10/5/16

1. 10/5/16
1. Woke up an hour before class, had delicious Raisin Bran breakfast while watching Your Lie in April, super beautiful.
2. Statmech was interesting, fast-paced and twisty lecture.
3. Hung out in SPS lounge, a bit of frisbee with Isaak, taught Isaak how to make the lunchbox poster. Worked on quantum tutorial.
4. SPS meeting! Stefana from club fair tabling and open house showed up, jumped right into the thick of things. The vibe was really good, everyone was joking around but staying on topic. I’m working on the Thanksgiving Food Drive, which basically means hyping and fostering cordial animosity between students and their profs, and opposing profs, so that people want to donate food so that their prof gets pied. We also talk about the Halloween party, which I coerce Devin into captaining.
5. Try to go home and get lunch. Get into conversation with Johan about trying to get into 390p, which I’m not even sure that I want to do, frustrating.
6. In Red Square sign up for HvZ, starts this Monday!!
7. Back to 2104, make myself a couple of grilled sandwiches (potato bread works really well) and some apples, watch more Your Lie.
8. Start working outside, write an email to Adam Blank.
9. Badminton with Xin, we get into a doubles game and this one dude single-handedly shows us up. Competitive frustration!
10. Return to 2104, take a shower, then
11. Off to swing lessons! First is the advanced lesson, which is mostly working on the subtleties of swing-outs. Guess who’s there: Stefana from SPS! She had mentioned she was interested in dancing and I’d told her about lessons. But guess what happens! My face-name recognition chokes fatally. I see a face I can’t quite place in the rotation, halfway through the lesson; naturally I assume it’s someone I’ve danced with before. So I ask her name again. Whoops! It’s Stefana :0 Whose name I instantly remembered, once I had the connection with SPS. She’s extremely weirded out by the contrast between my SPS competence and social grace vs. my apparent complete inability to remember her face in this different setting, actually asks if I’m high :P (Analogous to the Ritmo Latino dance moment where the dude asks me how I ended up there :)
12. Technique lessons are fun. Much smaller class but John and Cassie do a good job. Sasha from the intro lesson in the IMA is there, she remembers me. Madeleine is her usual goofball self. Afterwards we go to Team Food, meet up with Trevor.
13. Get into a conversation with Savanna and someone I vaguely remember from last quarter named Becci. Turns out Savanna auditioned for Furmata too, also didn’t get in. Becci invites me to audition for her acappella group, a spinoff of Furmata, called Hounds of Music. Sounds interesting :)
14. We all go to Mongolian Grill and chow down. I sit down at the main table and then see Trevor, who hadn’t chutzpah’d his way to one of the tight spaces at the main table. So I get up, grab Alex and Becci who are just sitting down, and sit with Trevor. Good conversation about travels, etc.
15. Return to 2104 with Madeleine and Alex’s friend Julie who are going to North campus. Skype parents, lots of fun.
16. Grab some tea downstairs, quick chat with Lisa, then back to journaling. Xin’s slaving away grading EE homework, guess my TA experience wasn’t enough to scare him away :D

10/4/16 (previous days are coming!!)

1. 10/4/16
1. Today is a crazy day! First up E&M, which is tedious. I open up a big Wikipedia chain on math and zone out.
2. Walk to the Bean and Bagel with Eric, Spencer, Brianna, get myself a cheap bagel, very good.
3. Quantum is exciting. Prof. Cobden gives us a list of postulates which deal directly with wavefunctions, different formulation than Feynman. Cool links to math I’ve seen before, plus some of the stuff I was reading about in E&M.
4. Head to SPS lounge, hang out for a bit, walk up the Ave to get Open House groceries with Frank. On way run into Jasper from 33x, he tries to get me to take 390p, which he’s TAing.
5. Once back, realize Kyle failed to get enough balloons for our balloon stomp game. Think for a minute, where to get balloons; stroke of genius--or so I think--says call the RSO (student club) resources office. They do have balloons; I run over there, turns out I can only get 16 balloons a day :( WTF?! But I get to learn about their awesome poster-printing printer and other resources. the friendly girl recommends the dollar store for balloons, I smack my head and take off running.
6. Get 75 balloons for $3, back to lounge, start frantically writing up name tags with famous physicist names and sci-fi-characters, and blowing up balloons. Go ham delegating both tasks, as the time grows nigh the whole lounge comes together in common purpose.
7. We start the Open House in one of the big auditoriums, I direct people over from the SPS lounge.
8. We must have had 50 people, 10+ freshmen. All 12 of our pizzas are consumed. I get to mingle and introduce people. Brianna and Spencer and Xin show up. Announcements with the officers go really well, for the most part; I’m getting really comfortable onstage. Frank forgets to introduce Hira, our treasurer, though; which really bothers me because she’s the only girl on our officer team.
9. Balloon stomp game is a big hit, people really get into it. Kyle’s demos also draw a crowd.
10. Meanwhile, outside, celebration is occurring for the Nobel Prize awarded to a retired UW prof. I have no time to stick around and help clean, I run to Creating a Company. Catch the tail end of a talk, hang around and have tea with Prof. Leong and some students, then I have to run to Glee.

9/24/16

1. 9/24/16
1. Slept in really late. Had a fascinating dream about a more realistic backstory for the Star Trek movie conflict, where post-singularity aliens decided to go back to their primitive state and left themselves emergency instructions for rebuilding their civilization that triggered when humans arrived in the vicinity.
2. Went downstairs and ate breakfast. Got into a conversation with Molly, our friendly roommate. Then joined by Kenneth, senior history major. Felt awkward chatting with my bowl of cereal long drained, but had a really interesting conversation. Ken wants to teach HS in Tukwila, where there’s a very diverse student body, lots of refugees (really?) and immigrants.
3. 12:30, Xin comes down and we go to meet Josh and another friend, Tanvi, for lunch. Meet at this cool waterfront Mexican place called Aguas Verdes, sit outside, portions are large but not amazing. Josh is his normal cheerful life-is-a-good-natured-joke self; having abandoned plans of getting into CSE, he switched to Environmental Ethics (apparently randomly) and is now applying to 100+ internships as a numbers game. Tanvi is a ACMS biology option major, very friendly.
4. Tanvi leaves, Josh Xin and I walk to Gasworks. Toss around the frisbee for a while, feels good. Back to Josh’s Stevens Court apartment, run into that nihilist dude Sam from Rick’s cafe. Play some Smash, get destroyed.
5. Return to campus, go to Mary Gates to work. Surprise! I run into another acquaintance--Caleb Huffman from my presentations honors class. We get into a long conversation. He wants to go into US politics the hard way--law school, clerking at a federal court, etc. Figures there ought to be some honest folk in that game. We talk about Trump and argue about biological determinism. Before I know it, it’s nearly 6pm. I’ve invited Andrew Li from math to cook dinner with me, so I hustle over to Safeway.
6. Andrew’s blue jacket is recognizable anywhere. We go into Safeway, buy taco stuff, talk about CSE 5th-year masters and our summer experiences. He’s been doing research at the UW about turning databases into matrices and factoring them :)
7. Back to 2104, Xin comes down to help cook. Andrew masterfully whips up homemade pico de gallo while Xin dices cheese and I cook the meat. End up sharing the meal with Jan, the basement artist, and Matt, who I don’t know much about yet.
8. Brandon comes in at the end and we get into a game of pool. I play crazily well the first game, Brandon and I dominating Andrew and Xin. Second game is more even as everyone’s play deteriorates. So much fun! Andrew has the cheer coming from working all day and then relaxing.
9. Andrew then gets on the piano. He’s amazing. He looks like the guys in Your Lie in April (an anime I’d been watching with the family, and which, in fact, Andrew knows. He tells me the song he’s playing is from the show finale.) I just sit there for a while and watch him.
10. Hang out with Emily and Andrew in the kitchen for a bit. Then Xin and I walk Andrew home. He’s got a nice apartment about 6 blocks from campus, although it’s in total disarray. I see on my calendar UW vs. Arizona has 20 minutes left and it’s a close game, so we use my HFS streaming privileges to grab the game; Andrew and I watch the harrowing final minutes (Go! Huskies! Spoiler, we win!)
11. Head back to 2104, write this log and pass out before convocation tomorrow.

9/23/16

1. 9/23/16
1. Dawgs Crew morning move-in much busier. Lots of fun. Meet the president of the League of Astronomers, she says she can share a table with us (SPS) at the club fair.
2. Took a nap :)
3. Lunch at 8, watched Your Lie in April.
4. Went to visit CENPA, close things out with Prof. Garcia. I had decided I was going to stop working there because I didn’t want to be messing with more large obnoxious software systems. But helping Garcia, a pre-GUI computer user, navigate COMSOL, almost changed my mind. I was in a better position to construct the simulation than he was! He couldn’t find the context menus, etc. And he was so nice! Honestly, I love that guy. Maybe I should keep working with his group.
5. Did work in Music building. Chatted with Issa a bit. Got about halfway on final Alpha manual. Ran into Elizabeth, one of our doctorate student conductors. Super nice lady, gave me a hug, some inside info on choral auditions.
6. Working outside once the music library had kicked me out, ran into Troy from the honors floor, plus a slick, business casual older dude. Chatted with Troy a bit, talked about my internship, found out Troy was interning with the dude, working on some solar systems thing. The dude was an incredible two, latched on to some piece of my intelligent-sounding chatter about my internship and tried to suck me into his world, of ill-defined attempts to compete with huge solar energy companies on five different buzz-wordy fronts at once. I feel like I have to warn Troy, who’s an earnest naif trying to change the world through science.
7. Dinner with Brandon at the 8. Run into Peter, this really nice, very autistic dude who sort of latched onto me freshman year. He’s extremely cheerful, even though he seems aware that he’s socially ostracized. Thinks I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread, since I’ll actually say hi to him and catch up when I run into him :)
8. Return to 2104 for floor meeting. RA, Dei, is nice, but not as eager to blow off goofy rules as I’d hoped. Get to bring up barbeque, afterwards a few guys say they’d go in with me to get one.
9. Head out to Quad Flicks with Molly and Abby (somehow we lose Dei). Watch Finding Dory. It’s great. Go back to drop off my sleeping bag, and...
10. Brandon’s sister Emily arrives. Make ourselves a couple of sandwiches, then B, Emily, me go to midnight carnival. Watch lots of great dancers doing goofy moves in impromptu dance circles.
11. Back to 2104 and crash!

9/22/16

1. 9/22/16
1. Quick log today
2. Breakfast! Make myself a sandwich.
3. SPS meeting. Very good--we discuss a lot of things.
4. Get ticket for the Stanford game. It’s on @Joan :)
5. Dawgs crew volunteering is very slow. Get to hang out a lot with fellow volunteers.
6. Dinner with Ben and Hiroki and Xin at A Burger Place. Lots of good conversation. Hiroki shares some interesting details--apparently Japanese dormmates always leave their doors open, even when doing private things. Ben agrees to the swap.
7. We swap all our stuff. Then Xin and I go to badminton. End up playing basketball with Hiroki.
8. Get back, hang out with Brandon. Get into conversation with Molly from the floor, who is nearly as colorful as Selorm. A bunch of girls from the floor leave to join a party :)
9. Hang up whiteboards, write this entry and crash!

9/21/16: First day back at the U!

1. 9/21/16
1. Wake bright and early, finish packing the van. Say goodbye to the sisters and their companion animals and head out!
2. Sleep most of the way there.
3. Arrive just in time for volunteer orientation. The orientation is routine and logistically plagued as usual, but I run into lots of people I know. First Lindy from last year’s Dawgs Crew, then Catherine from last year’s floor, then Trevor and Kasey from last year’s ill-fated housefinding project.
4. Chat with Trevor, who’s just finished JPL internship. He plans to return next year.
5. Inside the auditorium, run into Sara (global floor) and Alanna (Rick’s). Then meet Trevor and Kasey’s roommates, they seem like cool dudes. Wesley, Peter, Spencer (when I told him me and the other swing Spencer were Spencer 1 and Spencer A, he replied he goes by Big Spence (he’s a diminutive dude).
6. Meet parents at McMahon, go to pick up keys. Trees are beautiful and leaves are falling. Behind McMahon desk, am surprised to see Camellia from Honors Phys. Turns out we’ll be in quantum together.
7. Go to 2104, Hiroki my current roommate (the swap to get back together with Xin hasn’t gelled yet) is absent, his spare belongings across one side of the room.
8. Unpack, get Indian food with Mom and Dad, and head back to 2104.
9. Meet Hiroki! Nice guy, from Waseda U. in Japan, liberal arts major. Here for a year to study English, though his spoken english is quite good. Trade factoids about our respective countries.
10. Do work, answer email (one intriguing one from an investment manager of the UW’s endowment, to whom Raj Rakhra from last quarter’s Global Trends class referred me. The position looks really exciting, a full time junior financial analyst job. Should at least look into it.
11. Go out, look into lofting bed, Hansee custodial office just closed. For tomorrow! (the procrastinator’s battle cry).
12. Go to physics complex, hang out waiting for Margot to get advising notes. Margot never finishes, but while she’s helping another student I
1. Order socks, underwear and tupperware on Amazon
2. Meet a dude named Kevin and discuss electro-magnetic equivalence. We couldn’t figure out how the magnetic force on a charged particle comes out linear to the velocity.
3. Theorist dude named Marcel walks in (he was at the ice cream social); overhears me say “but magnetic fields are linear, right?”. In friendly condescension assumes I’ve made some weird assumption about magnetic fields in general. Put him right on that assumption and get to ask him about our E&M textbook. He prefers the one he wrote :)
13. Finally overhear Prof. Olmstead in the next room, she’s the ugrad advising head now. Ask her about my missing notes, and since she’s getting off work she takes me upstairs, we find the notes. Good time in the physics dept! Looks like I gotta take statmech, so much for japanese film :(
14. On way back to 2104, get sucked into a pickup hoops game at Denny. I hustle but my offensive skills are rusty.
15. Shower, off to dinner with Hiroki! Take him to Som Tam, good conversation.
16. On way back, stop by kitchen to hang with some girls from the room over, who were going down to cook as we went out. Abbie and Selorm. Abbie bustles away making squash soup, it looks like it’s going to take her 3 hours. She’s a “Soch” or sociology major, looks a little Hispanic. Selorm, a returning 2104 resident, sophomore dance and biochem major, is gregarious. She starts spinning stories about the dramas of 2104 past--one girl who got pregnant, the time she threatened her boyfriend with a chopstick… Turns out she’s originally from Ghana (she’s black but her English is really good, once I listen I can hear a bit of an African-sounding accent, a little lilt). She wants to go to the Nook, invites me along, so we run over there and back.
17. Return, put away stuff in room, more work. Reply to financial investor email, lots more stuff. Get Google photos autouploader working. Super nice. And the wifi (just UW, don’t even need a router) is screaming fast.
18. Read great math article.
19. Off to Safeway! Actually QFC. The prices are right and I load up on sandwich and breakfast supplies. By the time I get back and label all the stuff in my fridge (that’s right, it’s annoying!) it’s 1am. Write this journal and hit the hay.

China Blog referral

Yo! If you haven't seen my blog on my recent trip to China, you should do that! Head over to

sinospenceriantales.blogspot.com

Cheerio!