UW Update Saturday Feb. 7 (and Backlog Summary for the Week of Silence)

1.     UW Update Saturday Feb. 7 (and Backlog Summary for the Week of Silence)

a.     Sorry for the long silence! Last week was Leroy busy. I pulled two 6-hour nights, crazy for me, to write a midterm paper that tied in reading materials with James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games for teaching, and prepare a presentation on Maasai cattle culture for cows. I also had loads of physics homework, and was behind on all of this due to, among other things, writing CSE application essays. If all goes well, I’ll be able to take CSE department courses next quarter.

b.     After all this work, I spent Thursday evening, Friday, and Saturday afternoon re-immersing myself in the social world and goofing off. I was too irresponsible to write blog entries during this time.

c.      But now I’m back in balance and ready to roll. So:

d.     I woke up at 10 and headed to the Ave, where I met my cousin-in-law Georgia, in town for an interview, at the Café Solstice. We chatted for a while.

e.     Then I hustled back to Haggett to greet Lydia, who visited from Bham. Her brother Henry was in Seattle doing an audition for a summer camp in dance, which sounded more like an internship than a camp. If you impress the company running the camp, you get invited back for more training next summer, and potentially wind up with a position in the company.

f.      We put our backpacks in my dorm room and walked all afternoon. (My tracker tells me I walked 23,000 steps today, much more than average.) Lydia’s brisk stride never flagged as we hiked to the physics complex, back up to the quad and the disappointingly closed libraries (planned power outage, but we still got to see the stacks from outside), to the HUB and the disappointingly closed cafeteria (I forgot it was closed on the weekend since I always eat lunch at Which Wich or the Indian buffet), to the Henry Art Gallery, which I actually hadn’t been in but was neat, and finally to the Ave where we ate a terrific lunch at Which Wich.

g.     Then we headed to the IMA, where, danggone it all, we would have had to shell out $10 for a guest pass. So we walked out to the network of trails I’d discovered on a run and sat ourselves on a bench looking out over Union Bay.

h.     Throughout the day, we chatted about Whatcom and the things Lydia was doing (secretary of the QSA gender-inclusive club, potentially looking for employment as a French tutor or library assistant), life at a large campus like the UW, the psychological state of the homeschool community.

i.       Finally, we walked back from Union Bay to Haggett, where I said hi to Henry and Carolyn. They left for Bellingham, and I went up to do physics hw. I got 1-2 hours in, then went to play basketball. Got into some fun games, but I need to work on my footwork, kept tripping when defending this one dude. I was getting some great rebounds, though.

j.       Went back to dorm, showered, ate dinner with Raymond from chess club. He’s a huge Age of Empires nerd, and I used to play a lot of AoE, so we talked about campaigns, favorite civilizations, and so forth.

k.     Returned to dorm, talked with Brandon and Xin, did more physics with them. Realized I was locked out of my room even though I was sure I had taken the key with me when I left for dinner. Frantically retraced my steps to the 8 and found I’d left my key there, somehow had taken it off when I took off my sweatshirt.

l.       Thanked the world for its kindness and made some comments on a teaching classmate’s paper, then went back through my own paper and did some editing. Made notes to myself to edit tomorrow.

m.   Wrote this log and signed out my consciousness for the day.