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.

Yom Kippur

2005-10-13T23:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the beginning of Yom Kippur, so Hilary made matzoh ball soup and latkes and this casserole-looking thing made of egg noodles and custard with crumbly brown sugar stuff that smelled like apple crisp when it was baking. All of it was good. I cooked some of the latkes. We had the leftovers for lunch, and there are still leftovers.

Yesterday morning we had Oceanography, and we talked about the sources of salt for the ocean. Next time we will talk about how salt leaves the ocean (because if salt only went in, then it would keep getting saltier, which it doesn't). The composition of elements in the ocean has been constant for at least the past 1.5 billion (yes, billion) years (the earth is 6 billion years old).

We also had boat handling, but there were 15-20-knot winds in the estuary, and whitecaps, so we learned about the rigging of sailboats instead. Only Rebecca and I were actually there. One sailboat needed one of its stays replaced, so we got out the wire and the pin and the wire-cutter and all, and attached a new stay. That was kind of neat. We also tied ropes between the docks so that if one of them blew off, it wouldn't go far. This included tying it to the Conrad, which I thought was interesting, since it's a museum ship, you know, tying things to it, kind of odd...

I decided to sleep as late as I possibly could this morning, which I succeeded in doing quite effectively. We met for History class in the building where the Seaport stores all of the stuff that it is not currently displaying, which was pretty neat. We went back in the storage rooms, and there are racks upon racks of half-models of ships, whale bones and scrimshaw, the big name-boards for the ships, models of ships with all of the rigging and sometimes the sails, figureheads, and you name it related to the sea, they've probably got it. Steve gave a presentation about the frigate Essex, which the citizens of Essex county, MA raised money to build in the late 18th century so that they would be protected even though the fledgling nation didn't have enough money to build a full navy. We also got our papers back -- the papers that were due at the end of a busy week, that I spent about eight hours doing the night before it was due. Except for forgetting to go back and expand upon a citation -- I left it reading "Vassa & class" -- it was none the worse for the short time I wrote it.

This afternoon I wrote a postcard and some thank-you notes, kept reading Moby-Dick, had a nice dinner of chicken, broccoli and rice by Ashley, with some cake from Hilary's mom when she got back from Yom Kippur services (today was the rest of Yom Kippur), and then we heard there was a puppy at Johnston, so we all ran over. But it turned out it was just Lisa with Bingo, because she had gotten a phone message from someone that said "I need puppy love" so she figured it was someone from Johnston, which actually it ended up not being, but they liked Bingo, who is not a puppy but merely a small adult tog, anyway. Then we ended up watching the second hour (of six) of Pride and Prejudice, which was good. Maybe I will watch the third hour (of six) tomorrow, also.

Pictures from California, taken by Hilary, with me in them:

Playing jump rope with a piece of kelp

Lecture at Point Lobos

Monterey Bay Aquarium circular fish tank

Our Ghiradelli Earthquake team

On the historic boat the Alma

I made them sort of small, but you can click to make them bigger. They don't get very much bigger, though, because I took them off of Shutterfly.

Exeter

2005-10-11T23:36:00.000-04:00

But first, here are my pictures from California, with sparse descriptions of what the things are. I am really proud of some of my pictures, but most of them aren't very good. A lot of that is because of the camera, because it likes to make every picture that has the ocean in it tinted quite blue.

I intended to go to Exeter on the 6:13 bus, so I got up impossibly early, as did Valerie because she offered to drive me to the train station, and got there at about 6:05. The 6:13 train came, but it was on the other track, and although I ran about and yelled and waved my arms, there was no way for me to get to the other track, so it went by without picking me up. I called Valerie, but she was already asleep, so I ran back to the house and decided, finally by flipping a coin and having it come up "yes, you should still go" nine times in 10 flips, that I would take the 9:31 train. So I tried unsuccessfully to go back to sleep, and cleaned up my room and packed my bag again and went to the station again at 9:15 (Valerie and Hillary were asleep this whole time). I also had two Nutri-Grain bars and a juice box for breakfast because, having just returned from California, that was the only nutritious breakfast option.

Although I had a reservation, and the Internet and the toll-free line on which I made my reservation both said that the fare was $32 from Mystic to Boston, when I paid on the train, they made me pay $46, and would not take any amount of persuasion otherwise. There were two boys on the train, one of which was living in Boston and his friend/brother who was going to Durham, so I did the T thing switching from South to North station with them. I figured the one who lived in Boston would know what he was doing, so I trusted him to choose the right T connections, but he picked a slightly less efficient way to get there, so that was kind of annoying.

In North Station, I purchased a bagel with PB at Dunkin Donuts, because I had to have some lunch since when I got off the train in Exeter I would be having xc practice. In the station, I saw someone wearing a black sweatshirt that said HAYSTACK. I pondered whether I should say anything to this person, and actually walked in two small circles in front of her while I was pondering, and I finally asked her if that was the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts Haystack.

Her: Yeah, I live in the town next to it.
Me: Oh! Me too.
Her: Deer Isle?
Me: Yes. I was a summer person, but now I'm just From Away.
Her: Oh, okay. I live on Little Deer Isle by the bridge.

At this point, the woman behind her joined in the conversation with an unmistakable Deer Isle accent. That was pretty weird in North Station. So anyway, they were taking the same train to Portland, so I sat with the girl on the 1.5-hour ride to Exeter. It turns out that she is Kevin Grindle's daughter! Whoa.

Steve was talking the other night about how everything happens for a reason, in the context of surfing being cancelled, and then he found two little kittens abandoned by the road. I was wondering how it could possibly be propitious that I missed the morning train, because that was really awful. But then I ended up meeting these people from Deer Isle -- the woman was her aunt -- so I guess that was good.

The train was supposed to get to Exeter at 1:14, and xc practice begins at 1:15 by the track. The train station is about 1/4 mile north of the north side of campus, and the track is on the extreme south end of campus, so I already had my work cut out for me, and then the train didn't arrive until 1:30. I had my running clothes on under my normal clothes, and shed my normal clothes on the train, so I started running when my feet hit the platform, pausing only to leave my backpack in Mr. Parris's house as I ran past it. As it turned out, I arrived at just the right time, as the team was coming across the field with the start/finish line. When they finished warming up, I ran with a girl who was injured who was just supposed to do a "long run," but her injury kept occurring, so after about 15 minutes of that, she went inside and I joined in with P, timing and keeping just ahead of the interval-runners.

In the afternoon, I talked to Ms. Kemp, Mr. Wolfson, and Mr. Parris about when I could give a talk, and we decided on December 4. I have lots of finals and final papers due then, but the whole rest of the semester after the Chesakpeake trip is like that, so it's as good as any weekend. I will talk to the older, smarter half of the math club about my summer research. I also attended the accelerated prep class which was the equivalent of what I took in my prep fall, in that same room with P.

Jenna and her mom kindly let me stay over at her house on a few hours' notice, and while Jenna did her homework, I talked to her mom about Williams and to her dad about Williams and my summer math research, which was fun. I got farther in my explanation of it with him than I have ever gotten with anyone, which was neat. When Jenna had finished her Arabic (!) I helped her with her stat homework, which was fun. Jenna's mom gave me my own room, with a nice warm bed, which was very nice of them. And in the morning, she made me eggs -- in the microwave! and they were not slimy, and not tasteless! -- and an apple for breakfast, and drove us to school.

I went to Mr. Parris's A format, which was a prep class, and they talked about one of those things that is my pet peeve when people get it wrong -- when something increases from 1 to 4, it has increased by 300%, not by 400%. Mr. Wolfson wanted me to see his B and C classes, which I did, and they were indeed both good classes (meaning good groups of students -- they were both Math 3). I also went to Assembly, which was the John Phillips Award, to an alum who worked to eliminate large dams because they devastate the economy and the lives of millions of poor people. He also used the phrase "invasive species," which I thought was quite appropriate.

After D format, I ran into Sasha, which was nice, because I had missed seeing her the previous day, because she is injured, and I like Sasha. I quickly changed in the library bathroom and made it to practice in time to be on the first Red Dragon to... Apple Annie's! We had a nice run, where I got to talk to a few runners that I didn't know (the only people on the team I know now are Laura, Jenna, and Sasha, and the team has 46 people on the roster) and we ended up at Apple Annie's, where we ate drops and drank delicious cider.

When we got back, I said bye to P and Laura walked me through the new part of the gym, which is shiny and new-looking. While Laura and Jenna changed, I ran to the bookstore to pick something up, and then met them for lunch in Elm Street (yay for free delicious food). Lunch was, as it had to be, too short, and all too soon I was running north across campus to make the train. Which I did. I bought my ticket on a machine in the general store, which was neat, and read Moby-Dick (yes, the hyphen is required) and took a nap on the way to North Station, where I took the T (the efficient way this time) to South Station, where I bought the next ticket ($32 -- see? I asked the agent for a refund on the previous one, but he only gave me the address to write to) and a McFlurry. I read a lot of Moby-Dick on that train ride, and again hit the platform running, as I thought I was 20 minutes late for Celestial Navigation. Happily, Celestial Navigation occurs half an hour later than I thought, so I had time to change into dry, albeit less in dress code, clothes. And there were only four students there, instead of the usual ten or so, becuase people didn't realize that we had it tonight. Humph. Now I have to do more work before I can go to bed. Humph humph. I am tired.

Oh, and in case you either got this far, which I doubt, or scanned to the bottom, which is slightly more likely -- by "parents," I meant the lurker parents that I didn't know about. The parents who comment, I know they read it, but the ones that don't, all I know is that I get hits from random places that I don't recognize, and I guess those are other people's parents. I hope you like the pictures.

We're back

2005-10-09T23:59:00.000-04:00

Yup, and we had a safe trip, with no mishaps.

So, I heard that a bunch of parents read what I write here. That's neat. Feel free to pass around the URL. I hear that it helps my classmates to avoid having to repeat what they do to their parents, because they do the same things as I do, and I write about them. So, if you are a parent and you want me to post a picture of your kid or something, just let me know and I will be ever so happy to oblige.

That's about all for now, because I still have to call Amtrak to reserve my seat on the train for tomorrow early early in the morning, because I'm going to Exeter.

California

2005-10-06T00:44:00.000-04:00

I am having a great time in CA. Yesterday we went on an amazing tugboat ride yesterday and saw these huge container ships, each carrying 2000-3000 of the containers that go on the back of tractor-trailer trucks. This morning we took a sail on a gaff-rigged "schow" ship in the SF bay, which was beautiful. A few days ago we went on a whale watch and followed a mother and calf humpback whale around, which was really neat; we saw the mother's tail (flukes) a few times. But when they exhale, the wind blows it towards you and it smells really bad, because it's coming from the decomposing krill in their stomachs.

We also went to Cannery Row and the Monterey Aquarium, which is just about the neatest thing ever. Cannery Row is getting more touristy, but they actually kept Steinbeck's closest friend's house exactly the way it was, not open to the public, and the lab in the basement still has some bottles that he labeled himself.

We walked around SF today, and it's amazing how much of the city is built on fill -- junk that people threw in the bay to extend the land -- rather than land that was formed geographically. We are seeing and learning about a lot of science, in addition to all that we are learning about history, literature, and policy, and yesterday we drove up to a hill overlooking SF bay and the Golden Gate bridge, and saw not only a spectacular view -- a beautiful sunny day, rather than the more common dense fog -- but one of the world's only "ophiolites," where subducting continental crust is forced up onto the plate that the rest of the subducting plate is going under.

Driving in the vans is a lot of fun; the five vans communicate via walkie-talkies, and they joke with each other, as well as pointing out things that we should look at by the side of the road and explaining them to us. We have between three and six lectures a day by the various professors.

There are wild parrots in SF.

Today I got my sundae that Jim promised when we found the crabs a while ago. We went to the original Ghirardelli's, and I had a great sundae.

Signing off.

Fishing

2005-09-30T21:50:00.000-04:00

On Thursday it was a beautiful day for sailing. Unfortunately our student boat wardens had knocked the centerboard off of the Mystic sailboat, so we had to take off the mast and boom and take it over to the boat yard and help them take it out, which took our entire two-hour time slot. That was kind of annoying. It is the boat wardens' job to take the boats around and haul them and such, and they get paid for it; not only do we not get paid for it, but also they take away our sailing time. But they used a forklift with a six-inch horizontal rod which they drove up to the edge of the (deep) water and put it over the boat, and then put two cloth slings over the rod and under the boat, lifted the rod as a forklift does, and lifted the boat out and carried it around entirely by gravity and friction. Then to clean the bottom, they used a high-powered hose (it was attached to a motor) which was really effective.

Unfortunately the rest of that day was spent writing my history paper. It was a really boring topic, and unfortunately I wrote a boring paper to answer it, which was basically because I resented the question and was thus not interested in writing an interesting paper. At least the paper addressed the question, the entire question, and nothing but the question.

Yesterday evening we had a "yay, we're done with work" party. We had people over to bring their perishable food, and we played a fun game called Apples to Apples. Then Rebecca (the one at Williams-Mystic) had this paper summarizing her summer research that she needed edited, so I spent a few hours editing it. It was about how her university can address environmental issues through all sorts of things, like dining services and facilities management, but also through the general curriculum.

It was a short night, because this morning we got up at 5:30 for breakfast at Carr house (carrot-zucchini-chocolate muffins and crepes) at 5:45 before mustering at Labaree at 6:30 for the fishing trip. We got to the place half an hour early (half an hour we could have slept!) so I went along with people who were buying coffee, because it was better than standing around. We had to split up into two groups because there was not enough room on the boat for 20-something people. So first this woman gave a talk about how they do research on improving the nets to reduce bycatch. The room was really cold -- everyone was shivering; I had on three long-sleeved shirts plus a vest, and two pairs of pants, and I was freezing -- and I was really tired, so I think I kept falling asleep. But it's hard to know, because if I was, then I was asleep and I didn't know about it. Then we watched a video about different kinds of fishing, like for groundfish vs. mollusks vs. crustaceans.

Finally it was our turn for the boat. As we went out, the guy who used to teach policy at W-M talked to us about the waters and the shipyard and such, and marine salvage, this sort of thing. If a boat is burning, you are expected by law to save the people on board, and you are fined $10k and a year of prison if you don't. If you save the boat, or at least keep it from sinking, whoever's boat it is has to pay you a percentage of the value of the boat. That's just the way it is.

When we got out far enough, they put down the net, and while we towed it for 20-30 mintues, he talked more. Then we brought up the net and they dumped it on the deck. There were about 40 lobsters, all but two of them undersized, one really soft because it had just molted, one that was about five inches long total. There were a bunch of crabs, tons of squid (about 6-8" long) and lots of fish. There were winter and summer flounder, which are born with eyes on either side of their heads like humans, because they swim upright like a cod/mackerel/bass, but then at some point their eyes migrate and they swim flat. If the eyes migrate to the left, they are summer; if it is to the right, then they are a winter flounder. We played with the dying aquatic life for quite a while. There were these little fishes that died with their mouths wide open, so that they looked really surprised.

The guy let us take home a bunch of fish, like five flounder and five bluefish. He showed us how to fillet them, and lent us his knife to take home for the night. We packed the fish in ice. A few hours after getting back -- don't worry, Ashley went home for the day, because she would be in the emergency room many times over by now -- we got to work and filleted the fish. It was not as easy as he made it look, partly because he had done it a lot more than we had, and partly because his knife was a lot sharper than the ones we were using (not all of us could use his). But eventually we got it all filleted. We also ripped the bodies out of the squid, and I saved the cuttlebones. I think we must have had about 60 squid, judging from the number of cuttlebones. Every so often when you stuck your fingers inside the squid to pull out the body, you'd get ink all over your fingers. That's pretty neat, because I've read about squid doing that since I was in elementary school, and now you know, they really do. I washed the cuttlebones twice with soap (because I live in a house where fish is banned) and put them in my window between the screen and the glass to dry. I will make some sort of mobile or something. If you haven't seen cuttlebones, you'd think they were plastic, but they're actually the backbone-ish thing, the part that make squid an element of molluska.

Then a few hours later, it was time to cook them. So we painted this sauce made of horseradish, mayonnaise, and mustard (I think -- Hallie made it, not me) on the fish, and put lemon juice (from lemons) and salt and pepper on it, and put it on tinfoil on the grill. That was the bluefish. For the flounder, they egged and breaded and baked or fried it. I'm not quite sure, because I had to go look for my driver's license in the meantime, so I missed the flounder part. But then I went over and ate some. Actually I was in Johnston eating flounder, and I decided I wanted to try the bluefish, since I had started the whole seasoning and grilling thing, so I just took my plate out the back door of Johnston, went in the back of Carr, got some fish, and then returned to Johnston.

Now I have to pack. I won't have Internet access for a while, until about the middle of the trip. So, you'll just have to subsist without boomvang updates, which you seem to have been doing quite well for the past few days. Obviously.

Oh, and if you comment, you'll notice that you have to type the word you see. That's because I got one spam comment, and although I looked up how to delete it and eventually did so, I simply cannot be bothered to go around deleting spam comments. So, type in the word, and be merry.

Happy birthday to Becca tomorrow (I mailed her present a month ago) and happy anniversary to my parents on Thursday (I mailed their present yesterday).

Tuesday

2005-09-27T19:13:00.000-04:00

This morning I thought class was starting 15 minutes later than it was, so when I got back from my run I had 12 minutes to change, eat breakfast, and get to class (so much for the shower). Luckily class was in Craig Cottage, just across the yard and parking lot. We talked about volcanoes and tsunamis, which was interesting. Apparently the Pacific Northwest is maybe going to have a big tsunami soon. Here is some advice: If you are on a volcano that starts exploding, run downhill. If you are where a tsunami is going to hit, run uphill.

Then we had class, in which Abby gave her presentation on Seaman's Protection Certificates, and Glenn told us about the War of 1812 and the maritime commerce events leading up to it.

After lunch, I read the book that Kathy sent me, about the Essex, a ship that was struck by a whale and then what happened to the sailors in their whale boats afterwards. I read the whole thing. It was a good book.

Today in the mail I received my book from the MAA that I am going to review for Math Horizons magazine. (I am on the student editorial board of Math Horizons now.) It is about Euler, and has way more equations in it than I expected. The other one that should arrive sometime soon is about the history of minimal surfaces. That might have a lot of equations, too.

This evening I will go to Celestial Navigation class at the planetarium. We had to plot some things for homework. That was kind of fun, but kind of tedious, especially because we have two isoscles right triangles instead of parallel rulers, so it takes a lot of work just to get a parallel line. So, I'll be going now.

Motorboat

2005-09-26T21:22:00.000-04:00

Today in maritime skills, we learned to use the motorboat. This is because it was very windy, much too windy to go sailing in little boats with little experience. It was quite difficult to back in to the dock, because turning the engine only turns the stern, and it's very counter-intuitive. Driving backwards in a car is much easier, although I suppose if I learned to back around in a rear-wheel-drive car then it would be easier to do it in a boat. (Is this true?)

This morning in Literature, I was actually glad that I had read The Sea Wolf, because Dan talked about it a fair amount. We mostly talked about how John Steinbeck's portrayal of women is not very considerate. That's an odd thing to talk about in Literature of the Sea class when we're discussing a book about a place we're going to visit next week, but hey, at least people had vehement views on it.

This evening I have been doing research for my marine policy paper on aquaculture off of Deer Isle. About half of the names that come up are people that I have heard of (e.g., Hubert). So that's pretty neat. It's nice that people's phone numbers and addresses pop right up on Google. It would have been a lot harder to find these things even just a year or two ago.

Val's mom is showing all of you other people up in terms of comments, people.

The whaling panel on Friday was pretty interesting. Jim talked about the species of marine mammals (whales, dolphins, seals, porpoises -- which are different from dolphins -- and sea cows, which are like manatees) and it turns out that out of the 129 known species, only three are extinct. That's nice. Glenn told us the history of whaling and whaling technology, and showed us films of whaling, both the traditional way on the Morgan and then the Norway way with steamboats and harpoon guns on factory ships. Peter talked about maritime literature, how if you want to write a novel about the sea, you have to try to make it better than Moby Dick, which is... really hard. Lisa told us such interesting things as the factoid that blue whales, the largest land animal ever (200 tons) consume 1.5 million calories per day to maintain body weight. That's kilocalories, people calories, people. Just-born calves gain 200 pounds a day of permanent body weight. And then the whaling ships come along and chop them up and boil their fat to light and lubricate the developed world.

That all was about 1.5-2 hours. Then after a short break, Katy talked for about two hours about the policy decisions, including the ineffective international conferences on whaling and the trade implications of the current policy. You see, the USA could bully other countries into signing the whaling treaty (to protect whales) by putting trade embargoes on them, but that would be against current free trade agreements. And yet who's going to stop us? We're America! Yeah, that's a problem. At the beginning we had to vote whether we thought they should keep the current moratorium (with exemptions for aboriginal and scientific whaling) on whaling, if it was biologically and culturally defensible to take the whales. By the end there was a reversal of opinion, something like 4-14 to allow whaling at the beginning and 14-4 to continue the moratorium at the end.

Now it's raining. And I really want to go running. But I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow, because I have more homework to do for tomorrow.

Note the new sidebar addition. Ha! Ha! That is in our student handbook, and they're totally serious. It's really dangerous. And I bet you won't find that in any other rule book anywhere.

Yeah, Williams

2005-09-25T21:19:00.000-04:00

Yes, I did go to Williams again. No, I didn't just go last weekend -- last weekend Kathy, Alan and Nicholas came to visit, and it was Alumni Weekend. I did go the previous weekend, two weeks ago. I think that there won't be any good opportunity to go there for the rest of the semester, considering the timing of field seminars, and there was a convenient ride, and two of the people in my house and three in an adjacent house were all leaving this weekend, so it was a good weekend to go (although I missed surfing at 6:30 this morning).

I was reading this book in the car and on the bus, The Sea Wolf by Jack London. I really liked it. But it turned out that we didn't have to read it for class tomorrow as I thought we did. Hmmmm. Oh well; I do highly recommend it. The premise is similar to that of Captains Courageous, in that a rich and cultured person (in this case a 35-year-old man) who has never had to do anything for himself falls off of a steamship and is rescued by a fishing vessel that refuses to take him ashore and instead takes him on as a member of the crew on a months-long voyage. A very similar premise, but a very different story, because the point is that the captain is a violent yet highly intelligent man. There is also a love story. Quite a good book; I'm glad I read it, because if I hadn't thought that it was required, I might not have. Did I say that I recommend the 1930s movie of Captains Courageous? I do.

We have a bunch of paper-like stuff due this week. Ugh. But Friday is the fishing trip, and then we go to California! Woo hoo.

Lab at the beach

2005-09-24T15:26:00.000-04:00

For oceanography lab on Thursday, we went to the beach. First we looked at the sand through a magnifying glass and used a magnet to move around the little bitty pieces of black sand. Then we dug a big coffin-shaped hole with shovels, scraped off the sides, and saw the stripes from the difference between the sand deposited in the summer (small grains) and the winter (large grains). Then we threw oranges in the water and saw how the current in the surf moves parallel to the shore and the one far out doesn't. Then they gave us candy. Then we went swimming and played catch with one of the oranges. Sounds like a good lab, eh?

On Friday I went to Williamstown. My taxi driver between Pittsfield and Williams told me that I should never take cocaine. So, now I'm at Williams.

Some projects

2005-09-21T19:15:00.000-04:00

Today is our sort of free day. It would have been quite a free day, except that we had an English paper due at noon and they added this "learn how to use Williams' computer resources" meeting in the morning.

I met with Katy (our Marine Policy professor) and she said it was a fine idea to research aquaculture off of Deer Isle/Stonington. She pulled up Jane McCloskey's testimony to something or other, which contained the names of a bunch of local people interested in the issue, and I was able to find the telephone numbers of four (out of five) of them using Google. Unrelatedly, I was looking at the list of the 25 recipients of the MacArthur "genius" awards, and one of them is:

Ted Ames, 66, lifelong fisherman who fuses his trade knowledge with fishery science to develop protection strategies for fish habitats in Stonington, Maine.

So I guess I'll be contacting a genius. I hope his new fame doesn't prevent him from talking to me about fish habitats in Stonington.

In the afternoon I had boat handling again. We had a different teacher today, and he had set out buoys in the river so that we could do figure eights around them. If you drew a line between them, the wind was perpendicular to that line (on purpose). There was a good little bit of wind -- fine for a big boat, but a lot for a nine-foot boat -- but I did fine turning to go around the first one. When I was coming back and going around the second one, I hadn't crossed over the center, so it was like I was just going around them -- like a 0 instead of an 8. The guy said "you're supposed to tack instead of gibe" because if you did an 0 then you'd be doing one tack and one gibe, and I was heading for a gibe. I said "that's okay, I'll just gibe then," because I had gibed fine the other day. BUT today there was more wind, and so as the boom swung across, the wind hit it and the boat heeled -- whoa! about 70 degrees, enough that water was pouring in over the gunwhale -- so I stomped on the high side and put all my weight on that foot, and the boat came back up. It was the sort of thing where people were very impressed that I got myself back upright, and not so impressed that I got myself to 70° inclination in the first place.

After that there was about three inches of water in the bottom of the boat. Luckily I was wearing sandals, because sneakers would have gotten wet and flip flops would have fallen off. I bailed it with the bailer every so often, but it's hard to hold on to the tiller AND the main sheet AND bail, because I don't have three hands. I did manage to somewhat master the technique of sheeting in and sitting way on the high side to level the boat out. That works pretty well. This was after a while of purposefully luffing so that the boat wouldn't heel over. I did eventually gibe twice in a row, on purpose, after sheeting in as much as possible and making sure the wind was a tiny little breeze, and that worked just fine. No more tipping over for me.

Then I went over to talk to Lisa. She had suggested that if we wanted to model things for our project, we should talk to her. I said I wanted to take some data from 1990, mess with the variables until my model accurately predicted the data for 2000, then predict what would be there now in 2005, go out there and see how good the prediction was, maybe mess with the variables a bit more to make the model fit both 2000 and 2005, and then predict 2010.

Lisa suggested that I look at this marsh that is accumulating around the Morgan. Since the Morgan diminishes the wave action, the sediment has been building up, and then grasses grew, and now there is a little marsh there. The idea is for me to look at aerial photos, take some sediment cores, and do some mathematical modeling, and figure something out. It sounds good.

By the way, Jesus was in the clouds. If you're into that sort of thing.

Crabs & Celestial navigation

2005-09-20T22:58:00.000-04:00

So yesterday we got up at 5:00 AM, headed over to Johnston for a breakfast and then went to lab at 5:30. We drove to the coast in vans and the sun rose as we drove, so that by the time we got there we could see what was going on. We went to a place with lots of rocks and tidepools. Low tide was at 4:30 AM, so we got there as the tide was coming in.

These white worms colonize the bottom of rocks, so if a rock has been in one place for a while, it is all white at the bottom. And you can tell if a rock has recently been flipped over, because then it is white at the top. This does not work in Deer Isle, where rocks are white at the top from seagull poop.

Jim was telling us about the different crab species. The most numerous crabs are the greenish crabs that you see all the time. They weren't here until the mid '80s. They came from Europe. A college class discovered them when they were tidepooling. If we found a crab that was not one of these, and picked it up, Jim said he would give that person a hot fudge sundae. There were two other types of crab, one which was red and white, and one which was brown with light brown stripes (it is from Asia, of course). I found a big one that was red and white. It was half under a rock, so I pressed down on its shell until it was in a good position for me to grab it by the "ears" (it was quite active, and would definitely have pinched hard if I had let it). This was, as Candice would call it, "an ice cream crab." We will see about the ice cream.

Also, periwinkles are not native. They were also introduced. Periwinkles are the reason why the rocks are clear of algae on the coast. And the seaweed you see all the time isn't native, either. These things are all "from away."

We had a bit of a break, and then there was oceanography class. We talked about continental drift and how they decided that it really was continental drift that was happening, that the continents were moving, that sort of thing.

Then history class met in the fo'c's'le of the Morgan. This is the inside of the bow, where the crew sleeps. We lay on the bunks taking notes as Glenn gave a little presentation about the fo'c's'le. (Don't worry; the bunks are reproductions, not national treasures like everything else in the museum). We will each give this sort of presentation about some historical object, so this was his sample of how it might be done. Then one of the librarians talked to us about and gave us a walk-through of the rare books and documents.

In the afternoon I went running. I timed it so that I would not be caught on the wrong side of the drawbridge. It worked. The sky was spitting the whole time, but it didn't rain.

At night we had celestial navigation. We spent some time in the classroom, then some time in the observatory looking at the stars, then some time drawing lines on paper in the classroom to see how you would navigate. He explained some of how it works to take sights and why it works, this sort of thing.

The strange thing about the observatory is that it looks so much smaller than the sky. The constellations are much closer together on the observatory ceiling. Also, the stars are much bigger, and brighter. It looks quite different from the sky on the ocean. There, even if the stars are very bright -- like planets, for instance -- they are very small points of light.

Sailing, Stairs & Smoke

2005-09-19T21:42:00.000-04:00

This afternoon I had my first maritime skills course. You will recall that my skill is boat handling. We will be sailing 9-foot dinghy boats. The first thing we did was we went out with no sail or boom, only a mast, a centerboard, and a rudder. If you stand up and rock back and forth on your legs and move the rudder at the same time in a direction opposing the rocking, then you go forward. If you want to turn, then you push the rudder one way and lean the other way, kind of like turning in skiing.

That, plus the initial setting up of the boats -- dumping out the water and installing the mast -- took most of our time. Then we put the sail on one boat and each of us got to take it for a very short sail. We got a push off the dock, then sailed it out maybe 100 feet, jibed, brought it back in until it might hit the dock and then jibe at the last moment, and then out and back once or twice more. It was quite fun. The boom does swing across fast.

My maritime skills course was at 1330. At 1305, I was leaving for the post office, because I had to mail a package. It takes 10 minutes each way to walk to the post office. But then I fell down the stairs and caught myself on the railing between my arm and my ribs, which hurt, so I had to lay down on the floor, and everyone looked at me. Then I was sent on an urgent mission to procure cooking oil from CVS, which is near the post office. So at 1310 I left at a dead run to go to the post office and then to CVS and then to deliver the cooking oil and get to where I was supposed to be inside the seaport by 1330. I was only two minutes late, which was impressive considering that I also stopped to go to the bathroom.

Hilary made falafel sandwiches for dinner. A pita with hummus and homemade tabouleh and falafel. When she was frying the falafel, some of the broken off pieces in the pan got too hot and burned. It was not so bad, but then the fire alarm went off. It was very loud. So we were opening up the windows and doors, but the smoke did not really dissapate, and it was really loud. So I stood on a chair and looked at the smoke detector, which had an arrow and said "turn to detach." So I turned it, and the whole thing (except a plastic holder attached to the ceiling) came off in my hand. I took it outside and away from the house until it stopped beeping. Then I laid it on the walkway and we had dinner. It was really delicious. And we have a lot of tabouleh left, so we are hoping for another pot luck (though hopefully not on another of my nights to cook, because I would like to actually cook one of these times).

We all have lab tomorrow at 5:30 AM. I am told this is because of the tide. But in that case, I think it would be just the same to go at 6:00 PM tomorrow, which would be better for my sleep habits. But I have celestial navigation tomorrow night, so maybe those would conflict.

Neighborhood pot luck

2005-09-18T21:21:00.000-04:00

It was my turn to make dinner tonight. I was going to make Om Rice, but then since we had a bunch of leftover angel hair from the last pot luck in the fridge, I decided I had to use that instead. So I chopped up the angel hair, shredded what was left of two different blocks of cheese (cheddar and monterey jack) and mixed the pasta and cheese with a bunch of spaghetti sauce out of a bottle. I took some out at that point (it is bad form not to bring a vegeterian entree when you are going to a pot luck at a vegeterian house) and then added leftover beef from Ashley's tacos (it didn't have taco seasoning) to the rest. These I put in baking dishes.

Then I consulted the Joy of Cooking as to what temperature and time a casserole should be baked. There was not a single entry in the index for "casserole." I was shocked. Luckily the Good Housekeeping cookbook had a few casserole recipes, which agreed with Ashley that it should be baked at 350°. The cookbook was inconclusive on how long it should be baked -- everything was pre-cooked anyway, so it was just a question of warming it up -- so I put it in from when I woke up from my nap until when we were ready to leave the house. And it was fine.

So we walked across our back yard carrying a casserole to the neighborhood pot luck.

I'll make Om Rice on Tuesday, never fear.

Alumni weekend

2005-09-18T14:50:00.000-04:00

Last night there was a dinner and auction for the alumni. We ended the silent auction at 6:30 and started writing stuff up (there were 200 people there so there was a lot of stuff to write up). At about 6:45 it started raining (we were under a tent). At 7:00 there was a large crack, a flash in the sky, and the power went out.

We turned the board we were writing on towards the door so that we could use sunlight. People brought out their cell phone lights and flashlights. The seaport dinner server people went and got gas lanterns for each table. It was still very dark. A quorum of alumni began singing sea chanteys. They only knew one verse and the chorus, but they kept repeating it for quite a while before they switched. I had not gotten dinner yet, so I did and I picked chicken and steamers with my fingers in the dark, which is what I do anyway, except for the dark.

Luckily everything we were doing, including the credit card machine, was by hand, so we could still take money and such in the dark (because it was getting darker). There was a motor-yacht anchored on the dock right by the tent, and they offered power to us, so someone got an extension cord from Craig Cottage and they ran the microphone and the spotlight for the live auction off of the boat's battery. It was a group of Williams-Mystic people, so naturally no one flipped out, and it was just kind of funny when the lights flipped back on when we were cleaning up at 9:45 or so.

It also knocked out the Internet, which we didn't expect to come back on until Monday, but here it is again. Pretty neat, huh.

Today is international beach clean-up day, so the alumni and students went to two beaches, one after another, to clean up trash. It was interesting how you look at the beach and you can't see any trash, and then you go around and pick things up and end up with 20 or 30 pounds of trash just from a half an hour on this little (200 meters or so) beach. We also had to record everything we found, and the categories were not perfect for what we found, but it was convenient that they had three lines to record tally marks for cigarette butts, because we sure found a lot of them.

Bunny

2005-09-17T22:37:00.000-04:00

This evening someone was auctioning off a night at a house that accommodated 10 people on its own private island off of Stonington. It went for something like $800, which went to the scholarship fund. Afterwards I saw someone holding an aerial photograph that turned out to be of that house, so of course I told her I lived on Deer Isle and asked where, specifically, her house was off of Stonington. She pointed to the bit of land behind the private island and said that was Sunshine, so I pointed to the air in front of the picture and said that was where I lived. I tried a couple of things that she didn't recognize so well, and then I asked if she knew the French camp, and she did, and I said I lived across from the French camp, and she knew where that was.

I looked closer at the picture, and realized that the house looked familiar. "Does that house have a flagpole?" I asked, not seeing one in the picture. She looked a bit surprised and said it did. "Oh -- do you know Bunny?" I asked. "She's my mom," she said.

"Oh!" I said, "Bunny's college suitemate was just here visiting me today." She asked what her name was, I said Kathy Page, she said the name was familiar and that she was an author, I told her that I had actually been to that house, she said she must have been there, too, and met me, and I told her Bunny had a red wetsuit, and she said her mom never went swimming without a wetsuit, which I remembered also.

So, Kathy, Bunny's daughter went to Williams-Mystic. I told her you had been trying to think of what Bunny's real name was today, and she said it is Elizabeth. Later I told her that we always look for the flag to see if they are there, and I told her that it hadn't been there much in the summer, and she said that it's because she (the daughter) is lazy about putting up the flag because she tends to pack up and lock the whole house and then realize that the flag is still up. So if the flag isn't there, it doesn't necessarily mean that no one is there.

Bunny's daughter has red hair. I would say she is about 25. Now you know.

Visitors

2005-09-17T17:07:00.000-04:00

Kathy, Alan and Nicholas came today for a few hours. We walked around the museum for a while at the various boats and exhibits and such. That was fun. I am supposed to research Nicholas's boat during the week when the library is open. Kathy made fun of me a lot when I told her about the papers that I have to write at the end of the semester.

They also brought stuff my parents sent, including posters for my wall and cookbooks. So I now have two more posters, one which is a placemat that we got in France off of the table when I was eight, and one is a decorative map of Penobscot Bay. My housemates are excited about the cookbooks. We can only eat chicken in this house -- fish, beef, pork, all seafood are out -- so it will be useful to have 365 ways to cook it.

My mother also determined that I needed a wool vest with sheep on it, a chamois shirt that I have never worn, a pair of soccer shorts, and a pair of underwear. I am not sure if I am supposed to wear this outfit all together or what. If you want me to, I will, and I'll photograph it.

Nicholas took many pictures on his new cell phone, so perhaps he'll send them to me and then I'll put them up.

Ashley made two apple pies. It seems we are having a dessert pot luck tonight after the alumni dinner. That sounds like fun. We are going to donate the Runner Cookies without chocolate chips to the dessert pot luck, because who wants a cookie without chocolate chips? That's what Valerie said.

I am now a maker of boxes. This is because I don't have any boxes. I made a little box out of a FedEx box to send Becca her birthday present. It was my first effort, so it was incredibly ugly. It did not have a single right angle in it. Then I made a box out of a Coke can box to send my mom her birthday present. It was excellent, because her present was wrapped in a box anyway, so I just made a form-fitting box over. Then I made a box out of sort of corrugated paper cardboard stuff that Ashley's book came in to send Ethan his birthday present, which also worked out well since I was wrapping a box in that case, too. So if you are going to be getting a present, look out for an excellent box in the mail.

My mother sent me return address labels with lighthouses on them, so if you'd like to see one, just send me along a letter and I'll send you one with a lighthouse on it.

Skills, Jobs, Core & Dinner

2005-09-15T22:38:00.000-04:00

We got our skills and jobs today. I will be taking boat handling, which means messing about in boats (sailing them, etc.) and my job will be using a 3-foot scanner to scan in ship plans (i.e. blueprints) so that the seaport can put them online or something. Sounds like a plan. We get minimum wage for jobs, but in CT minimum wage is $7.10. Pretty neat, huh.

We won't be going to Louisiana in October, for obvious reasons, and we are relocating to an undisclosed location that we will learn tomorrow. It is apparently a place that Williams-Mystic has never been. Sounds like fun.

Today for lab we went out to a salt marsh. It was supposed to rain, so we wore full rain gear. I stayed completely dry in plastic coat, pants, and boots. People who wore shorts had the rain rain in the top and they got inches of water in there.

We took a core of the sediment (i.e. dirt). We pushed a metal pipe type thing into the dirt. Then Steve was pushing the pipe one way and Paul was pushing a pole into it to push the dirt out and four people had their hands ready to catch the core as it came out, when there was a huge crash and a flash and lightning struck the next point about 100 meters away. I ducked and covered my head, which is what I always do when there is a loud noise. We stopped doing the core thing and carried the dirt in the tube back to the vans.

When we extracted it and cut it in half lengthwise, we found there were light horizontal bands. These are from when there are hurricanes. We could see bands from the big hurricanes, one in the 80s, one in the 60s, a few in the 30s, and then one from the 1860s! All from taking a two-minute core. Pretty neat.

Ashley made dinner. She made black bean soup, chili, chicken fajitas, rice, and fried plantains. We had Carr House over for dinner and they brought homemade applesauce from apples that Anders's girlfriend had picked. Valerie made limeade and also banana cream pie for dessert. We shall have many leftovers. And I was so excited about making tomorrow's dinner, too. Too bad. Another time. I still have to clean up the kitchen.

My poem

2005-09-14T20:56:00.000-04:00

There's no way I'm going to finish writing about the offshore field seminar, so I'm just going to plow right on by. The last night on the boat we had a talent show, so I wrote a poem with a couplet about each person on the boat (the captain got two couplets). It's too long to paste into my blog, but you can read it here. Here is an abridged version containing the clever couplets (it's hard to write 35 really good ones in less than 24 hours):

Paul's pickup line in the great pin chase
brought a smile to the third assistant scientist's face.
Hallie always has a nice expression on,
and she tends to disrobe in the main salon.
Libby's not a student, but it didn't really matter,
except everything you say turns into data.
Hilary Palevsky -- HIP HIP hooray!
She could winkle in the lab all night and all day.
Jen's so calm, nothing can faze her,
and she points out the stars with her snazzy green laser.
She sits on the deck and she plays her guitar
and she always knows exactly where we are.
These 10 days have been great; we'll never forget it,
and it might change our lives if we only let it.

Also, other people have really nice pictures. I am going to have to look at all of them and then choose which one is the best to go in the place of me standing on the bowsprit netting at the beginning of my offshore field seminar post. I am glad other people took so many pictures. I was experiencing things and learning, and other people were photographing me. That's perfect, in my opinion. And I took a few pictures that I wanted to take, and that was that.

Back in Mystic

2005-09-14T14:30:00.000-04:00

Now I'm back in Mystic. Candice drove Hallie and me from Williams this morning, arriving with eight minutes to spare despite making one wrong turn. I had a nice vacation at Williams, three days plus bits of two other days. This was the first time I have had a vacation where there really wasn't anything I had to do in about a year, maybe more because I actually don't remember the last time. So that's nice.

I've been adding things to my previous entry below, so scroll down and make sure you've read it all. I have now uploaded all of my pictures (63) to Shutterfly, with descriptive captions that you should be sure to check out, and you can see them here. I suggest "view as slideshow" as the optimal viewing option. And now I have added pictures to the narrative below, and they're awesome, so you should totally read it again.

Offshore field seminar

2005-09-13T22:40:00.000-04:00

I had a great offshore field seminar. My pictures are now on Shutterfly, and I've selected a few to illustrate my narrative as we go.

The whole trip we only had 15 minutes of rain, and it was at 5:00 in the morning, and I wasn't on watch. The whole rest of the time it was sunny. Two of the days there was no wind. Only one of those days we motored; the other day we just sat there and we also went swimming.

Megafauna:

I saw a whale breach. It was a mile or two away, so it was very small, but it did get all the way out of the water and make a splash. We saw many whales surfacing nearer to the boat, but not less than 50 meters or so.

One morning there were about 10 dolphins surfacing in the bow wake. They stayed with the boat for a long time. Then we noticed 10 or 20 more off of the starboard bow. It was neat because since we were above the water, you could see their grey bodies beneath the surface even when they weren't surfacing. Then most of the ones on the starboard side joined the ones in the bow wake, so we had tons of dolphins in the bow wake. There was a little baby dolphin swimming alongside its mother.

One night when we were on watch, there were these phosphorescent fish swimming beneath the surface in the bow wake. It was mid watch -- 2300 to 0300 hours -- so it was pitch dark. This is when we were in the vicinity of Monhegan Island in Maine. The water was pitch dark, and then you'd see all these glowing bodies, a school of 18-inch fish, appear and dart around in a group, and then they'd disappear again. There were probably between 15 and 30 of these big glowing fish that would appear at a time.

We saw a giant leatherback turtle, maybe 1.5 meters in diameter, about 20 feet off of the stern on the port side. It was just floating there. The scientists said it was probably 140 to 150 years old at that age.

We saw ocean sunfish. They look like big white pancakes 2-3 feet in diameter floating just under the surface, with a black dorsal fin. So if it is near the boat, you think it is a pancake because you see the white fish part, and if it is far away and you can't see the fish part, then you think it is a shark.

We saw a really big shark. We saw the dorsal fin on the starboard side maybe 50 feet from the boat, going parallel to the ship and at about the same speed. Then we saw its tail, about 10 feet (no joke) behind its dorsal fin. That was a big shark.

One time we were out on the bowsprit furling the jib or the JT, and our backs were to the port side, and we heard a big splash behind us, and we turned around to see a 20-foot-diameter circle of white crested wave where clearly an animal had just surfaced. The people who had been watching told us it was a shark, and a big one at that. Good thing we had the netting to hold us up! Unfortunately for my story, these sharks were just big, not ferocious. They are filter feeders or something lame like that.

We saw lots of mahi mahi, and actually James, the engineer, put out a fishing line and one of them got on it, and there was much commotion and excitement on the quarterdeck, but then it got itself off. Mahi mahi are iridescent, like neon colored, and they have green, blue, and sort of pink. They are 12-18 inches or so. They swim 5-10 feet below the surface. We did see quite a lot of them.

Seas:

The thing I was most excited about on the trip was that we would be encountering big seas, i.e. where the waves are really big. The thing about being in a big boat is that it takes much bigger seas to seem big. When there were whitecaps, it was no big deal, because the seas at that point were only maybe three feet anyway, and the ship just cut right through them. But one day there were really big swells. I took a picture of them. Actually I took five or six pictures, because when you take pictures of the waves, it's impossible to convey what they actually look like, and so I thought maybe a few pictures would help.

Anyway, I thought this was just about the most exciting thing ever, so I got Valerie to come with me and we went out on the bowsprit netting and crashed up and down as the ship crashed through the swells. If we had been standing on the bow, we would have gotten wet when the bow hit the waves and made a splash, but when you are on the bowsprit then you are actually ahead of the spray so you don't get wet. We were clipped in with our harnesses. The bowsprit is about 10 feet long. When the bow went down, we were maybe 10 feet off the water, and when it went up, were were maybe 30 feet above the water.

When I was not on the bowsprit that morning, I discovered that if you hang on a bar, as though you intend to do a chinup, then when the ship goes over a swell, there is a sort of floating sensation when it crests the wave.

Also.

One day when there was no wind (because there was a high pressure system sitting on top of us -- the barometer got up to 1027 millibars, and that's a lot) we were only 87 nm from Rockland and we had four days to get there, so we were just sitting there, and they let us go swimming. At this point we were obviously in the Gulf of Maine, so the water was only about 70, which is pretty cold (when we were in the Gulf Stream it was more like 85, but we did not get to go swimming then). The neat thing was that we were swimming in about 150 meters of water. I suggested to Candice that I would throw a penny down and she could dive for it. She suggested that I go first.

We jumped off the bowsprit, which is about 5 feet off the water where it is connected to the bow, and about 12 feet off the water at its highest point. (The bowsprit is pretty long, and my figures are estimates.) So that was a pretty high place to jump from, especially when you consider that you jump up, which adds to your altitude. So you are in the air for a long time, and then when you enter the water, you go pretty deep. We had seen a shark (I made a typo and said whale originally, which is wrong) just a few hours before going swimming, and we had only been drifting since then since there was no wind, so we had lookouts in the rigging in case they saw a shark. They saw no sharks.

We also went swimming in the harbor in Rockland, where it was only 59 degrees.

I climbed up the rigging twice, not to the very top of the mast, but to the second platform (of two). The first time, when I went to the higher platform, was after we went swimming, when there was no wind and the sea was completely flat. And I discovered, from high up on the mast, that the sea is, indeed, extremely flat. I made this observation allowed. My classmates agreed with me. We could see a boat on the horizon that you probably couldn't see from the deck. Standing on the deck, your eyes are perhaps 10 feet above sea level. The second platform is about 60-70 feet off the deck (note that when you climb up, you rely only on your own grip, and don't clip in until you get to the top of where you are climbing to) so then your eyes are about, let's say 70 feet off the surface of the water.

You can determine via a simple calculation the distance to the horizon given your distance above the ocean's surface (assuming a perfectly spherical, i.e. "flat," i.e. no significant waves). I have derived this to be as follows:

d = the square root of the following: 4/3 times your height plus one 5280th squared of your height squared.

In this equation, d is in miles and your height is in feet, because those are the most useful units to use. Substituting in 10 and 75, you find that from the deck you can see about 3.65 miles, and from the second platform you can see about 10 miles. Whoopee.

Stars.

At night, we could see lots of stars. There are about 55 navigational stars, which are relatively bright and relatively spread out in the sky, so that people can navigate by them. Our watch officer, Scott, and our captain, Jen, pointed all of them out to us multiple times, as well as a bunch of constellations. When we were on an earlier watch, like evening watch, we could see the big dipper, and then during mid watch Orion would rise and then during dawn watch you could see Orion basically the whole time.

The moon was a new moon when we got on the boat, so there was essentially no moonlight. Once the moon rose right where the sun was setting, and there were two planets there too, so you could see the tiny sliver of the moon and two bright points right on the pink sky. That was pretty neat.

We saw all of the sunrises and sunsets. The sun set at around 7 PM and rose around 7:00 AM. The sun was always bright orange when it set. I am not sure if this is true everywhere or just on the ocean or just when it is nice weather. The sky was not always red, more orange or pink.

We learned to use a sextant. We learned three skill sort of things one afternoon: splicing, knots, and a sextant. I utterly failed at splicing, though what I made does resemble a splice. I did all right with the knots, though I could not remember the whole rabbit coming out of the hole thing for the bowline and thus I had to invent my own way to tie it. But when I used the sextant, I found our position to within 200 yards of our actual position. (They put our sightings into the GPS or something to determine how close we were.)

The nicest watch was dawn watch, because when you got up at 2:30 it was pitch dark, and by the time you handed over the watch at 7:00 the sun had risen and it was totally bright daylight out. Once I took the helm at about 5 AM when it was pitch dark. The helm was a steering wheel, so if you turned it a full rotation, it looked just like it had before you had turned it at all. So there was a little metal indicator to tell you how many turns you had on the wheel. It was a metal hand that pointed to various notches, sort of like a gas gauge. Since it was pitch dark, I had to put my fingers on it to see how many turns I had on the wheel (every turn of the wheel was 5° of turn on the rudder). When I turned over the helm to Rebecca at 6:30, I was telling her how it was useful to put your fingers on the needle of the gauge to see where it was, and then I realized that it was totally bright outside and you could just look at it.

Watch.

The 20 of us who were on watch (18 students plus two others) were divided into three watches: A watch, B watch, C watch. Each watch had a watch officer (the first, second, or third mate) and an assistant scientist (the third, second, or first assistant scientist). I was on B watch, so we had the second of each. The watch schedules rotated ABCAABCABC... etc. The watches were as follows:

0300-0700: Dawn watch
0700-1300: Morning watch
1300-1900: Afternoon watch
1900-2300: Evening watch
2300-0300: Mid watch

So for instance if you had dawn watch, then you could go back to bed after breakfast (and dawn cleanup) and you would't be on watch again until evening watch, and then you could have a sort of normal night's rest after evening watch and then you'd be on watch the whole morning, and then you could go to bed at 8:00 after dinner and you'd be awakened at 2230 to go on mid watch, and then you could go to sleep at 0300 and you would be on watch again in the afternoon, and then you'd have dawn watch so it would be three days later and the cycle would repeat.

If you were going on watch at a mealtime, like at 0700, 1300, or 1900, then you were awakened one hour before you had to go on watch because the meal was served 40 minutes before the watch started. Every meal had two sittings. If there was no meal, like for mid and dawn watch, then you were awakened 30 minutes before watch started. You didn't set an alarm or anything, because that would be loud and it would wake up other people. Rather, someone from the watch that you would be relieving would come to your bunk and wake you up.

So, to answer your question, Rebecca, we did not go on watch alone. There were always either eight or nine people on watch together. On deck with the mate would be three people, in the lab with the scientist would be three people, and the seventh person would be in the galley. On deck we needed one person at the helm (students were at the helm at all times except during the hour or two of class in the afternoon) and at night we needed a lookout. When we needed to set or strike sail, we got the students from the lab because it took a lot of people to haul on the downhaul or the halyard, to ease the sheets, to sweat the lines when we had hauled all we could, this sort of thing. We also had to do hourly boat checks where you walk through and make sure everything is running properly, and hourly logs, both on deck (wind direction, seas, temperature, taffrail log, plot position on chart) and in the lab (water temperature, salinity, barometric pressure, latitude and longitude, direction and magnitude of surface currents). So it was good we had a bunch of people around to do these things.

More later.

I'm back

2005-09-10T21:49:00.000-04:00

Yup. It was a great trip. More on that later. Now I'm in Williamstown, and I am quite tired. So, that's all for now.

SSV Corwith Cramer

2005-08-30T22:46:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, we will be leaving to go on the Corwith Cramer for 10 days. We won't actually sail the boat until late morning or early afternoon on Thursday, I guess getting acclimated to the boat until then, but from then until September 10th, we will be sailing around the clock.

You can chart our progress here. If you have a peculiar desire to hear things in your ears instead of looking at them on a screen, you can also call the toll-free number listed on that page to get a recorded message about our location. You will find information about the current coordinates, speed, and compass direction here. That should be just about all the necessary information.

Here is the Corwith Cramer:

You can see a very nice slideshow with 10 excellent photos here.

After we return to land on September 10, I plan to go to Williamstown (we have a three-day vacation before classes start up again).

In response to repeated inquiries -- no, I will not have e-mail. If you have an urgent message for me, I will be at sea. You can call the Williams-Mystic office and they will assist you in any way they can, or perhaps refer you to the SEA offices. But I don't think I have ever received an urgent message in my life, with the possible exception of when Gloria came into health class in ninth grade to tell us that it was snowing and we were getting picked up early, except that in the end we weren't, so it wasn't so urgent after all, and I just missed health class. And I'm not going to miss any sailing for things like that.

We will be going south around Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, across Georges Bank to the edge where there is very deep water (over a kilometer deep), then north until we are perhaps in Canadian waters, and then eventually down to Rockland, ME, where we will take a motorcoach south.

My house and my room

2005-08-30T18:57:00.000-04:00

Here is a clockwise (from above) tour of the downstairs.

Upon entering, you see the stairs and the kitchen.

This is the kitchen. Mary gave us the blender today.

This is the living room. It came with the boats on the walls.

This is the dining room. It came with the maps.

Now we will have a counter-clockwise tour of my room.

This is my desk. You can see my poster of n-gons in the Gauss plane. It is 78.4 degrees in my room (the thermometer is hanging beside the poster). The view is of our back yard and the main parking lot for the seaport museum.

This is my bed and the sum total of everything, except my rubber boots, that I am taking on the two-week offshore field seminar tomorrow. I had to take it without flash (hence the fuzziness) because my bag has a reflective strip.

Each room, and the stairway, has one of these nice stained-glass windows.

This corner needs work. If you have extra posters, please send them along.

More rigging climbing

2005-08-30T18:00:00.000-04:00

Now you see just how high I climbed -- not so far, but certainly far enough.

The view from the top, and the woman who taught us how.

The museum from the rigging

Time stamp

2005-08-30T16:00:00.000-04:00

So, I fixed the time stamp to put us in Eastern time instead of Pacific time. That will throw off the times of my posts -- subtract three hours, obviously -- but the comment time stamps should be correct now.

Plankton

2005-08-30T02:10:00.000-04:00

This morning we did the loop where we had to illegally cross the interstate highway bridge again and pick our way through the poison sumac. Candice is very fond of that loop. And it really was beautiful this morning to look down from the bridge onto the river below. It was very foggy, so the water was completely flat and still.

Our first class (we all have the same classes, all 18 of us, and the same class schedule, except that half the class takes marine ecology and the other half takes oceanography) was Literature of the Sea, taught by a professor from Middlebury. It sounds like it will be quite a good class. It only meets on Mondays, first for a lecture, then we break into two consecutive discussion sessions, so that he ends up teaching three hours and 15 minutes of English and each student gets 2:15.

After a 30-minute break, we had maritime history. First Glenn went through the syllabus, and then we talked about the reading we had done for the class, which was an interesting reading from Harper's magazine about a guy who traveled on lots of 747s carrying cargo. We compared 747 shipping to boat shipping.

We went back to the house and I introduced Hilary to cottage cheese with applesauce, which she kindly said tasted fine. I had gotten a package, which contained both my medicine and my mom's medicine, so I repackaged everything except what was mine and walked to the post office to mail it. I had run a loop the first day I was here that passed the post office, but it was on the way back, so I wasn't really sure where it was, or how far it was. Luckily, it was not so far, and I mailed my package and got back in time for science.

We met at the science place, Craig Cottage, where we first practiced using the microscope by looking at our fingernails. We all decided that our fingernails are really gross looking. Then we learned about nets. The nets we use have 80-micrometer-wide holes in them, which is 0.08 mm. You can't even tell it has holes in it when you look at it, it's so small. So they catch little tiny things. We went down to the dock and Jim Carlton showed us how to drop the net down and shake it out to get lots of organisms. We each did it ourselves to get a sample, and then brought it back to the lab where we filtered out the water so that we could get all of the stuff into one little dish. When it was filtered like that, with the naked eye you could see little translucent specks moving around, and with the microscope, it was really neat. They were all darting around and swimming and bumping into each other.

Ashley made fajitas for dinner, which were really yummy, and I did the dishes. After dinner we had Mallory house over to watch Captains Courageous, the 1938 version in black and white. They had amazing footage of these sailing ships sailing really fast, with waves crashing over the decks. They definitely milked the sentimental parts to make it a tear-jerker, too. I do highly recommend it. The boat they used to film it was apparently the L.A. Dunton, a schooner that Mystic Seaport has now.

Tomorrow we can climb the rigging again. Perhaps I will bring my camera this time. I haven't taken very many pictures so far, but I do plan to bring it on the offshore field seminar and take more pictures then.

Oh, and thanks to Rebecca for pointing out that I had to open up the commenting privileges. The default was that only people with Blogger accounts could comment, and that was silly. I have now opened it up to everyone. Let me know if something isn't working properly.

Chores

2005-08-28T22:13:00.000-04:00

Today we woke up and chopped potatoes and baked them in the oven to make home fries. Carr house was having a potluck brunch, so we brought them over and chatted until everyone got there. It was very impressive; we had our homefries, and muffins, and a baked French toast custard thing, and English muffins, and bacon and sausage, and iced coffee, and orange juice. Wow.

Last night I made a chart of who would do the various chores, such as cleaning the bathroom and making dinner and washing dishes. It was not an excellent chart, but at least it got the idea out there. Today Valerie took the chart to a whole new level and printed out a version for every day of every week we are here, 8 sheets of paper in total, and posted it on the board downstairs. This week I am in charge of trash, recyclables, and compost. Today it was my job to cook (dinner), so we had pasta. This was not such a cop-out thing as it might seem, because it was either that or leftover chicken and rice and we didn't have a vegetable to go with that, or omelets and we had those last night. It was good pasta, because it was angel hair.

This afternoon we went down to the boathouse to take out boats, but again they were all taken, so the two experienced sailors among us (not me) took out this tippy boat that is not so good in gusts, and it was gusty, and Christine and I took out a rowboat. Christine had never rowed before, and there was a lot of wind, so it was not the best conditions to learn to row, but when she absolutely had to row to get out of the way of an approaching 19th-century steamboat, she did. When we got back, I read a book. I also made dinner. And that is about it. Now I'm reading about Hurricane Katrina. We will be going down to New Orleans on a field seminar later in the semester -- if the city is still there, that is. And I hope it is.

Also, I wrote a long thing responding to questions from the first post, which you might otherwise miss, and you can read them here (scroll down).

Rigging climbing

2005-08-28T13:36:00.000-04:00

Now you see what climbing the rigging was. These pictures are couresy of Hilary. In the pictures where two people have on pink shirts and dark blue shorts, I am the one up higher (Valerie is the lower one). You can see in this last picture that there was a difficult part where you had to lean backwards, as I tried to describe in Friday's post.

Beach school

2005-08-27T23:33:00.000-04:00

This morning we had class, and before class I got up to run with Candice, but Candice slept through her alarm (NPR is quite soporific sometimes) so I ran by myself, over on the other side of the river, which was nice. There was this guy running with his dog and I passed him, and he kept trying to catch up to me, but he didn't.

I had cornflakes with blueberries again before rushing off to class. Class was Jim Carlton talking first about what we should bring on the boat, and for the rest of the time about the various species of living creatures that we would encounter in the sea (or that existed in the sea even if we would not encounter them). He passed around examples of such things, which was neat, but much of it slipped through my ears, because Latin names of various species is not something I retain easily. However, we did learn that the Loch Ness Monster actually has a scientific name -- "Nessiteras rhombopteryx" -- and the guy who gave it that name did so in the journal "Nature," which is highly respected. However, that name is an anagram of "Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S." (Try it out yourself -- I did, and it's true.)

When class ended, Hilary, Candice and I went over to the boathouse to take out kayaks. We found the kayaks, and the life jackets, but the paddles were nowhere to be found, and the kayaks were locked to the building. We found two paddles, but in order to get the key, we would have to have been checked for proficiency in paddling, and we had not been checked. So we left.

After a lunch of PB&banana, Albion house and Candice and Julie went to the beach (see at left Ashley, Candice, and Julie). It was behind the YMCA, and the had it so that the swimming area was all about three feet deep, which did not make for much swimming. But we did find these jellyfish-like gelatinous animals floating about that we had learned about this morning in class, which was pretty neat. They don't have any capacity to sting, so they're perfectly fine, although kind of strange, to swim near. They are about 1/2 inch to 2 inches, at least the ones that we saw, and when we picked them up they were like clear jelly. I swam just a bit, and also sat on the sand and read some more of that book, Cod.

When we got back I let Candice take a little break, and then instead of letting her take a nap in her house, I called her up and we went to the boathouse to take out a boat. We wanted a sailboat, but I wanted one with a mainsail and a boom, because this would be my first time sailing this year, and I would be sailing with someone who'd never sailed before, and there was quite a bit of wind. The only sailboats they had left were gaff-rigged, so we took out a rowboat instead, and rowed to the bridge and back twice in the hour or so we had it. I was all right at rowing. Candice coxed me in to the dock but she coxed it so that the bow went in, whereas I was going to go in parallel to the dock. There was a volunteer there to catch us anyway, so it didn't much matter.

On the way back, we heard this strange noise, so we went to check it out, and they were doing a demonstration where they were running an old engine in the back of the shop where the make the circular hoops that hold the sail to the mast. The engine turned a shaft, which turned all of the machines in the shop. It was pretty neat, and also pretty loud. Then we spotted Hilary in the shipsmith shop, so we went over and watched her heat up iron and then bang on it (see at left). She was making a feather shape on the end of an iron rod, which would eventually turn into a coat hook hung on a feather-shaped piece with a hole in it. The other day she made a coat hook, but without the feather-shaped piece with a hole in it, just a flat piece with a hole in it. In the picture she is pounding on the other end to make it sharp, and she will eventually curl it over to make the part of the hook that pokes into your coat. You can see a flat part near the end of the tongs; that is the feather.

Here are some pictures of where I am.

This is my house. That's me waving in the lower left corner. It was a millworkers' house when there was a velvet mill in Mystic. Four of us live in this house, including me, Hilary (above)...

...Ashley, seen here boiling rice...

...and Valerie, seen here eating eggs and toast.

We had omelets for dinner, because Hilary made lots of salsa for last night's chicken, and we had lots left over, so we put it in the omelets. I made the frying pan too hot so my omelet cooked in literally 10 seconds, but that was all right; at least it was an omelet instead of having to turn it into scrambled eggs.

I said "beach school" because I went to the beach and went out on the water in a small boat. But it is a Saturday, after all, and after we start having classes in earnest and have homework and such, I will not be able to do such things. (Well, I hope I will, but probably not.)

Also, you people should leave comments. If you got all the way to the end of the post, then you should leave a comment. Really, it took me a long time to write this whole thing and post and format pictures, so you can write just a little something.

A couple of adventures

2005-08-26T23:52:00.000-04:00

This morning we went running again, and we didn't have a good idea of a place to run, but we had heard that there was this nice loop called River Road. We didn't know where it was, though, so we just went running. Then we encountered a runner and asked her if she knew of any nice place to run, and she described one, and what do you know, it was River Road! We realized that it was too long to do the whole thing, because we had already been out for 15 minutes and we couldn't be out longer than an hour or so because we had class. So we got to the I-95 bridge where it crosses the Mystic River, and decided to climb up there and go along the bridge to cross the river. This is illegal, and there was poison sumac where we were climbing up, but I was careful not to touch it and we haven't gotten arrested (yet).

We had a three-hour public policy class today, describing what marine public policy is and the structure of the U.S. government and court system. During the 20-minute break in the middle of the three hours a few of us went over to the museum exhibit "The Art of the Boat" which is beautiful black and white photos from the 1930s of boats, mostly heeling over quite a lot.

After a lunch at home (the first time I have ever come home for lunch in the middle of anything like school or work) we went for a talk by the captain of the tall ship we'll be on about the parts of the boat and sort of how things work. It turns out that we'll leave and go south around Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, then go out to sea and then end up in Rockland, perhaps anchoring close to Rockland the night before we have to be there in the morning, but otherwise sailing through the night with night watches. All of the pictures in the talk were sunny with people wearing shorts and bathing suits, but it very well might be cold out there. I have also heard that while we are out at sea, you can track our location on the SEA Web site; more on that later if it turns out to be true.

In the afternoon we took a bus and drove around to three sites of interest and Jim and Glenn talked about the oceanography and history of the sites. They made submarines 540 feet long with 24 missiles that each had eight nuclear warheads in them, in a particular warehouse on the Mystic River. It just came out that they are not going to close this shipyard (they were about to); apparently it's good to keep people at work making submarines even if they're not needed, because then if we ever need them again, we'll have a trained group of people.

Then we went to the Joseph Conrad, a two-masted tall ship, to climb the rigging. This was an optional event. We climbed up on a sort of rope ladder where we had to step on the horizontal parts and hold onto the vertical parts, no exceptions, and we climbed up that until we got to a platform, but the rope ladder came to a point there and it was attached to the mast, and the platform came off of the mast, so when you got to the top of the ladder, the platform was above your head. So there was this ladder that went out from the mast and you had to sort of cling to it hanging backwards off of the mast until you could get to the top of the platform. Then you could climb up another rope ladder type thing, but there was no platform up there, and I didn't do that (only one person did). It was not that high, but we were on that little platform. I held on very tightly. And I did not fall off. It will be much better when we are out at sea, because then you can look down into the water. When I was hoisted up the mast on our sailboat to put the rope through the pulley, the water looked neat from up there, and on a tall ship I would be up higher than that. Today I suppose I was maybe 30 feet above the water? I don't know. It's hard to tell. People took some pictures of me, I hear, but I don't have them. That's all right.

We made a nice dinner of chicken, rice (leftover) and homemade salsa with ice cream for dessert. I also had cornflakes with blueberries for breakfast, which was delicious, because blueberries on cereal is delicious in general, although I was a bit rushed eating breakfast because I had read the Williams-Mystic book that they made on the 25th anniversary of the program after coming back from running for a while, because there was an interesting bit about how they threw out bottles with messages, for science, to see how the currents worked, and they got picked up on the west coast of Florida, and in the middle of the Atlantic, and in Europe, and that was much more interesting than taking a shower, though I eventually did that, too.

So you see, two adventures (the bridge and the rigging, in case you missed them).

Stars and food

2005-08-26T02:04:00.000-04:00

This morning Candice and I went running, actually across the river and back again before the drawbridge opened (yes, we have a drawbridge, and it opens). It's really nice outside early in the morning, because the air is so fresh and the boats and the water are so beautiful. We hope to get checked out on our boating skills so that we can take out kayaks or rowing shells or something in the morning when the water is so calm and lovely to go boating on.

We filled out a lot of forms in the morning, and then got house money to go shopping. Our advisor (we have an advisor for the house) told us to go to one grocery store for everything except produce and meat, and to the other for produce and meat, so that is what we did. In the end, we had about $15 left over, which was enough for us to buy lunch (the grocery store has a place to buy lunch). I had sushi. It was delicious. I haven't had sushi in quite a while, especially when you consider that the last sushi I had was some freeze-dried stuff that the snack bar tried to sell for $6.25 and ended up having to give away because it had the consistency of styrofoam. (I got a whole box of it for free. But it had the consistency of styrofoam.)

Then we had to rush over to get facebook pictures taken. So watch the mystic site, because my picture will be going up soon, and you might forget what I look like. I read a book, and then I took a 12-minute nap before going to a navigation class. We used a chart and plotted bearings and measured distances to get "ded reckonings" (not "dead" reckonings, because the "ded" comes from the word "deduced") and then made lines from things that we had compass sightings on and found a fix of our point and saw how far off we were, that sort of thing. Then we went to the planetarium and the same guy who taught us the navigation (he has been at Mystic Seaport for 44 years) showed us how the stars move during the night and how you can navigate by them. This was only a brief lesson, of course; those who want to actually learn how to do it using a sextant and such have to take the marine skills class.

We got out of the planetarium about 45 minutes later than the schedule said, so our advisor was coming over for dinner 45 minutes after we got out of class. So I made cookies while the others made chicken and rice, and actually we were ready for her to come when she arrived. We had a nice dinner, and we were actually quite ready when she came, except that I had to keep checking the cookies to see if they were done while we were having dinner. But she was quite impressed, and decided that we will do just fine.

I think it will be quite a good thing for me to learn how to make my own food and live with other people and share cleaning and such. One unfortunate thing is that we cannot have any fish or seafood of any sort even in the house, because one of my housemates is very allergic to all of that stuff. This is unfortunate only because we are by the sea and could thus have seafood. But it is certainly not the end of the world. We will just be having an awful lot of chicken.

Tonight we were coming out of the house and we looked up and there were all these stars in the sky. "Oh look, there's the summer triangle!" someone said, pointing out something we had learned in the planetarium. Then we found the north star, and determined where the Big Dipper was (it was behind some trees), and I found a W-shaped constellation that, as the sky "turns" throughout the night, goes upside-down and becomes an M, so that it is the Williams-Mystic constellation. So you see, we are already applying our knowledge.

Now everyone is here

2005-08-24T21:21:00.000-04:00

Today I went running again, a nice run in the cemetery and then some (8) hill repeats on a short (35 second) hill right by Labaree. After breakfast I started running about and meeting the new people who were arriving. I helped carry stuff up to several people's rooms from their cars, and met their parents. The two remaining members of my house arrived in the morning, so we all met and all of that. They seem like nice people. I talked to Christine's parents for quite a while -- Christine is the one that I tutored in the math resource center last semester who always had perfect homework and came in anyway (she denies that it was perfect, but it was).

Candice came after lunch, so I helped her carry up her stuff and unpack her room a bit. Actually I just set up her computer. I was happy that she brought a toolbox, because I decided not to bring mine. (I decided that anything I hadn't used all summer, I wouldn't bring, and I didn't use my toolbox all summer, although I had it along.) Her hammer came in very handy for installing her chinup bar (I am also glad that she has that) and fixing one of her drawers. Someone had previously tried to fix it by putting cardboard under it, but we fixed it by hammering on it.

We had a tour of the seaport museum with our future history professor, and then after a short break, we had a 90-minute cruise on the only working steamboat in existence in the USA. We went under a drawbridge and all the way out to the ocean (Mystic is on an estuary) and around lots (probably 500) sailboats and some motorboats moored in the harbors. It was interesting that I guess because of the different depths of the water in the channel, sometimes the boats would be moored in the middle and the channel with the red nuns and green cans would guide the boat towards the shore. So it would be boats on the left in the middle, and shore on the right side of the boat. That was interesting. Also, the boat (the Sabino) was powered by a steam engine that took coal, so it had this great working engine inside with big pistons and oil all over, and it ran very quietly.

After that we had a dinner at picnic tables under a roof at the museum, which was nice, and everyone introduced themselves and they gave us journals to write in. We returned home (actually I went back to finish connecting Candice's computer to the Internet, installing her printer, and installing her external hard drive -- be very impressed with my technical skills, yay, I can put cords into matching color-coded ports) and had a long house meeting during which we discussed all of the foods that we like and those that we are allergic to (I am not allergic to any foods). And I am getting up to run at 7:00 (first required appointment at 8:30) so I had better go to sleep soon.

Another day, two more students

2005-08-23T17:37:00.000-04:00

This morning I woke up with the sun and went running. I ran to the left and then cut towards the ocean and ran back along the ocean. Then I ran to the right to make sure I could find the grocery store again, and found a really nice cemetary. It has a very tall arch as the entrance, and I thought it was a cemetery, but I couldn't see any gravestones from the entrance, and then there it was over the entrance -- I AM THE LIFE AND THE RESURRECTION -- so I guess it's too bad if you're not Christian and you want to be buried. It was a really nice cemetery, with lots of trees to shade it.

My housemate and I had breakfast and I took a shower, and then when I went over to the office to turn in a form 1.5 months late, I found a third student, Abby, who was just moving in, so I helped her move her stuff in, and then we collected Hilary and we helped -- well, no, essentially just watched Abby put her stuff away. Turns out Abby knows Emily Starr-Phillips because she has transferred to Smith, but that does not interest anyone else because no one else knows Emily Starr-Phillips. She took French with me at Exeter.

In the afternoon I read some of a book, Cod, that we will be reading in class, and then Hilary and I went over to the seaport museum because they were singing sea chanteys. ("Chantey" is pronounced "shanty," apparently. I did not know this. Am I just being dense?) And so we listened to this guy talk about and sing them.

We went over to the office to get Christie because we were going to get ice cream, and it turned out they were organizing Mystic T-shirts from years past, so we ended up putting them all in order, eliminating duplicates, and photographing and cataloguing them all. That took a while, and it was neat to see all the designs that the classes had thought up. After that we did go to get ice cream, and it was yummy.

So, the house has a mail thing on the outside. It's a plastic box attached to the side of the house. I was under the impression that in order to mail mail, you would place it into this box, and then when the mailman came, he would take out your letters that you were mailing and then put the ones that you were receiving in. This is not how it works. I returned today to find my envelopes still in there, and another new one added (mailed to someone who no longer lives in this house). Apparently this is not so much a mailbox as a receiving box, and in order to mail a letter, you have to take it to the blue postal service drop box in front of the seaport museum entrance. I suppose if you put it on the doormat, the mailman would also take it? But maybe this is not so much a mailman as a man who delivers mail. Well, that's interesting, isn't it.

We ate the pasta last night, so I suppose we will be having PB&J or PB&banana for dinner. Yum.

Oh right, and in the middle of when we were cataloguing T-shirts, a student came with his mom, and we met him. Yup. But he's not moving in yet, so he's not really here yet. Tomorrow everyone will come.

Pictures will come sometime.

Here I am

2005-08-22T18:25:00.000-04:00

Well, here I am in Mystic, CT. We saw the seaport museum this morning, my family and I, and then I moved into my room. There is one other student here already, who just so happens to also be living in my house. So that's neat. We walked around the seaport museum together. Four people live in this house, all female, no others from Williams (there are five Williams students, four female, out of 18 students in the program).

I have a neat Mystic Seaport badge that has my name and "student" that lets me into the seaport museum for free. The main entrance is right across the street, so it's really convenient and close.

There are five Internet jacks in my room and one phone jack. One (exactly one) of the Internet jacks works. But one is certainly enough.

It's really hot, over 90 degrees. Luckily there was a fan in the closet, since I gave away my fan from the summer, so I can use that. It is a very small fan, though.

Everyone else will come on Wednesday, which gives me a while to explore everything.

That's all for now.