Long (-awaited) post

Yeah, it's been a loooooonnnnnggggg time… it's hard to find time to post when I'm having a great time!
Here's a quick run-down of the rest of my summer:
4th of July week - Kern reunion in Ouray, CO
end of July - Heather comes to visit me in Iowa
- we take a trip to Wisconsin
beginning of August - Heather and I drive lots of stuff to my new apartment in Atlanta, stopping in Indianapolis and Bloomington, IN, to see grandparents, aunt & uncle, cousins, and brother
middle of August - family, with Heather, vacation to Aspen, CO, to camp, hike, visit Claire at the music festival, and attend lots of great concerts

And now… I've been in Atlanta and taking classes for almost 3 weeks. Other things occupying my life:
biking everywhere (2.5 miles to school with lots of hills!)
cooking meals (despite lots of great restaurants in the area, I still haven't gone out to eat yet)
enhancing the apartment (furniture, appliances, etc...it's looking GREAT)
exercising (running, swimming, lifting, longer bike rides)
chatting with Heather and planning for a trip to Argentina over winter break!

Yeah, so Heather's doing an internship in Cordoba, Argentina, from Oct-Dec, and I already have plane tickets to visit her there 12/8-12/29. (I'll miss Xmas at home, but I'll be back in Grinnell for New Year's.) Plans include: Cordoba, Buenos Aires, Iguazu Falls, and--the most anticipated--PATAGONIA (including Torres del Paine national park in Chile and Los Glaciares national park in Argentina)! Even though it's still 3 months in the future, I've been dreaming and yearning for the trip constantly.

Speaking of dreaming and yearning, I won't have to do quite as much as I expected, because Heather's going to visit me here in 2 weeks! It turns out that all the best flights for her to Argentina went through Atlanta, anyway, so it was pretty convenient to stop here for several days. Just two weeks ago, I expected to not see her until December…so this is definitely a freebie. I'm so excited!!!

By the way, the time I spent with Heather last month was one of the best times of my life. I'm sure those of you who met her or got to know her better realized what a special person she is. Let me just say that I'm simply overwhelmed by the fact that we are fiercely in love with each other! And even now, being physically separated, our relationship is stronger every day. Quite simply, amazing.


Anyway, here's a more immediate update. There was a Georgia Tech graduate student picnic today, which was organized by Carl Yerger (Mudd grad of 05, one of my 3 other research buddies here), who is graduate student body VP. He suckered me into volunteering (partly because I got a guaranteed free t-shirt), me thinking that I'd only have to bus food around. But he immediately put me on PA duty, where I had to get on the microphone in front of over a thousand fellow graduate students to announce door prize winners. It was pretty disastrous for a time: we had about 400 t-shirts to give away, and I had started reading single numbers at a time (drawing them out of a pail) which was impossible: I had to call maybe 10 at a time (we needed to get rid of all the shirts!), upon which I would get a crowd of people. Maybe 10% of them would have a valid number, because some of them couldn't hear me very well, others just thought they could get a free shirt, and (most often) others didn't understand the rules of raffling. Worst of all, the shirts were not even that desirable: they were all XL size from the start, and only came in 2 varieties, a blue Atlanta Thunderbirds (hockey) or a white Atlanta Hawks (basketball, one of the worst teams in the NBA.) And yet some people seemed fanatic about getting one, I think mainly because they wanted to /win something/. Typical scenario:

I finish trying to verify someone's ticket. I didn't match it with one of the ones I just called, but maybe I did call their number 5 minutes ago, they look really desperate, and we have tons of shirts to give away, so I just tell them to grab one. I turn around and see ~8 people who have come up randomly, handling t-shirts and trying to find one other than an XL. I proclaim to them in a loud voice, "You only get a t-shirt if I called your number!" to which some look up embarrassed and walk away, and others keep what they are doing. I speak into the microphone: "Please only come up if I called your number." I turn around again and see about 5 people in front of me. Each one comes up to me in turn and asks, "did you call this number?" Some of them have just come from the food line, and didn't even hear me call out numbers; they just want to know if by chance their particular number got called from the 500 possible numbers in the bucket. "No…No…No…No…" I turn around again and someone asks me in broken English, "how do I get a t-shirt?" "You have to wait until I call out your number! …The number on your wrist band! …just listen!"

And of course, all that came out of this wasting time was that WE WERE GIVING THEM AWAY TOO SLOWLY. It was quite a dilemma: do we just say, OK, come up if you want a free t-shirt? No, that would have been suicide. Do we just give them away to people who come up with the wrong number? No, that would quickly cause a free-for-all as well.

Anyway…we gradually learned the tricks of the trade. First, we brought the shirt boxes to a little tent where people could only approach from one side. Then, instead of calling single numbers, we said, "if your number ends in these two digits: 6-3. 63. Come on up to get a t-shirt." Of course we'd still get people with wrong numbers (usually totally wrong numbers) but it was much quicker to check. Finally, we hit the master stroke as the party was slowing down and fewer people were around, we did "for the next 2 minutes, we will give out t-shirts to anyone whose number ends in the digit 3." Actually, by this time, a CRC staff member who had been sitting by (I think he was in charge of the sound system) and giving me tips, took over the mic for a while, and put my PA skills to shame (he had done this stuff before.) I really need to work on that showman's voice.

Well, that turned into a long story… (I also need to work on the skill of writing frequent, short blog posts.) Sorry about that.

I saw Tim's blog post about the nerd quiz, so I took it too:



That's right, "High nerd." That should clear up any uncertainties about who is the superior brother.

Question: what's the focus of (social) life in a (southern) public school (during fall semester)?
Yep, that's right, American football. The Yellow Jackets (also known as the Wramblin' Wrecks, after the alternative mascot of this engineering school, a vintage car) crushed Notre Dame in South Bend last weekend, and are currently ranked 21st in the country. Tech students are given free tickets to the highly-attended home games; there are even a number of tickets reserved for grad students. Tomorrow, Tech plays Samford University, a game that seems a forgone conclusion according to ESPN:
"Georgia Tech looks to keep the good times rolling after its dominating victory at Notre Dame last week. Samford is 0-11 against Div. I-A schools since dropping down a division in 1988."
But just in case they need the extra bit of support, I'll be there.