We had Moot Court on Thursday afternoon. It was pretty good. I sat there listening to everyone say their things and get asked questions, and then I frantically added bits to my speech during our 15-minute break, and then I went up and read my speech with emphasis, and then it was over. My last sentence was excellent:

If you believe that all people are born equally free and independent, if you believe that the people of Maine should be able to enjoy and defend life and liberty, then allow them to similarly acquire, possess, and protect their property.

The judges both ruled for the landowners (my team) on performance, and split on the merits, though the senior judge ruled in favor of the town/state, so then it's like the Ghiradelli ice cream competition: well, you won in this way, but we won in this way, so it's a tie. (That's for you, Valerie.)

Then I came home and found out that Ms. Carlisle died. I realized, of course, that she kept getting weaker every year, but I didn't realize that her illness would eventually be terminal. Ms. Carlisle was my advisor all four years at Exeter, and she really was a great advisor. She had us over to her house for meals and figured out activities for our advisor group to do, she helped us decide what classes to take and she helped us with history papers. I am sorry she is gone.

When I was at Exeter a few weeks ago, I went to her classroom as I always do when I visit Exeter, but other teachers' names were on her door, and although I went to all the rooms in the history department, I could not find hers, and I could not find a history teacher to ask where her classroom was. I guess she must have been on sabbatical this term. I am sorry that I didn't go to her house to find her. I am trying to start some sort of something in her honor; we'll see how that goes.

We went to Mystic Pizza on Saturday night -- Mystic Pizza of "Mystic Pizza" fame. It was pretty good, but not phenomenal enough to elicit the vast hordes of people that it does. On Saturday night a few of Evan's friends who graduated from Williams this past June came over and played rock music. I recognized some of them vaguely, and one of them tried to convince me that we had a class together. He was drunk, so he accepted my assessment that it must have been Art History, which is a large lecture with the lights off so that you have no idea who's in your "class," seeing as how we have completely different majors and I have no idea who he is at all.

On Saturday I got up before 6:30 to take the J&D out with Hallie and Lisa. Hallie needed to collect cormorant pellets from an island, Lisa (our professor) needed to show her how to collect them, and they needed someone to stay on the boat while they were on the island. It was difficult to get off of the dock, because the seaport had tied the Annie up between the J&D and the river, so we had to go under the ropes that were tying her to the dock on one side and the L.A. Dunton on the other. This was a delicate procedure, motoring between two priceless vessels that happened to be attached by ropes, but we did it, both going out and coming back. It was a bit cold, but it was fun to drive the boat, especially after we got past the no wake zone (the no wake zone was unfortunately about 80% of the ride). I let Hallie and Lisa out on a rock covered in seaweed, and they walked through water that threatened to spill over the top of their waders, and then I waited on the boat, bailed it out a bit, before coming back to the rock to pick them up (the boat was anchored). Two leetle feesh!

Afterwards Lisa took Hallie and me to the coffee shop, and then Lisa came over to Albion to help me with MatLab. There is always a bit of adjustment required to learn a new math program, because you have to figure out what the syntax is and what the commands are. This program is much like command line, and happily it uses parantheses for functions, as in f(x), rather than square brackets like Mathematica, as in f[x]. Lisa told me what to type every step of the way, which was good in some ways because it meant we got somewhere, but it was bad in some ways because I could not reproduce what we did. Luckily, we did get somewhere, and we'll get farther next week. Lisa stayed for lunch, which was nice. We had Valerie's vegetable soup.

In the evening, one of my policy people called back, and we talked for maybe 15 minutes while I frantically scrawled notes. Honestly, these people I am talking to are so nice. They tell me who they think I should talk to, and they even look up their phone numbers for me. Today I realized that not only is this woman I talked to last night Robert McCloskey's daughter, which I assumed was the case -- and that is already pretty neat -- but she is the Jane from One Morning in Maine! The one who gets the spark plug, who is the older sister of Sal! I talked to that Jane on the phone! Cool.

Today I basically read Moby-Dick all day, and I finished it. I also went for a run, which was great. I tend to forget how much I like running when I'm not running, but I really do like running, especially when it smells like fall, which it does now. But it's sort of cold out, not cold enough to wear something other than a T-shirt and shorts, but cold enough that all the old people in tour groups at the seaport stare at me and some of them say things like "aren't you cold?" Of course I'm not cold. I tried once again to get to CVS via Greenmanville Avenue, and once again failed to succeed. I have heard that going via the post office is not the most direct route, but I cannot seem to find this mysterious better one. I also did some intervals, one minute on and one minute off. My heart rate was about 185 during the fast pieces and it managed to come down to 180 on the minute off before I started again. But this is what happens when I prevent myself from going slow on the rest part, so that is just the way it goes.