it cool. But it was pretty great. There was blood rice cake, crazy mushrooms, lamb, noodles, … :D

                                              ix.     At the end of dinner, I gave Brandon Diaspora, and Xin gave him this cute little Pikachu wearing glasses. I think he was pretty surprised/happy.

                                               x.     Returned to Haggett, met Brandon’s family (mom, and younger sister Emily, an accomplished cellist with a crazy hairdo). Alternated between reading / working (setting up the last brunch of the year) and helping Brandon with move-out. Brandon’s a fun dude to help—always cheerily behind on everything and laughing at his goofy attempts to, say, clear frost from his freezer with a screwdriver. When the refrigerator was finally clean, helped him take it to the summer apt where he and Brianna and Eleanor would be staying. Then we stopped by Mercer to pick up Brianna’s boxes. A fun evening.

I'm back!

1. Hey you all! Hope you're having a great summer.
2. I have a huge backlog to share out! But I'm going to do it gradually rather than dump it on you all at once.
3. So today, I'll do today, and two posts from--jeez--finals week!
4. Coming up soon: the SPS camping trip, swing dancing in Montana, the return to Park Day, and much more!
5. Read on,
6. Spencer

6/6/16

1. 6/6/16
1. Math final! A bit of a struggle honestly--as much as I’d prepared I figured it wasn’t enough and I was right. But whatevs. I survived 3 quarters of this stuff.
2. Hung out with classmates for a while, discussed problems. Then got into a conversation with classmate Everett about a physics circuit problem. I knew I knew the source of his confusion, so I spent about an hour trying to figure it out, followed him to Suzzallo before I finally got it.
3. I swear, at that point my voice was shot, my brain was fried… so I called up Xin for some badminton. We also did some volleyball rallying, which was fun, help me prep for the homeschool volleyball camp.
4. Worked out for a bit, then back to the grind. Lunch at Orin’s, studied for accounting exam, realized that marginal time studying > marginal time on the exam, so showed up to exam 10 minutes late. Still left 30 minutes early :D
5. Worked on paper for a while outside Paccar. Got into a random conversation with some serious, well-dressed business faculty conversing in a very rationalist way about financial literacy education :) Also came up with a sweet proof that I’m very proud of, that I can represent an arbitrary graph such that the transition probability of going from state i to state j is the same as the inverse probability, as a regular graph where the probability of going to any neighbor of state i is just 1 / neighbors(i). Why is this cool? Cuz’ then I get to apply a theorem from earlier that all distributions go to the stationary distribution :D Which means all states are equally likely, which verifies the fundamental assumption of statistical mechanics (at least for the unlikely “strongly-reversible” case Pi->j = Pj->i)
6. Met up with old buddy John Andrews for dinner (the guy I only talk to about arcane CS systems stuff). True to faith, John (more cynical and frustrated now than before, but just as entertaining)--ranted about the most hilarious “f---ing asinine” mistakes that dumb developers make, incredible goofy security loopholes, how all operating systems don’t manage processes correctly (they don’t! Zombie processes and waiting on children is stupid), helping Minecraft modders interpret crash logs. (Apparently he’s just been bored all quarter and so decided to learn the Minecraft crash reporting system.) Crazy life! But always fun to chat with John.
7. Worked on paper a little bit longer, then went to Monday dance. On the bus, who do I find but Eleanor Kahn! After the Quarter Dance, she decided to come on out. Caught up with her for a while.
8. Monday dance was fun, lots of just chatting and decent amt of dancing with Eleanor, Eleonore and Alex.
9. On way back, got bubble tea with abovementioned three + Spencer Pease. Then back to Haggett, wrote this log and went to bed.