UW Update Saturday 4/18/15

1.      UW Update Saturday 4/18/15

a.     Woke at 4:45 am. Dressed, grabbed my water bottle, and jogged to Johan’s house. I knocked and nobody answered, so I checked the perimeter of the house. Nobody outside. I texted Johan—no response. Finally I called. Still no response. I shrugged and started reading The Martian, calling and knocking at regular intervals. Finally, at 5:20, Johan’s brother David opened the door. Turned out their alarm had malfunctioned. Ate some English muffins with jam, then hit the road.

b.     Listened to banjo music all the way past Issaquah. David, nominally a high school sophomore because of the way he transferred from the Danish school system, but really a junior with the only car amongst the three of us, is taking banjo lessons.

c.      After a pretty drive, arrived at the trailhead around 6:40. We were intending to make it to the top of the mountain/hill to see the sunrise, but both temporally and spatially we were off. We took the longer trail by accident, and only made it halfway up. No matter—it was a beautiful day, and the air was super fresh. Near the turnaround time mandated by David’s banjo lessons, we tried running for a bit, but we weren’t getting to the top. So we stopped and ate some avocados with Johan’s “pretzel rolls”, slightly salty buns that went well with the avocados. Then we sprinted down the mountain singing trail songs until David hurt his ankle. We stopped running for a bit, but David needed to make it to his banjo lessons, so we kept running. David led the way with his Forest Service hat (from an internship) intimidating all the latecomers we crossed paths with.

d.     Returned to the car sweaty and panting. Listened to more banjo music on the way back, ate some Clif bars. It was interesting to note Johan and David’s mannerisms in conversations—I don’t know whether their mannerisms were representative of Danish culture in general, or whether their similarities were due to being family. Both brothers addressed me and each other by first name much more often than most people, and they were both soft-spoken but exuberant in a similar way.

e.     Walked back to dorm from Johan’s house and napped from 10 to 3:30. Grabbed lunch at Which Wich. Then Mom and Dad picked me up and we chatted for a bit at a park. Their experience at Ikea had not been good—tons of people, and the things they were trying to order were heavily backlogged. But the day was as sunny and warm as it had been eight hours earlier, and our conversation soon turned to sunnier topics.

f.      They dropped me off at the dorm. I sat outside reading physics for a while, then grabbed some dinner at the 8 and returned to my room to read.

g.     Sorted through and reviewed all my class notes, which took a good chunk of time.

h.     Finished physics postlab, and was just about to head to Denny Field, when Grace texted that she was free to Skype. We talked for a long time. Sounds like things are really crazy over at Whitman, in a good way. Grace told me of her HvZ escapades, as well as the crazy preparations in progress for the Renaissance Fair (“RenFair”). Not surprisingly, there’s a high degree of intersection among the RenFair crowd, the Fencing club, and the HvZ horde. Sounds like a neat culture.

i.       We talked about classes, extracurriculars, and all sorts of random things (we shared a load of Pandora stations J). It was nice to talk on the weekend with no time constraints.

j.       Wrote this log and dipped my mind back into the void for the night.