1/22/17: A Perfect Sunday

1. 1/22/17
1. Wake up in Bellingham!
2. Family brunch. Chill with Mom and Dad as we make french toast and bacon. Get into a long, fascinating discussion about the difference and interplay between learning by pattern matching versus more sophisticated modeling. And, which people benefit from which type of learning. We concluded that pattern matching is, for most people and most ends, easier to teach with and use than modeling; it is only for exploring new territory that having a more structured model of what you already know is useful, and then only for certain people (who typically gravitate to models even to learn static skills)
3. Delicious french toast. Dad cooks the bacon perfectly and Mom griddles the toast to perfection.
4. Uncle Tom, in giving up the ghost, generously dedicated some of his clothes to myself, and good ol’ Aunt Joan, in her bereavement, somehow found the time and energy and strength to sort and iron and ship the clothes back here with Mom. So I spend a bit of time looking through them--there is a beautiful black cashmere sweater, as soft as a well-brushed cat.
5. Almost miss the Bolt bus. The bus pulls out of the station as we pull in, but I sprint to the turnaround and flag the driver down. The guy (who is probably the most well-spoken bus driver I’ve met yet) gives me some serious flak for not being early, but he lets me in, so I shrug it off and get to work.
6. On the bus, chat a bit with Monica, catch up on all my emails, do a tutorial pretest, read up on monads, a functional programming construct that allows you to construct pipelines of actions with flexible, smart “connectors”… the time flies by and I’m in Seattle in no time.
7. Meet Gayatri at a bus stop. More accurately, I’m sitting in the bus stop reading and she stands across the road guessing how long before I’ll look up--eventually I realize and go over to cross the road.
8. We hang out in the Seattle Art Museum--it’s a free day! For a bit over an hour. We hustle around and get to see tons of different exhibits; from tribal-inspired costumes made of socks, to abstract paintings, to crazy bronze headdresses. It’s a real good time. Afterwards we walk down to the waterfront and grab selfies by the big glowing ferris wheel.
9. Then we trek to Pike Place and grab piroshkies at the world famous piroshki bakery. We eat piroshkis in glowing contentment on the way back to Terry.
10. Hang out in Terry studying. I look up classes at ETH, try to put together a convincing argument that I can graduate on time even if I miss 2 UW quarters abroad.
11. Go up to the 8th floor deck and stargaze* for a bit (the elliptic, irreferential, asterisk).
12. Return home. Run into Brandon eating dinner and catch up for a bit. Then spend a few minutes watching the Grand Finals of a big Smash tournament with Andrew and Brandon. In the final, a reckless bold Fox gets smashed by a Peach-wielding master with ridiculous and unerring precision and recovery defense.
13. Check in with Xin, unpack and clean, eat a few slices of the pie Garrett left on the counter for public consumption while reading the paper for the discourse group meeting tomorrow. It’s very interesting, talks about a quantitative framework for tracking which entities are the focus or “center” of each sentence, and how transitions between centers affect the semantic coherence of the statements as a whole.
14. Write this log and hit the hay!