Mystic blog by Diana

That's well

2005-12-28T18:59:00.000-05:00

Thanks for reading my Mystic Blog. If you'd like to read more, scroll down, or check out the weekly archives in the sidebar on the left (I'm talking to you, Libby).

Thanks to Val's mom for her prolific comments, and for other people for reading and visiting and generally making my hit counter happy.

If you'd like to read more of my writing that will actually get updated in the future, you can go to my regular blog or my running blog. You can also look at my Web site, which should be getting an overhaul sometime within the next month.

To contact me, just leave a comment; they go directly to my e-mail.

I'll get the presents; go take off all your clothes

2005-12-16T07:53:00.000-05:00

Here are the reasons why Albion is the best house.

1. Dinner every night
Albion house knew who was making and cleaning up after dinner for the entire semester within the first week. And we did it, too. Albion House was the unrecognized gourmet establishment at Williams-Mystic. Some houses had really gourmet food sometimes and not so good food most of the time. But we had solidly good food all the time.

2. Food on Sale
If it was on sale and we would eat it, Valerie bought it. Some examples follow. This also led to (4) below.
Klondike Bars
We had perhaps 60 Klondike bars over the course of the semester, because sometimes they were on sale. We had regular, dark chocolate, crunch, and peppermint patty-inspired, and we had them a lot of the time. There is a malicious rumor circulating, which I propogated after I deduced it by subtraction, that Valerie once consumed seven Klondike bars in two days.
Grapefruit
Bags of grapefruit were two for one, so we got four. Two weeks before the end of the semester, we had 31 new grapefruit in the recycling room. Valerie and Ashley love grapefruit, but they just couldn't quite keep up with the magnitude of the task. But we ate a lot of grapefruit in the last couple of weeks.

3. Iambic Pentameter with Sexual Innuendo on the Refrigerator:

And I quote:

Hadst I my lady yielding wickedly
I'd make full haste lest soon she idle be
But could my saucy tale know wanton grace
If his drunk lordship warrant yonder dream
Like merry codpiece wilt he give me hence
And please her vulgar bosom slander'd here

& ere thine farwell vow you speaketh
The loathsome night comes hither to torment
And lazy winter will besmirch death

This poem is by Ariel and Andrew. It's Hilary's Shakespeare-inspired magnets, and it's our refrigerator.

4. Grocery Fantasies
Some houses with leftover money would be more likely to say, "great, we have all this money left over, let's go out to dinner every night." Not so with Albion House. "Great, we have all this extra money, let's go get awesome groceries!" So we made a grocery fantasy list. I got fresh blueberries, sushi, and Cracklin Oat Bran. We had six pints of Ben & Jerry's and one of Godiva in the freezer. We had brie and crusty French bread whenever we wanted it. Basically, it was like fantasy land, and everyone else wanted to be us.

5. Mary
We had the best advisor, because we had Mary. Mary made the whole program run smoothly. Plus, she came over to lunch and dinner and she thought our food was excellent. She is taking tap dancing lessons, which further cements her reputation as the best advisor. Also, we got her a top hat, a boa, and a cane to further her career as a tap dancer, which further cements our reputation as the best house ever.

Minnesota & Set

2005-12-11T09:47:00.000-05:00

Anders and Kasia made this Minnesota Heritage Night last night. They made lots of lovely food, including Hot Dish, Orange, Green, and Red. There were also potatoes with cheese and Special K bars. Here is a picture of Ellie, Abby, me, Christine, potatoes with cheese, Red, and Hot Dish:

Then Valerie and I played the WORST GAME OF SET EVER.

Actually, we played a few good games of Set first. Valerie actually got more sets than me. That has not happened since I was maybe 10. But sometimes I got more sets than her, too. You know how when you play Set, you look and you see a set, so you pick it up, and then put more cards down, and the next person sees a set so they pick it up, etc.? This DID NOT HAPPEN in the worst game of set ever. There just weren't any sets. So we'd sit there and try to prove that indeed, there weren't any sets, and after a few minutes either one of us would find one, or we'd put down one more card. It took forever. It was so annoying. After that, we had to stop.

But at least Valerie was willing to play with me. Usually people refuse to play Set with me. But now I have downloaded Set onto my computer, which is quite possibly the WORST IDEA EVER. I can beat the Expert setting handily, but the Pro setting beats me. Fortunately it is only in one color, so that it's not that fun to play. Otherwise I would probably play it all day. Maybe over Winter Study I will program Set on my own so that I don't have to pay $19.95 for the version with all three colors. Does this make sense? Spend hours upon hours programming Set when it only costs $19.95? Or better yet, bring your cards to school?

Yes, it makes perfect sense, because I welcome a challenge. We shall see how that goes.

Monday: 15-page history paper due.
Tuesday: Oceanography or Ecology exam
Wednesday: History and English exams
Thursday: Field Day (clean house day) and closing dinner
Friday: Some of us depart, others don't, still others depart and then come back

Now you know.

Yesterday I went running in shorts. More people than ever before told me I was either brave or crazy. I think it was less about the shorts and more about the ice. It was about 29 degrees out and sunny, so it was not bad at all. On my way back I went to the toy store and CVS and bought Christmas presents. In the afternoon I wrapped them. Here they are:

Yup, Santa Claus is definitely coming to town.

We made a snowman

2005-12-09T20:32:00.000-05:00

This is the snowman.

It looks like I have a really weird expression, but actually I don't, which you can see if you click and see the full-sized version. Valerie took this picture.

It snowed really hard today for about an hour. First there was rain coming down so hard it sounded like hail. Then it snowed like a blizzard with little tiny flakes blowing sideways. We had to go to the library, but we really couldn't, because it was so snowy out. Finally we put on all of our foul weather gear because we really had to go to the library. But then it was beautiful and sunny out, so we made a snowman. You see that we are both wearing foul weather gear, except that I took off the plastic pants when I went to get the camera.

The snow was really sticky, wet and heavy because it had both snowed and rained. When I rolled the snowball around, the whole layer of snow came off and it was green grass below. That was a little weird. The snowman has a carrot nose, but you can't really see it in the picture. You can see it fine in real life. Valerie found the rocks. I made the head and the bottom and Hilary made the middle. We basically think it's a great snowman. He's a little tilted. "Artistically crooked," one might say.

The snowman does not have a skinny waist. We put extra snow there to keep the snowballs together. "This is a Williams-Mystic snowman. He has had his snack." I said that.

Exeter, snow, hats, it's all good

2005-12-08T14:12:00.000-05:00

I had a good talk at Exeter. The math club kids were very blank-faced and uncommunicative at the beginning, but they got more into it as it went along, and asked a bunch of great questions at the end, as did the teachers.

I stayed with Mr. Wolfson, who has these big windows in his house facing the woods, and when I woke up, there was this wonderful puffy snow falling out the windows against the dark trees. So, that was really nice. I had to study a lot on the weekend, but I was studying in my favorite place to study, so that was fine. When I was in the library, a kid came up to me and asked if he could ask me a math question. He asked what math class I was in. "I'm not taking any math" didn't seem like a very good answer, so I said "I graduated in 2003," which really doesn't answer the question at all, but you know, I answered his math question, so that's good.

If you have a solid sphere of radius c, and you take a drill bit of radius a and drill out a cylinder through the center (with spherical caps on the end), the amount of hollowed-out-sphere stuff you are left with has the same volume as a sphere of radius b, where a²+b²=c². If anyone can give a geometric explanation for why this makes sense, I'd like to know about it.

Our policy exam was on Monday for three hours. My arm hurt afterwards. And there were some things I forgot to write, but there were a lot of things I remembered to write, too.

Dan came. So we met Dan. And we liked him.

Our English and science papers were also due. That was all right. We didn't get much sleep, though. And my science paper is 1.1 MB; Hilary's is 27 pages long (because of the figures), and Ashley's is 36 pages long. So, we wrote a lot, and killed a lot of trees (because we had to print out three copies).

In better news, we got our Team Zissou Standard Issue hats, and we wore them to history class this morning. I did not know what Zissou hats were when Hallie said she was ordering them for all of us, and I looked on Google and saw people wearing red hats, but I didn't really know what the deal was. Then Hilary and I watched the movie (Life Aquatic) yesterday after we turned in our science papers, and now I know what the deal is. They just wear red hats with their blue pajamas, and that's just the way it is. So now Williams-Mystic wears them, too.

Here is a picture of us walking to history class wearing hats. You can see all of them on Shutterfly here. You will notice two members of Albion house at the extreme left of the picture.

Exeter

2005-12-02T23:22:00.000-05:00

Yup, I'm going to Exeter tomorrow, partly for fun, and mostly because I'm giving a talk on Sunday titled "What is math research?" I gave my practice talk today, and people were much more interested and engaged than I had even hoped. Let us hope that it is the same for the real thing.

I hear the Putnam is tomorrow. Oops! I was going to try to find a way to take it. I only took the first half last year, and I didn't come back for the second half. Then when I got the results back, I did well enough that it would have been a good idea to take both parts. Oops. I guess there's always next year.

In other math news, I appear in the MAA Fall 2005 Student Chapter News. My name is about 1/3 of the way down, if you bother to click on the link. Also, I now own the orange feather boa that the very annoying woman with the large sunglasses who decided to give a talk aimed at first-graders to college students at a national math convention is wearing in a picture about 1/5 of the way down. It looks sort of pink in the picture, but it's actually orange. She was like "if you solve this problem before the end of the talk, I'll give you my autograph." I didn't want her autograph, but the talk was so ridiculous that it was a way better use of my time to solve a math problem than it was to listen to it. And then she felt bad and gave me her boa. The story is longer than that, but I'll stop there.

Well, my train is early early, so I'd best go to sleep.

You're welcome, Valerie,

2005-12-01T08:47:00.000-05:00

but you know, I have an e-mail account. If you want to send me private messages, you can send them to my e-mail account. But since you insist on posting private messages on the Internet, I shall have to post a picture of you on the Internet. Gasp!

This is a picture of Valerie standing in the recycling bin wearing boots.

Valerie actually asked me to take this picture. She said something like "you have a camera, right? Go get it." That is not a direct quote, but it gives you the sense of her sentiments.

We sure compacted that recycling. The entire trash room was basically full of recycling, but after the compacting extravaganza, it all fit into that one little bin. After Valerie got out, that is.

Save lids, save lives

2005-11-30T12:01:00.000-05:00

If you like breast cancer research and you like running, then you should run a Susan G. Komen breast cancer race. But if you prefer yogurt to running, then Yoplait has a promotion for you. See, their yogurts have pink lids, and if you lick them off and send them in, Yoplait will donate 10 cents to the Komen foundation for each one. So if you're into buying delicious and somewhat expensive yogurt in a six-ounce package, Yoplait is the yogurt for you.

I have an envelope in my room with about 30 such pink lids in it. That's right, Albion House eats Yoplait like nobody's business. Except that even our extreme efforts will only result in a $3 donation to research. Thus, you have to eat Yoplait too! And tell your friends! And save your lids, and send them in!

Alternatively, instead of paying $1 for a yogurt that yields $0.10 to cancer research, you could just donate the entire dollar here. That would probably work better, but then again, Yoplait yogurt is delicious, especially the custard variety, so you can just eat ten times as much!

This promotion lasts until December 31. So eat up, and ask for yogurt for Christmas.

In other news, I made it to the Quote Wall. Hooray for procrastinating on my policy paper and saying something eloquent.

Brilliant, part 2

2005-11-28T17:10:00.000-05:00

So, as it turns out, the Brilliant was not an America's Cup vessel. I showed Ronit the Brilliant this weekend and he was terribly unimpressed. He thought I had run into some super craft, and this was just a wooden boat with its mast out for the winter. But actually, the Brilliant was a pretty awesome yacht. She was a private yacht, built in the 1930s, and when she was given to Mystic Seaport, she came with an endowment to keep her in sailing condition (unlike, for instance, the Morgan, the Conrad, and the Dunton, none of which go sailing anymore). In fact, earlier this fall I saw her going upriver. Well anyway, just in case you weren't impressed, here is a picture:

Pretty awesome, no? I bet you wish you had an out-of-control JY-15 to run into such a vessel. If you're actually interested, here is more info about the Brilliant.

Okay, back to policy, back to policy, this week is going to be rough.

Oh, and by the way, that self-promoting text on my Web page was not supposed to be there forever; I just wanted text on the front page and thought that was better than lorem ipsum. If you have any suggestions -- self-promoting suggestions are requested -- of things that I should link to, please let me know. The current better-looking state of my Web page just makes its content even more sad.

Thanksgiving

2005-11-28T01:02:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving was nice. I tried to cook a 4.5-pound turkey that was still frozen, and after 8.5 hours in the oven it was still not up to temperature, so we microwaved it. The potatoes and the pumpkin bread turned out well, though.

We were at the seaport yesterday and there was randomly this Christmas parade of boats with lights, music, and Santa Clauses just coming from the drawbridge to the seaport. It was really nice. But I think all the adults were drunk.

Tonight I watched Master and Commander. We had a choice of watching the three-hour movie or reading the 500-page book. The works are not the same story -- the movie draws from several of the M & C volumes -- but the movie was pretty good.

I overhauled my Web page. You should probably take a look at it. Just don't look at the source code. I finally have the buttons on the side that I have wanted for years now. Aaah, buttons on the side. Here it is.. Ronit says he will help me overhaul it much better soon, which I say will be after the policy paper, the science presentations, and my math talk. Today was css; php is the future.

Almost Thanksgiving

2005-11-21T21:13:00.000-05:00

I said that because I didn't have a better title.

Let's see, the first important thing that's happened since I last wrote is that David Kane '88 linked my previous post from EphBlog. Too bad it wasn't a more interesting post, eh? Gosh, now everyone knows about my fashion emergency! Maybe I should wear a bonnet or something! You can always tell when that happens from the spike in traffic. And the fact that all the referrals are from EphBlog. And the fact that EphBlog has a post on it, of course.

Also, old business, here are links to my Web page, normal blog, and my Running bLog. Please note the clever capitalization on that one. Someone has tried to convince me to put all the blogs into one, but until I do that, they're all being linked separately like that.

I made a delicious chicken dish with spinach. My parents know about this because I was talking to them on the phone -- or, more accurately, they were talking to me on the phone -- while I was chopping up the chicken. It was pretty delicious. It was so delicious that when I went to have it for lunch today, people had already eaten it. That's impressive. It's probably because I put half a stick of butter and some salt in it at the end. That makes more of a difference than the lovely spices. Sad, isn't it?

My lightbulb, which, if you will remember back to approximately a fortnight ago, I JUST changed, burned out today. Only one of the two burned out, but still, it says on the package it's supposed to last a year. One year != one fortnight.

I bought all of the food for Thanksgiving. It was about $25. This is mostly because when I would try to put something in my handbasket of things that I was paying for, Valerie would take it away and say "no, the house is buying that for you." I did pay for my turkey all by myself, though. It is only a piece of a turkey. I suppose it is about the size of a Cornish Game Hen. If you were a Cornish Game Hen, you'd want your name to be capitalized, too.

Lisa helped me with my project over the weekend. We decided that modeling the actual accretion of sediment was just too hard. So I fit a quadratic curve to my data, and now we're making a nice little animation of a marsh growing, represented by a bar (the bar of "bar graph" fame) growing. The rough draft of the paper is due on Wednesday at noon. It will not have this animation with it. Because MatLab is super difficult. I can program programs in my calculator, Java, and Mathematica, but MatLab I have not learned yet. And, wouldn't you know, that's the one I need.

This morning I violated my 40° rule. I went running in shorts and a T-shirt even though I was pretty sure it was going to be below 40° out. And it most certainly was. The sun had not risen, but the sky was light, and it was yellow over by where the sun would be rising presently. My skin froze, but otherwise I was okay. After I got back and took a shower, I checked the temperature, and it was 32°. So I am officially hard-core. But more just hard on the outside, where the skin froze. No, not really. And I had gloves on. My parents brought me my running gloves from middle school. But they brought two rights instead of one right and one left. That's all right; just the writing is on the top of one hand and on the palm of the other.

Also, you should write to me NOW, because stamps are going up to 39 cents on January 8. You read it here first, and I read it at the USPS site first.

I guess I'd better get back to my history presentation for tomorrow.

Potter

2005-11-18T22:37:00.000-05:00

That's right, I saw the new Harry Potter movie today, only 16 hours after it was released. I have never done such a thing before, but a lot of Mystic people are really into Harry Potter, so we all went together. It was a good movie. I have not read the fourth book, and that was what the movie was about, but it was a perfectly good movie without having seen the book.

This morning Jim lectured in Policy. It was really interesting.

Today Hilary made cranberry sauce for dinner. It was really delicious.

Yesterday afternoon I was doing science in preparation for meeting with Lisa, but I was not particularly occupied, so when Christie called and asked if we (Albion House) were busy, I said no, because none of us was actually busy. So we went over to Labaree House, because there was a --

Fashion Emergency!

I put this in bold and offset it because I don't have fashion emergencies, ever. So Christie needed someone to model W-M attire to go online so that people can order W-M apparel online. So, Albion House plus Ariel will soon be featured online, modeling vests, T-shirts, frisbees, jackets, etc. I will link it and then you will see the brilliance of this.

Last night was Ashley's night to cook and she didn't want to cook, so we considered getting takeout, but then we decided not to, so we drove to New London and had dinner at a Thai restaurant, because we have enough excess house money to do that sort of thing. This was the first time in my life that I have ever had an appetizer, a main dish, and a dessert at a restaurant. I had green tea ice cream for dessert. Mmmm, green tea ice cream. Everyone else had fried green tea ice cream with whipped cream. Whoa.

I hadn't gone running for three days. The last time I didn't go running for three days was on Cramer and immediately afterwards. It sure makes me antsy. My legs sort of ache in the sense that they want to be challenged and, essentially, they want to sprint. So I went running today, but it wasn't enough. Ronit showed me this article a while back where they bred mice to like to run, and then when they didn't get to run, they experienced the symptoms of withdrawal from addiction. See here, and an excerpt:

"All mice run on wheels, and, therefore, have a motivation to run," says Justin Rhodes, a postdoctoral fellow at Oregon Health & Science University who completed the study while a graduate student at UW-Madison. But he adds that the specially bred mice have a genetic predisposition to run longer distances. "They represent those few extreme individuals in the population with an intense desire or compulsion to run," he says.

On the seventh day, the researchers blocked half the mice in each group from the wheel while giving free access to the other half. "In the high-running mice, certain brain regions displayed extremely high levels of activity, more than normal," says Rhodes. "These were the same brain regions that become activated when you prevent rats from getting their daily fix of cocaine, morphine, alcohol or nicotine."

So, yeah. Withdrawal. I've never been addicted to anything else, obviously, but I am probably addicted to running. Well, there are certainly worse things to be addicted to.

We took our class picture today, by the really big anchor by the church. It was probably a nice picture. We shall see. That's all for now. I'm going to bed early tonight.

History

2005-11-17T00:35:00.000-05:00

Today I was doing some last-minute research for my history paper, trying to find some instances where people asked after each other's health. This is all over the letters that I have been reading, so it should not have been difficult. But the collections that I was looking at were just business documents. This one did have correspondence, but it was all correspondence that the navy had sent to him on Navy Department stationery. I only found two letters the whole time, one where he explained to his dad what they were doing in China for five pages, and another one where he wrote to his mom to say his brother had died. So, it was pretty disappointing, since you only get the kind of thing I'm looking for with correspondence within a family.

Then again, he was also the captain of the U.S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides), and I was reading the letters he received and carefully saved. The Secretary of the Navy wrote him a letter, and signed off "your obedient servant."

We had the first day of motorboat class today. This guy that used to be the sailing instructor at the Coast Guard Academy is teaching us. Today we went over the parts of the boat once again, except that it was a motorboat this time, and for the last 20 minutes we got to drive the boat. The five skills kids were out rowing in the whaleboat. When they passed the first time, we were on the dock, so we just shouted and waved. They were rowing totally out of sync. When we finally got both motors started -- not that it took a long time, just that we had to very slowly get guided through the process -- we went out and Evan and I in our boat went in circles around the whaleboat. A few times. Matt was steering, and I don't think he was amused, but I think the skills kids enjoyed it. Right, Hilary? We made fun of them for having old technology. Evan laid down in the bow with his hands behind his head.

Valerie made delicious chowder for dinner.

Our heat is fixed now. My room was really warm last night and the rest of the house was cold, but now it's fixed so the whole house is pretty warm. Today it was warmer outside than in until they fixed the heat, but it was really warm outside. Now it's really windy and I hear it'll get cold tomorrow. That's all right. It's supposed to be November. At least, that's what I hear.

Brilliant

2005-11-14T22:24:00.000-05:00

I say that a lot -- "brilliant."

"Do we have raisins?"
"Yes."
"Ah, brilliant."

But today I did something really brilliant. It was the last day of sailing, so they made me steer and do the main sheet, instead of squatting and doing the jib sheet, which is what I had been doing the other times. Now, I had not yet mastered the skill of switching hands when coming about by putting the tiller behind my back, because I had not done it much before. So the second time we came about, I let go of the tiller to switch hands with the sheet, and the tiller accordingly went all the way over and stayed there, and thus the boat continued to turn after we had tacked enough. And where did we head? Yup, straight towards the Brilliant. I grabbed the tiller and pushed it all the way in the opposite direction, and we missed the hull by less than six inches. That was really lucky, because I was going way too fast for the instructor to be able to stop us from hitting it.

It's a really bad idea to run into exhibit boats. Then again, it's kind of cool to almost run into an America's Cup boat. "Oh, Brilliant."

Katy didn't like my policy paper. She wrote all over it and gave me bad ratings on the rubric. But I liked talking to the Deer Isle people, so it's all right. I'll make it much better in the final draft anyway.

We had dinner at Lisa's house tonight. We also prepared the bottles that we are going to release, with notes in them, to study currents. People who find them call (or write, or e-mail) us up and say where they found them and then we know where the current goes and how fast (at minimum) (think about it) it was going. She made us chowder and really good anadama bread.

I am glad my room has separate heat. The rest of the house is cold, but I can turn up my own personal baseboard and then I will be warm.

It was really warm today, 65 degrees. I went for a six-mile run, and actually experienced the symptoms of running in heat. When it's really hot and I go running, I get tired a lot sooner and my muscles hurt a lot more. It was only 65°, but it happened today. Weird. I did run all six miles, though, out 'n' back on the River Road.

Oh yeah. My mom brought key lime pies for the dessert table at the family day lunch. There was one left over, so we brought it home, because key lime pie is delicious. Then we were trying to figure out if there were nuts in the graham cracker crust. Ashley and I looked very closely at it and decided there weren't any. So she ate a piece of pie. Then I got two pieces of nut shell, and she found a bit of nut that had not been ground up so much. Luckily Ashley can just take a pill and then she won't go into anaphylactic shock, which is good because we didn't want to go to the hospital; we just wanted to eat pie. So now Ashley can't eat it. More for Valerie and me. (And Hilary, but she isn't as vocal about her fondness for the pie.)

Parents' Weekend has begun

2005-11-11T22:08:00.000-05:00

Yup, that's right. So we have an influx of food, I now have heat thanks to my dad pulling out the desk and turning the knob, and I have light thanks to his bringing pliers and unscrewing the screws to take off the light cover. I didn't know that there were two bulbs in there and one had apparently just burned out long ago and no one bothered replacing it, because now it's even brighter than it ever was before.

Also, I have an influx of the various items I was missing, such as all my papers and transparencies from SMALL. Amazing that I got through the first three months without them, isn't it?

Now I have the pictures that I took at the gathering in Colorado. I took some really nice pictures. I am really impressed with myself. You should really look at them. You will find them here. Most of them, the people aren't looking, because that's the best kind of picture. Here are just a couple.

"And then we hit the rock! Ha! And she still goes out on the boat!"

Aunt Verna and my grandma. They are sisters.
This isn't a great picture, but my mother likes it, so I'm putting it up. At least I didn't put up a picture of her. She didn't like her hair that day, so she probably wouldn't want it ALL over the internet. Because my blog is ALL OVER the Internet.

"Oh, my! My, my, my what a quilt! Good gracious me, oh!"

Valerie's parents claim to really like my blog. I'm glad. At least someone reads it. Unfortunately, they don't care about the pictures of my grandma's 90th birthday party. In fact, I'm probably the only one who cares that the pictures of my grandma's 90th birthday party are really awesome and amazing, except for the people who were there who now have awesome amazing pictures of themselves, and none of them are reading this. But that's all right; blogs are for navel-gazing anyway.

We had exams

2005-11-08T23:57:00.000-05:00

That's right, the science (marine ecology and oceanography) midterms were this morning. Why so late in the semester? When you go on three field seminars, the middle of your semester turns out to be in the middle of November. Neat, huh.

Our next thing, which is a draft of our history research paper, is not due until next Thursday, so except for reading, we have nothing due until then. So today I made food. I made chocolate chip biscottis dipped in chocolate, and apple-rice-grape-raisin-yogurt chicken salad. They were good.

Valerie went to Maine. We miss you, Valerie. And you missed some good food.

My light bulb burned out. I stood on a chair and turned the covering part to the left, and I turned it to the right (lefty loosie righty tighty depends if you assume they were looking at it from the top or from the bottom) and both directions turn and neither makes it come off. So maybe I have to undo the screws. That would be really annoying. I realized I have this wall sconce tiny lamp thingy that I have never really turned on before. It is not what I would call a good reading lamp, but it is better than nothing. That's the glory of a blog, you can talk about when your light burns out. It's dark in my room, though, and cold, because I haven't figured out how to turn on my baseboard heating. The whole rest of the house is heated with radiators and my room has no radiators. It has this baseboard without a front part, so you can see inside to the heating elements. And it has no on/off switch. So it's cold and dark. But only in my room.

Only three days left until I get this really awesome camera. I can't wait.

Only two weeks until Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is going to be a lot of fun. I got Ronit to agree to run the Turkey Trot with me. It is at 8:30 in the morning on Thanksgiving. We shall see how it goes.

We had boat handling again yesterday. Julie and I were once again command in a JY-15 with JY-14 sails. This time we sailed down to the drawbridge and then went back and forth from the seaport to the drawbridge to the seaport, etc. This is because there were 10-knot winds in the estuary by the YTB. Oh no, 10-knot winds! This is the problem with having different teachers on Mondays than on Wednesdays. Last week Julie and I took out the same boat with the same sails in sustained 16-knot winds, and we were fine. Sailing in sustained 10-knot winds would have been much better than slowly going back and forth in the channel with every so often a puff. The wind changes way too much over there, because there are buildings that alternately block and change the direction of the wind. But at least I did not get wet. It was a beautiful day for sailing.

Oh, and I finally punched it in: Mystic and Williamstown are 112 miles apart. Funny how it takes like eight hours to get there. And it is 286 miles to Deer Isle, which also takes about eight hours. Funny.

Digging holes

2005-11-06T17:53:00.000-05:00

This morning I got up at 5:15 to go to the beach with Hilary, Lisa, Ashley, and Hilary's friend to dig holes in the sand for Hilary's science project. The hole I dug was more than a meter deep and about half a meter across, so it was difficult to get the sand out at the end since the shovel had to be almost vertical to get the the bottom. But we dug them down to where the water was, and she got the temperature and salinity of the water in the bottom, so that was good.

This afternoon I ran the Tarzan Brown race on the River Road. It was 5.5 miles, and I started out with a pace of 8:15 and sped up so that I finished in 44:06, precisely 8:01 pace. That's all right with me, considering that I have only run more than four miles once in the past six months or so. I started out about 2/3 of the way back in the pack at the starting line, so I was passing lots of people for the first half or so of the race. But that's sort of fun. I don't think I placed in any measurable way, though.

Now I have to study for my oceanography exam.

Policy is done now

2005-11-04T13:48:00.000-05:00

At least for a few days. Then we will begin calling and rewriting and conferencing in earnest.

This is my new favorite picture. Peter took it in the Chesapeake Bay, at Fort Monroe. Valerie was sitting on top of the pile of cannonballs, just normally, you know, like the Thinker or something, in other words just like a regular person sitting. But when Peter tried to take a picture of her, she said no and jumped off. So I did this nice gymnastic balancing thing, because other than sitting on the top, it seemed like the only logical thing to do. So since I am logical, that is what I did.

In the Chesapeake Bay we had a crab dinner one night, and we decided to have some of them Tangier style, so instead of just putting them in the pot, throwing a bit of spices on them and steaming them alive, we did something more drastic. We removed the top shell -- the part that looks most like a crab, you know -- and then you could see their hearts beating. Next we ripped off the gills, which are their lungs, and used a knife to take off the mouth part. Then we used a spigot to wash out the guts. Then they were pretty much dead, except that their legs still moved when you sprayed water inside, because it pressed on their nerves and it made them twitch. So if you're weird like me and you know it's already dead anyway, you take a knife and you poke its spine to make the legs twitch. Because that's kind of cool, you know, manipulating the nerves after the animal is dead. Then we sprinkled the spices on the meat, which was now exposed -- that was the point -- and steamed them that way.

We got up at 5:45 this morning and went to get more cormorant pellets. It did not rain this morning, and we started the engine just perfect, and the seaport people put it on the other side of the dock so that we wouldn't have to go under the lines of the Annie, and we collected maybe 80 cormorant pellets, as opposed to four the last time. And we made it in time for policy class, even in time to have cereal first. But I was falling asleep in policy class during our guest lecture, which was bad, bad, bad. I was so tired that I slept for a good 13 minutes of our 15-minute break, and would have slept longer had I not set an alarm for myself. Hmmmm.

It should be a nice weekend.

Gourmet food

2005-11-03T22:13:00.000-05:00

Grandma thought we would be eating PB&J all the time. But she was wrong. I told her the last time I had PB&J was when I was at home! Unless you count on toast in the morning, that's true.

Today Valerie and I made spinach-artichoke dip. We put in spinach and chopped artichoke hearts and some dairy ingredients (cheese, cream cheese, mayonnaise) and then we spread it in pans and Valerie grated romano cheese over the top and we baked it. Then we had it with Triscuits and sliced baguette. Sliced on the diagonal. Duh.

Hilary made banana bread, although it was more of a house effort since we have been preparing our bananas for banana bread for weeks. They were almost entirely brown before the Chesapeake, so I put them in the refrigerator so we wouldn't get fruit flies, so when we got back they were entirely black, and now it has been almost a week after that. So they were ready to be made into banana bread. We baked it and ate it warm. Mmmmm. But not all of it. Yet. Things like this last very short amounts of time in this house, though. Hilary's two loaves of pumpkin-coconut-cranberry bread lasted under 24 hours. So you see, I am not kidding about the short amounts of time, or the gourmet nature of the food in this house. Three adjectives for the bread, honestly.

And then Hilary brought some over to Katy during office hours, and Katy said that because of that, we all get As. "A is for Albion," she said. Hilary claims that this is a direct quote. In that case, I need not get back to work on my paper, right? Wrong. Back to work it is. I currently have 8.5 pages. It needs to be 15 pages, but not necessarily the draft... right? right? Hmmm, maybe wrong about that, too.

Chesapeake

2005-11-02T16:30:00.000-05:00

Yup, still here. The Chesapeake was good; it was much more low-key than the other trips, because they could not plan it to the nearest minute, so we kind of went around and saw things and ate a lot of snacks. Nothing wrong with that.

I had a nice weekend in Colorado, seeing Karen and Jeff and their kids, and going to Grandma's 90th birthday party. It's good to visit Cooper and Stella every so often so that they will remember who I am. I asked Stella who made the wooden thing with her name on the wall, and she said she didn't know. So you see, I should go more often. They are really cute. Yup.

I ran two miles on a track that we had to break into by climbing over a seven-foot (or so) chain-link fence. The track was really nice, the edges weren't even broken off yet, and the lines were beautiful. I ran two miles slow and then did a mile fast around the inside lane. I ran the first two laps at 7:20 pace and the last one at about 6:10 pace, so I was pretty happy with that. 7:02 for the mile, which is not what I would call impressive, but for not having anyone to race and for being at 6,000 feet of altitude, it was pretty good.

I got "randomly selected" for a full security screening both going to and returning from Colorado. You know, where they make you stand with your feet apart, arms out and palms up and wand you down, pat you everywhere the metal detector detects metal, and swab all the surfaces of your luggage with cloths. Going both directions. Ha ha, "random," sure. If you fly American, look at the bottom-right corner of your boarding pass. If it says SSSS, that means you get a Super Special Security Screening. So allow extra time.

I had to write a four-page English paper for today. That was not very much fun. I don't like writing English papers. It was about this poem. I would rather write our 15-page policy paper than a four-page English paper. And it's due on Friday morning, so I had better do just that.

We had boat handling today, and Julie and I took out a JY-15. The average wind was 16 knots with gusts up to 20, so there was some pretty steady wind. There were not whitecaps, but it was close. I was in the bow doing the jib, so I got quite wet. We went pretty fast, and the boat made that humming noise. We had to hike out a bit. When we were docking, the teacher guy did that thing where they just tell you what to do and not what the idea of why you are doing it is, so when we barely missed the dock and circled around again, he said "push the tiller that way" and Julie did, but apparently it was not "that" way and we had no idea of what his plan was, so the mast almost hit the cables holding the Conrad in place. Honestly, if you want someone to do something, you should say "turn the boat around that way and come in again, point your bow into the wind," that sort of thing. Today was the last day for the JYs; I don't know why, but after this since it is getting to be winter we will only be sailing Dyer Dhows.

Now, time for policy.

Another fine couple of days at Mystic

2005-10-23T23:34:00.000-04:00

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.

Please borrow my cat

2005-10-20T21:10:00.000-04:00

Dear friends (and yes, I do mean you, you who is reading this post),

I have a wonderful cat. Her name is Tigger. I got her from the humane society when she was a kitten and I was eight. Even when I was little and had no idea how to hold cats, she let me hold her and did not complain. To this day, she loves being picked up, and if you so much as appear to be about to pet her, she will start purring. She does not meow, does not eat much, and is litter box trained. Here are pictures of her: http://wso.williams.edu/~ddavis/tigger/

Why does this matter to you? Well, my parents are retired now and they are going to go to Florida for a couple of months and sort of drive around and travel. My cat would not be a good companion for this sort of journey, so they have been trying to find someone who could take care of her from January to April. Everyone they have contacted either has a family member who is allergic to cats or will be away for too much time to take care of her. So, where will she go?

The current option that my parents are considering is to put her in a kennel for three months. They were recently extolling the virtues of this kennel, where she would live in a little box with food and water and litter and a little window to the outside world. For three months. It is almost at the point where I would take a semester off of school to prevent this from happening. But, not quite.

So, I ask you now: Would you or your family, or anyone you know, or anyone anyone you know knows, be willing to take Tigger in? If you, or your parents in most cases, would not mind having an unobtrusive little cat around, who likes being petted and held, I would be most appreciative. If you or anyone else you could put me in contact with might be interested in borrowing a cat, PLEASE let me know. We will happily deliver her to any location on the east coast (broadly defined), from Maine to Florida. I kid you not.

Tigger is a Maine Coon Cat. She is an indoor cat, and does not go outside. She does not scratch on things, but she does shed, less if she's combed, though. She has been an only cat all her life, all else equal would be better in a house without other cats. I do not want to subject my cat to staying in a little box for months on end, and I hope that one of you will be willing to borrow her.

Thank you very much,
Diana

Chicken & messengers

2005-10-19T16:09:00.000-04:00

I think I forgot to mention, I have a new recipe for chicken. I was sort of following this recipe online, but then I just got so far away from it that I decided to abandon it altogether and just set out into the wilderness of cooking by the skin of one's teeth. So, here is my new recipe for chicken:

Take a normal package of chicken with four boneless skinless chicken breasts in it, or the equivalent. Cut off the yucky bits and cut the chicken into bite-size chunks.

Combine 1-1.5 cups of plain yogurt with about two tablespoons of spices, including chili, curry, cumin, salt, pepper, etc. The total volume of spices should add up to about two tablespoons, in case my first sentence was unclear.

Put the pieces of chicken in the yogurt, stir it all up, and marinate in the fridge. After a couple of hours, overnight, a few months (it'd better be in the freezer in that case), etc. pour the whole deal into a skillet and stir it on medium to high heat until the chicken is cooked. If you have to cook it for a long time and the sauce evaporates, add more yogurt.

So, that's what we had for dinner last night. We also had couscous and salad, but that's not very interesting, although the couscous was delicious. But Valerie made it, so what would you expect, huh?

I now have my webcam, and I am not going to do the picture online thing because it is too difficult what with WSO requiring sftp and me not being able to figure out how to set up my computer as an internet host. However, if you would like to view it, you can sign on to Yahoo messenger, the latest version (Yahoo Messenger with Voice), send me a message and I'll get it all hooked up. Most of the time I have four messaging programs at my disposal -- AIM (dianathemath), Google Talk (dianajdavis), Yahoo (dianathemath), and Skype (dianathemath) -- which should be enough for anyone. So if you want to do the webcam thing, install Yahoo with voice and send me a message.

The next 24+ hours will be entirely saturated with Moot Court.

Moot court

2005-10-18T22:22:00.000-04:00

This post will not be about Moot Court. This is just a heads-up.

Yesterday a couple of interesting things happened. First, we had maritime skills. Second, it was blowing about 16 knots. Third, we were super annoyed that we'd only gotten to go sailing once this semester, and so we really wanted to go, 16-knot winds or not. Fourth, we were supposed to take out JY-15s, which we had never sailed before, and our first time was to be in 16-knot gusty winds, which is less than ideal. Fifth, we took out the JY-15s and did just fine, which was pretty neat. And sixth, I met Val's mom, who writes more comments than you. Unless, of course, you are Val's mom. Oh, and seventh, we found a poop on our front step, which later turned out to be from Carr House and made of chocolate frosting, but we didn't find that out until today; yesterday we just thought it was poop, and so I moved it with sticks. And then today it was gone, which would be weird if it had been poop, but it was less weird since it was frosting and living creatures enjoy eating frosting, even if it looks like poop.

This weekend was not terribly eventful. I read a lot of Moby-Dick, went for an hour-long run around the circumference of the estuary up to the drawbridge, during which I remembered how much I like running, and I met with Lisa about my science project. So now I have MatLab on my computer. This program will ostensibly allow me to map out the shape of the area around the Charles W. Morgan and plot vectors of the current and model how the sediment gets deposited. Unfortunately, though I worked through most of the tutorial, I found nothing about making pictures and modeling currents; it only told how to add and multiply matrices, etc.

Today I went on a run; I decided that since I had limited time, I would run uphill. This is Mr. Parris's advice: if you can only run limited mileage, make it uphill. And it was a good thing I did, and that I did the hill on Bruggemann street, because I forgot that history class was starting at 10:30 instead of 11:00 today, so when I saw Chella and Ariel at 10:27 as I was coming down the hill after my fifth repeat, they advised me that I had better go to class. So I didn't get breakfast or a shower, but I did manage to entirely change my clothes and get my notebook and pen to Labaree house by 10:31, which was an excellent effort indeed. Instead of class-class, we drove to Stonington (which was why we met early) and had a walking tour, where we learned all about the houses and people who lived there. Cool.

Oh, and if you people knew that Karen ran her marathon, I think that this is something that I would have liked to know, no? So, since I didn't know, I assume that other people didn't know, either. Karen ran her marathon in Maui, in a time of 4:26:26. The person before her finished almost exactly a minute ahead, so there was not much competition there, but someone finished three seconds behind her, which suggests to me that she out-sprinted someone at the end. Well, in any case, yay.

Also, Tyler ran this marathon about a month ago. And he was fourth. In the whole marathon. In 2:38. That is pretty impressive, considering that for maybe two entire months of his training time, he could not really get out of bed, much less train. But he read Lance Armstrong's book, just like all the other inspired people of this generation probably will, and he battled for first place until the last few miles. Well, congratulations to Tyler. He doesn't read this, and I already congratulated him. Right.

In any case, we have moot court on Thursday, for which I now have a very spiffy blazer. Our team has nine people (18 students / 2) which naturally makes for extremely long meetings, especially when people do not come prepared. I am giving the closing, which is excellent because otherwise I would be nervous about how we were ending, but this also means that I wait until the end of our meetings to talk about my part, and my attention span is somewhat shorter than a few hours. Well, hopefully in about 36 hours we will have our arguments much better in mind.

Oh, and we read the first half of Moby-Dick for Monday's English class. Now, Steinbeck puts in those seemingly unrelated chapters between the story narrative chapters to help strengthen the story or sense of place, and I like that. But Melville puts in unrelated chapters about whales in general or other expeditions or scripts for plays, merely to illustrate the facade of the novel as a form of literature. I have little patience for these interspersed chapters, interesting though they are on their own. Everyone thinks that Moby-Dick is about Ahab and Ishmael and Moby-Dick, and that's the part that most people enjoy and remember, but it's maybe 25% of the book. And that's the 25% I like, too.

Work

2005-10-14T19:36:00.000-04:00

So, I decided to do my job for the first time today. I ran into my supervisor in the library, so I couldn't very well avoid it for much longer. She showed me how the scanner worked, and the computer program that went with it, and where to get the plans out of a drawer, and where they were on a certain list. Basically, my job is to set the darkness level (like on a copy machine) so that there are not background dots all over the scanned image, but also so that the lines come out completely and are not missing pieces. This takes a bit of trial and error, since some plans are printed on white paper in black ink lines, some are on beige plastic-ish paper with brown lines, and some are on bright blue paper with dark blue lines (those are the hardest).

For dinner I made Japanese curry. I decided to make 12 servings while I was at it, instead of six, because that takes a lot less effort than to make the whole thing twice. So now we have a very large batch of Japanese curry left. It looks sort of like stew, but it is much tastier.

This morning we had policy, where we talked about our research (which I need to start calling people about) and about next week's moot court. We also talked about the cases from our reading, about the Clean Water Act. In the afternoon, a Williams English professor, Cassandra Cleghorn, gave a talk in which she read us some poems about the sea -- about the beach, really -- and talked about them. I think her talk would have been better if she hadn't been reading from pages she had written, even if she did justify this aloud at the beginning by saying she had just been to a bad extemporaneous speech.

It rained today, but not all day.

This weekend I will read more of Moby-Dick, start calling people for my policy research, do some reading for the moot court, and go running, maybe for a long time.