3/11/18: Quiet Saturday

1. 3/11/18
1. Wake up at 12:40
2. Hustle to laundry and breakfast and shower, then go to Indian buffet. It is amazing. I get some quantum reading done while I eat and feel so content.
3. Run to Paccar for CaC meeting. Talk about last remaining clients. Still have websites to build but ah well.
4. Return home, more laundry, print quantum stuff, get a bit of work done, then
5. Off to gym with Brandon! We play some badminton, then get into a game with this pro named Steve, an old guy, slow, but so efficient in his motion. What a boss. I play him in a game of singles and lose 21-13 despite running about 5 times as much as he does. And he’s going easy on me!
6. Return to 2104, then nearly immediately head out to meet Alex for dinner. We have some really great conversations about people, about this article on “optimal stopping theory” for relationships she sent me, about goofy stories, about the people at the Engineering Flat and various gossip related to those shmids :)
7. Run to Safeway for some milk and bananas, then walk back to 2104 with Alex. Wrap up our conversation over chocolate ice cream and tea.
8. Chat with Gaya for a bit! She’s on the strugglebus with accounting, but some goofy accents bring back a blush of good humour :)
9. Do my course evals, write this log and hit the hay :D

3/7/18: Back to the Hustle

1. 3/7/18
1. Wake up, head to CSE to work on grad hw with Laura. We struggle with notation way longer than necessary :( I don’t wake up fast enough.
2. Head to biophysics, more elasticity theory, this time more on membranes. Interesting!
3. Grab kalua pig and speed-read the paper I’m presenting to the discourse group, on a efficient, greedy discourse tree parser. I’m shocked how quickly I grasp the whole structure of the paper, given that the method is fairly sophisticated and makes liberal use of Conditional Random Fields, a probabilistic model I just learned about.
4. Head to CSE and present the paper with gusto. As usual, I defend the paper’s strategy and approximation against the attacks of the more jaded grad students. It’s pretty entertaining and I’m on point responding to factual queries. Everyone is pretty tired, however.
5. We part, not without some tearful goodbyes. Then I run into Johan and Aishu in the atrium; Aishu, who I haven’t seen in forever, is organizing some crazy cross business / CSE event focusing on agricultural technology, and we talk about that for a bit.
6. Run to Haggett, grab a chocolate milk, and do my tutorials.
7. Return to 2104, start working, then realize it’s Swing Kids pilates night. Run over to Hillel UW, which is pretty awesome. The teacher works with Ben and specializes in pilates for dancers. Pilates, from my basic perspective, is isolation exercises focused on core strength and body awareness. Learned a lot about my back musculature. The thesis is that when walking, sitting, etc, and especially dancing, one needs to be aware that most of one’s structure resides in the back, where the bones and the supporting muscles sit. Seemed reasonable!
8. Hit Som Tam, looked at Pedro’s research. Want to talk to him tomorrow about research opportunities.
9. Return to 2104, keep working. Read biophysics lecture notes, talk a bit with Damir.
10. Chat with Gaya for a bit and hit the hay!

3/6/18: The Happiest of Days

1. 3/6/18
1. Highlights!
2. Gaya brought me flowers after the Glee concert! And met the family :) Both sides enjoyed the encounter a lot.  I got to goof off with Secret in the grass, chat up Izzy about algebra. We hit Full Tilt for a ridiculous amount of delicious ice cream, then back to 2104 to hang out for a bit.
3. Then my folks dropped me off at Chili’s for the Philosophical Physical Society’s 3rd meeting. We had an interesting discussion about Germany--fun fact: Hitler was a decent painter :P And I came up with a topic for next time--a better vocabulary for describing the recursive interactions between self and environment that make me feel less like a decision-making robot than math-major-mental-models predict ;)
4. Afterwards, went to Jacob’s house. We talked philosophy for a bit, then dug into Ohm’s law--turns out a uniformly conducting medium supports EM waves, but they have a damping term! And all sorts of crazy stuff. Really really cool. Jacob and I may Tex it up over break--typeset it into a paper :)
5. Head to Terry and hang out * with Gaya for a while. Recap the fam visit happily.
6. Return to 2104, write the SPS newsletter, crash out

3/5/18: Dinner Party

1. 3/5/18
1. Woke up at noon :)
2. Made Xin an omelet
3. Went to get a haircut with Xin! My favorite place Epic Cuts was closed for a remodel, but we found a nearby place. Barbers were very entertaining, big buff dudes slapping us on the back with rugby on the telly.
4. Went back, hit the gym. Crushed Xin at badminton then played a few going-it-easy games with a few noob girls and a dude who I’d met at DubHacks.
5. 5-minute workout, then shower, towel off in the sauna :)
6. On the way back to 2104, grab some groceries for the curry night
7. Then grab some more stuff from 2104 and hike to West Campus
8. Run into Alex on the way, turns out she just broke up, give her a hug and proceed to pick up Gaya from Terry.
9. Walk over to the Engineers’ Flat, where Curry Night is in full swing. Brandon is mixing ginger * beverages, (the * is not a pointer declaration), Fielder et al. are masterminding two different kinds of curry, a new dude named Anice is chopping chicken. Gaya and I get to work. I start making greek salad and Gaya makes chai.
10. Gaya gets in a good chat with Alex while I catch up with all the engineers.
11. Once the rice is ready, dinner is served. Amazing and very classy. Fielder did a terrific job organizing. I feel like I’m at a homeschool dinner party, a far cry from the omelets and pancakes me and Brandon hacked together in the earliest brunches :D We’ve come a long way.
12. See Gaya out--she’s got to work--then sit down and chat with Julie and Trevor and Alex.
13. End up in a long EE conversation with Max; we argue about capacitors in series and springs and a possible abstraction in graph theory that connect the two :D
14. Bid everyone goodbye, head over to Terry, have a good chat with Gaya, sing some goofy songs :D
15. Return to 2104, hang out a bit with Xin, check email and Facebook, do tutorial pretest, read a math article from Dad, and hit the hay :D

3/1/18

1. 3/1/18
1. Woke up at 10
2. Read through fascinating lecture notes on biophysics, polymer folding and entropic force :)
3. Went to class, we started a discussion of elasticity theory, which relates strain (the forces on an object) and the stress (the resulting deformation) in all its multi-dimensional glory. We derived the lines of zero stretch ;)
4. Lunch culti-date with Gaya! Cultidate <- date at Cultivate, the actually quality HFS-run high-end restaurant that takes student dining money. Sat next to the ASUW president--all the HFS brass eat at Cultivate.
5. Went to Terry to study * with Gaya.
6. Frustrating work on the hotel website for CaC. The feature set of the builder we decided to use (Squarespace is blocked in China) is just too lean. Will have to talk with team.
7. Swing lessons! I was super out of it for some reason and really struggled with swing-out variations. At the end of the two hours (advanced, techniques) I just collapsed on the floor.
8. Team Food at Little Thai. Tasty, good to catch up with Savanna, talk to Nico about math memes, which is a difficult mode of conversation for me.
9. Am not feeling like doing work, so I go to the gym and play some hoops. Check in with my family about the absolutely, wildly insane thing that’s happening with my sis’s instagram account--one of her videos is on track to be in the top 3 most popular videos of the year!
10. Return to 2104, hang out downstairs and read, chat with Gaya for a bit, then hit the hay.