Pan Privileges: Revoked. It's a New Semester, Kids.

I realize you are already well into your quarter, and presumably having a blast being a TA coordinator and living The Riley Life and in general just being a boss. I, however, am only a week into my semester, so the phrase, “how do you like your classes?” frequently flows freely from my lips. (Debated saying “face” instead of “lips” for purposes of alliteration, decided would be overkill.) So, in the spirit of a new semester, here is what life is like now that I’m back at the ol’ grindstone.

This semester I have two professors I’ve taken classes from before. This is sort of good and bad, since I have mixed feelings about both professors (one is a cool guy but not a great teacher, the other is a good teacher but not always such a great guy). On the bright side, I got As in both of their classes. Hopefully the trend continues. With these two professors I’m analyzing separation processes, studying kinetics, and designing reactors. Hardcore chemE stuff! Should be cool. I’m particularly interested in separations, as those are usually the financially limiting step in any manufacturing process and they are necessary for manufacturing almost everything. So far the class is pretty derivation-y but the homework is more structured toward applications, which I like, and I hope the lectures will follow.

My other two classes have to do with controls. I’ve never taken a class on controls before, so I’m slowly forming a definition of what it means. So far, the gist is that you employ some sort of control system when you’re trying to maintain something (a tank level, a room temperature, a flow rate). It seems pretty simple at first glance, but there are a lot of things to think about and components to add to a process in order to establish a control loop. I don’t think controls are my calling, but it seems like thinking about engineering from a controls mindset could be really useful, and the professors seem good.

My last big course is biochemistry.  I guess I don’t have too much to say about it, except that I’m liking it. It’s a fairly standard chem/bio course, except that it meets four days a week. The professor is great, the material is helping my co-op make more sense and will hopefully make the continuation of my co-op over the summer more enriching too. Yay biochem!

Aside from orchestra (in which I have a bassoon-playing buddy! And a whole bunch of time off from rehearsals while there are string sectionals, which is why I got bored tonight and decided to write a blogpost), the only other class I’m taking is called career perspectives. People (generally alumni) who were trained as chemEs talk to us about the job they have and how they got there and give us advice and all that jazz. I’m hoping it can give me a better understanding of what I might want to do once I’m “out in the world”. We had a presentation today, which I paid amazing attention to considering how badly I needed to pee. (It’s alright, I don’t think I want a PhD anyway…)

Outside of school, I live in a two-bedroom apartment with some guy who was abroad in Jordan last semester. Ordinarily I would think going to Jordan for a semester would be a fantastic experience, but I don’t understand why you would decide to go if you hadn’t already planned out the classes you were going to take to still be able to graduate on time… Don’t get me wrong, he’s a really nice kid, just maybe a little immature.

Also, he lost his pan privileges yesterday. I’m a two-strikes-and-you’re-out kind of gal, and he used ‘em up. Here’s the situation: he knows the two guys who lived here last semester, and accordingly they left a whole bunch of dishes here for him to use. I have one pan and one pot. My pan, I’ll admit, is a pretty fantastic pan. It got a little bent due to shipping, and I don’t have a lid, but it’s a nice color and a nice weight and a nice size and nice and non-stick. It is clearly the best pan in this joint. So, Roommate used it. Theoretically, I don’t care if someone uses my dishes. “Oh sure, use a butter knife, I have like 11 more of them anyway,” “Yeah, no problem, if you use a pan or utensil and put it away before I ever have the chance to miss it, no big deal.” In practice, I’m a lot less generous with my kitchen supplies. But still! Use a spoon, I will learn to cope with one less spoon. HOWEVER. I have one pan. If you use my pan, and you don’t clean it for multiple days once, I will clean it before I need to use it. You do it twice? No more pan for you. Pan lives in my bedroom with me now. You will never see pan again. Pan got sick of being disrespected and violated so it got the hell out of that unfortunate situation. Pan is in a better place now. He and printer are from different worlds but they’re learning a lot from one another. The separation from pot has been tough, but if pot suffers the same fate as pan in the kitchen they will be reunited. Hear that, Roommate? Two strikes.

Just to clarify, I was serious when I said Roommate is nice. Maybe he isn’t as neat and tidy as I am, but we’re nowhere near endangering ourselves with filth. Also I stole two of his cookies. Pan tax.

Finally, there are three things I’ve added this semester I’ve never had at Cornell before: a job, a car, and a boyfriend. Having a car is pretty sweet, as I can be like, “I need to go buy X at Y,” and just do that. No hassle of asking for a ride or trying to figure out the bus situation. Yay!

I think I already told you this, but just in case, my new job is in the engineering advising office. So far, I am really enjoying it. I work 10.5 hours a week answering phones, scheduling appointments, helping students who walk in, making copies, and entering petition information regarding courses into a database. I’m learning a lot about how the university works, like to whom to go if you have a problem. Last week was pretty busy, with a lot of people having beginning-of-the-semester questions, but from here on I think I’ll have a lot of time there to work on homework. Getting paid to do my homework? Free coffee? Sweet!

Finally, there is the boyfriend. Both of us are quite busy this semester, and he started to have a little mini freak-out last week from stress (he’s not the only one I know, either), so I’m trying to give him lots of time to work on stuff when he wants to work on stuff and play videogames when he wants to play videogames and all that jazz. The last thing I want to do is have our relationship add undue stress for either of us. We’ve been making solid efforts to hang out every few days, and so far I think it’s working well for us.

I guess that pretty much sums it up! I bought and assembled a nightstand yesterday because my friend Tyler said an inadequately sized box is not appropriate to use as a nightstand. I also made homemade meatballs yesterday that tasted delicious. (I may not be as Italian as my first name, but at least I can make meatballs.) I’m also reading A Tale of Two Cities and enjoying it SO MUCH MORE than when I was forced to read it in high school. I’m now 70% of the way through, according to my fancy-dancy Kindle (which I love, by the way. I think I’m reading a lot more now, since it tells me how many minutes it’ll take me to finish a chapter, and I’m always like “that’s not that long!” and keep reading).

I hope you’re doing well and that you’ll find a little time sometime soon to write a post!

Love,

Lola

You're Coming Home!

It is a little ridiculous how excited I am to see you.  It's been almost a year since I've seen you, and although that has felt like a really long time, it also has gone be so fast.  A year is 1/20th of both of our lives.  I don't know if that seems long or short to you when I put it like that, but to me, I can't fathom how that much time has already gone by.

I don't know if you feel like you've changed a lot since high school.  A lot of the people I talk to seem to think that they have changed a ton since their high school days.  For me, I know there has been some personal growth and changing, but a lot of me still feels pretty similar.  And I feel like you are in the same boat.  Maybe this is just giving away how much I don't get a chance to talk to you anymore, but I thing we already had it kinda figured out back in high school, and college was just a chance to see that. Regardless of how much we have or haven't changed as people, our lives have definitely taken us to different experiences in the last year.  

Since last Christmas, you've gotten to experience your co-op and learn how much free time you have with a 9-to-5.  You started dating Brandon, a mysterious stranger who can cream me at scramble with friends.  You lived in, and hopefully got to explore, a new place.  You probably have done many many more things that I don't know about or can't remember since you've been on the other side of the country.

For me, I've done somewhat similar things in completely different ways.  I worked as a Head TA this summer, and learned that not all jobs are 9-to-5s.  I also started dating someone you've never met in person, though I don't know how good he is at scramble.  I moved away from home and really haven't looked back.  My life in Seattle kind of consumes my time and I almost never go home to visit my family.

I can't wait to hear more about all of the things you've done in person.  And to get to tell you more about mine (including some of the most recent things I'm attempting).  I hope you have a safe flight tomorrow.  And I hope I get to see you really really soon.  We'll make delicious things to eat, play trivial pursuit, play with your pets, and you can meet all of the people my mom has populated the house with to fill her empty nest.

This break is going to be awesome.

Love you!
- Ry

A Post with Such Disconnected Topics that I can't Think of an Appropriate Title. (I Blame the Coldpocalypse.)

I am sick. Yes, it is just a cold, but it is the kind of cold that caused me to spend the entire day yesterday trying to achieve the ability to breathe out of both nostrils (a skill I apparently take for granted on most days) and to refer to it to my brother as the “coldpocalypse”.

It’s been awhile since I had a cold, but I realized that my thirst for knowledge and basically trying to live life to its fullest is always at its highest when I’m sick. Home with a migraine? Spend the entire day reading even though it makes your head feel worse. Unable to breathe comfortably? Attempt a logic puzzle written by Einstein he said 98% of people wouldn’t be able to solve. [It was the German who lives in the green house, drinks coffee, and smokes Prince that owned the fish.] Highly contagious? Find the pull of a nice day irresistible. Am I alone in this? It seems like a weird quirk…

Other than the cold, things are going pretty well. My landlord fixed our oven this week, so on Thursday I roasted potatoes for the first time in months and was reminded of how much I freaking love roasted potatoes. I also finally got moved into the bioengineering department a couple of weeks ago, though it’s not quite what I was expecting. Part of that is because “no one has time” to devote to training me and supervising me. (Can you tell I find that to be a bullshit excuse?) I think most of it is that they thought they had a reasonable project for me to do on my own, and then once I actually started doing it I found out they were missing about half the necessary parts to complete said project and had lost all of the manuals I needed. Fortunately, after a completely awful and needlessly long meeting with the condescending director of bioengineering, he assigned me to a very competent, nice, busy, and somewhat frenzied Asian lady who has been a blessing. Unfortunately once I start the experiment she wants me to do I’ll have to come in on weekends. Fortunately that probably means I get to leave a little early during the week.

Last week a couple of guys from the Cornell alumni association of “the distinguished class of ‘74” took all of the co-ops in the Boston area out to dinner. I had calamari as an appetizer and salmon with potatoes and vegetables as a main dish and pumpkin cheesecake for dessert. (All of which were delicious and a nice departure of my usual “I’ll just throw whatever vegetables I have in the microwave and/or eat toast.”) I think it ended up being like 40 bucks per person and I didn’t have to pay a thing. The guys were also really nice, as were the other co-ops, and it was nice to have something to go to after work. I like Boston, as a whole, but the past few months have gotten pretty lonely at times, so this dinner was a nice departure from what has become mundane. It also was sort of eye-opening to see that guys who went to school together 42 years ago, who met freshman year, had stayed friends all this time. They basically told us that Cornellians are a special breed, and you don’t stop being one after you leave. It felt like we were all a part of this huge family. In the words of my mom, “and that’s why we pay the big bucks.”

Girl, I wish you would let yourself spend a few hours doing nothing and not feel so guilty about it. People are not designed to be productive every waking moment! If you ask me (which you didn’t but I’m going to tell you anyway), you’ve been working too hard for too long and finally your brain is deciding to just do what it needs to do. You know how if you consistently don’t get enough sleep, eventually your body just goes whomp and you fall asleep with your shoes on and don’t wake up for four hours? Your brain is doing that. Who cares if you don’t touch a musical instrument or find an amazing park? Apparently you need pop-nerd-culture ramblings. It’s like dudes and steak, or women and chocolate, or hipsters and vinyl: a necessity. Don’t fight it.

I’ve been thinking about that time you decided to “explicitly introduce” Tristan on the blog, and now that Brandon and I have been dating for a bit it seems appropriate for me to do the same. I mentioned him last time, but pretty briefly. He’s a fellow ChemE co-op, hails from Disneyland (well, Anaheim, but that’s where Disneyland is), and is now known as “the pie king” among the other co-ops at his site. If a friend or even a mild acquaintance asked him for a favor he’s the type of person who would do it without thinking twice, no questions asked. He hates being late, cuts his own hair, uses Sriracha liberally, and his favorite piece of clothing is the sweatpants I made him buy because he kept complaining about being cold. He loves puns as much as I love alliteration. He has trouble articulating himself sometimes, and he recommends good books (i.e. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, possibly the reason I can’t stop reading despite the dull ache in my head). He’s a pretty cool kid, even though a little (very competitive) part of me hates that he pretty much always beats me at Scramble with Friends. (I keep telling myself I would hate it even more if he let me win, but I'm still not convinced.)

Anyway I hope your quarter (totally just typed semester and deleted it) is going well! Classes and TAing and hanging out with people and all that jazz. It’s almost thanksgiving, which means you’re in the homestretch. Happy birthday! (In case I forget to mention it on the actual day.) Only one more month until I’m home! I was talking to my mom on the phone today and she said if your house of full of mysterious Asian men you are more than welcome to stay at ours. J

Much love,

Lola

Also I found this quote today: "A hug is like a boomerang, you get it back right away." Bil Keane

Living Week to Week

I think I have taken the suggestion of "living in the moment" in the wrong direction. Ever since fall quarter started, I have been non-stop living in the moment. And by that, I mean I have to ignore everything else I need to do, to focus on just the task I'm currently trying to handle, without going insane.

 Every Monday, I find out the things I need to accomplish that week, and every Saturday, I flop onto my bed and ignore the world. Currently, that is what I am doing. Does it matter that I have a midterm on Monday that I haven't studied at all for, homework due next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday that I haven't even looked at? Does it matter that I have to grade 20 assignments before Monday, and then will spend the rest of my Monday grading midterms? Nope. It is personal-time-with-my-bed day.  I can start all of that stuff late tonight and tomorrow.

Maybe if I were devoting my efforts towards school right now, it would mean that my average bedtime of 2:00 am could actually move more towards midnight, but I can't seem to make myself give up these precious hours.  Sometimes, that seems weird to me since I never seem to accomplish anything during this time.  I flock from internet site to internet site and dully immerse myself in pop-nerd-culture ramblings, when instead I could be applying myself to finding the best park near my house.  Or actually picking up a musical instrument this quarter.  Or any number of things.  You think I should be more productive and feel like I'm contributing to my life?  Yeah?  Well, good luck trying to convine my subconscious, cause so do I.

Anyways, I just wanted to check in with you and mention my lack of anything interesting going on with my life.  Just lots of school, prepping for exams, grading, and hunting for an internship for next summer.  I think I'm going to try and get out of Seattle this time.  As much as I love it, I think I need new scenery for a while.

Actually, that reminds me of something semi-interesting that has been preoccupying my brain cells lately.  I think I'm going to try to work as an APM for Google.  What's an APM you say?  Well, that acronym stands for Associate Product Manager, and basically means "make all of the things work".  Or at least, that seems to be what it means according to the people I have talked to.  I've known for a while that I want to try interning as a Product/Program Manager for a while.  Those are the people who make the connections between the engineers and the testers and the lawyers and the users and the bosses all make sense.  So some company would hand me a project (as an intern!) and say... okay, we need it to look like this in three months.  Make it happen.  

Part of me is terrified by that idea, but part of me is completely intrigued.  I talked to one of the TAs this quarter who did the APM program at Google last summer, and what she had to say convinced me that this is something I need to attempt.  Even though Google only hires about 20-25 APM interns every year, and last year only 2 of those were from public schools, and even though I feel completely inadequate in my technical abilities as of yet, I kind of want to apply and see just how far down the interviewing process I get.  The interview process alone is pretty scary.  They ask the kinds of questions like "how many lightbulbs does America use every year?" and "if you could make any product ever, what would it be? how would you break that down?  where would you get funding? how would you advertise?" and other such open ended questions.  This kind of thought process seems exciting to me, but I don't know if I have the passion yet to really land this kind of job.  I do intend to dip my toe in the water and see what is out there though.  And who knows?  The very worst that could happen is that I don't get it.

So, now you're semi-caught up with my stream of consciousness.  I hope you are doing well, and that you enjoy your visit to Ithaca.  I can't wait for December to roll around and for our baking/movie-viewing/random adventure hangouts.  I can hardly believe this quarter is half over as is.

Love you,
Ry

"What Happened to the Girl Who Got Everything She Ever Wanted?" "She Overanalyzed the Poop Out of It."

In my last post I was roughly halfway through my summer semester. My biggest concerns were a roadtrip with my grandpa to Niagara Falls, finals, and organic chemistry lab.

My, how times have changed.

I now have been working at Shire Pharmaceuticals for almost six weeks. I have gone from, “what’s a micropipette?” to, “the phage display titering failed last week because our tetracycline was in culture too long.” I can also identify “E. coli smell” (and yes, that is a thing.) The job is not exactly chemical engineering, it’s more like straight up biology, but I’m learning a lot and the group I’m in is full of genuinely fantastic people. I now live in Cambridge, about halfway between MIT and Harvard. I am kitty-corner from both a Rite-Aid and a Whole Foods, and it takes about 12 minutes to walk to the subway.

I also started dating someone almost two months ago, and our compatibly weird senses of humor are still compatible (and, as always, weird).

I have had two visitors to Boston (three if you count when Joe came here with me), took one roadtrip to Pennsylvania (where the boyfriend and the best friend are on their co-ops), and for the future I have planned three trips to NYC, one trip to Ithaca, one more trip to Pennsylvania, and two trips to California.

In a nutshell here are the life goals I have for myself: go to a good college (check), have an awesome, supportive best friend (this role is filled by about 5 people simultaneously, so a resounding check), have a healthy happy relationship (check), work for a biopharmaceuticals company (check), have wonderfully funny and intelligent coworkers I’m excited to see every day (check), live in/near Boston (check), finally get a smartphone (check), have enough money for spontaneous trips/shopping sprees/coffee runs (check).

Basically, if I sat down and listed all of the things I wanted to do by the time I was 21, I have already achieved them. (Crushed that deadline by about two years…)

And yet I haven’t been that happy the past few weeks, and I finally figured out why. I, Lola, am a huge worrywart.

Do I really want to work in pharmaceuticals? I’m not getting to do engineering right now, what if I don’t like the engineering? Or what if I’d like it more and I’m not getting a chance to do it? What if I don’t take [X Class] that would be oh-so-crucial to getting a job at [Y Company] when I graduate? What if I never live in the same state as my parents again? What if I’m not married before I’m thirty? What if I have kids? What if I have to give up career stuff for family stuff? What if I have to give up family stuff for career stuff? What if I go into the wrong industry?  WHAT IF I DIE ALONE AND MY 14 CATS DON’T EVEN WANT ME? AAHHHHHHH *explodes*

I have been in this horrible worrywart spiral of thinking of every possible thing in my life that I have no effect over and making it seem like it is the worst possible thing ever. But I’m finally starting to get over it.

One of my favorite shows is The Big C (I made you watch a season…) and one of my favorite parts is when Cathy (woman who finds out she has about a year to live) realizes “I don’t need to worry about raising Adam (her son), he will be raised.”

I don’t need to worry about getting married or having kids or choosing the perfect career, because I don’t know what “perfect” is for any of those things, or if it even exists, and I’m not in a position to influence any of them right now. They're most likely just going to happen when it's time. I’m 19, should I really be worried about work/life balance? I can worry about that in 10-15 years! Which is literally 50% of my current amount of life.

Long story short, my life is pretty damn awesome, and all of my problems are in my mind. Hopefully now that I’ve made this fabulous realization I can start focusing more on the A and the E of my CARE. (That stuck with me from when we talked about it with your mom… I have a tendency to let my A and E get a little neglected.) 

This post is a bit on the short side considering how long I’ve been absent and how much has been going on. I feel like I’m at the point where there’s so much to say I have nothing to say… I hope your first week of classes went well! It’s kind of crazy (and liberating) to not have to worry about midterms and problem sets and lab reports and bad TAs and orchestra rehearsals… Who am I and why did all my problems turn into fictitious ones?

I’d love to catch up sometime in the next month or so… Hopefully I’ll write again before then, but I should be home on December 18^th, and I better see you shortly thereafter… or else. (Plus we have an end of the world party to plan.)

Much love,

Lola

Summertime

And the living is easier. Congratulations on finishing your semester! You are probably at this moment off in Boston about to start your Co-op and new adventures for the next few months. Firstly, I am so excited for you to explore Boston. You should catalog the best pizza places and if it as cool of a city as I think it is, we can wander it together someday. Secondly, by you starting this new chapter it has made me realize just how much closer we are to being reunited! That makes me very happy. Thirdly, go kick butt. Be as awesome as you are and learn tons of really cool things. I hope this is a really good experience for you. Now for some send off reading material, I shall recount some of my summer adventures for you.

The last time you heard from me, I was settling into my house with boxes strewn across my room and nothing put in a proper place. At that time my room was still white with a large hole in the wall, I owned neither sheets nor a laundry basket, and I owned about half as many books as I currently do. Much has changed about my surroundings since then, though most of the improvements have happened at a snail's pace. My room is now a pretty blue, the wall has been patched (including the large chunk of wall I managed to tear out while removing an outlet cover), and many items that I needed have been acquired. Along with those items came a slough of things that I didn't *need*, but have loved getting nonetheless. My bookshelf is now completely full with even some books spilling over onto the dining room bookshelf. I have yet to read many of the books I've bought this summer, but I'm looking forward to perusing them all before the school year starts and I will no longer have time for such things. My most recent acquisitions are probably the best of them all though, two pristine I-SPY books that I read through the very day I got them. Now I just need to collect the Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein books and I will be set.

There have been improvements happening around my house as well. Bathrooms have been painted, dishes and curtains purchased, and proper couches moved in. I also tore up a strip of grass outside the front of our house and planted some more attractive plants instead. You should have seen the look on the neighbors' faces. I kid you not, on the day I was digging up the grass, six different groups of people stopped to congratulate me. There were names and pleasantries exchanged and now I have become a sort of ambassador to some of the neighbors. The second time I was outside gardening and planting the new plants, two more groups stopped by. Trudy from next door came outside despite her arthritis, and said hello to both me and my neighbor Cam across the street. Cam is the resident gardener of the neighborhood, and Trudy jokingly likes to call her our Cam-petition. Apparently if you want to meet and impress your neighborhood, gardening is the way to go. Later at the neighborhood block party I got to meet some of the other neighbors and realized that our street is full of 80 year olds and young couples with small children. Two of the young mothers jokingly asked us if we were a party house, and when I reassured them that we don't drink they instantly turned serious and asked if we were open to babysitting. I hope this means we have made a good impression on the people around us and that they will enjoy our company for what will probably be the next two years. As far as college kids go, they really didn't wind up with a bad group to live next to.

We are college kids though, and have had some learning to do (including how to make a really good fruit fly trap). It has been interesting adjusting to living with this group of people. For as adaptable as I am, I can't help but miss all of the amazing people that I lived with at my last house. I learned a lot about myself living with them and miss their company. And getting used to my new house will start again at the end of the summer when the faces of the house change a little bit as subletters move out. In the large scheme of things though, it won't really be that different. I will still be busy with school every day and trying to balance seeing the people I care about with doing the things that interest me.

Most of the new things I have done this summer haven't been around the house though. It has actually surprised me how little time I spend at home. Each day, I do some sort of head TA thing on campus, but physically being there actually requires very little of my time. Mostly, I figured I would be at home and working on new projects. Instead, I have managed to fill my free time by adventuring with other people and learning new things. I just got back from my first backpacking trip ever, a two day backpacking trip into the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Man, this is a really beautiful part of the country, and every time I go out into nature, I see how amazing it is. I also went cliff jumping earlier this summer and learned how not to land in a bad way after falling 30 feet off of a rock wall into water. It was really fun though, and some of my friends are thinking of a repeat before summer is out. Another activity I tried for the first time this summer is hot yoga. One of the friends I made in the CS department decided to take me to the hot yoga studio she goes to for two weeks straight and it was a lot of fun. I don't think I'll ever really have the time or patience to take it up during the school year, but dripping sweat in a hot room doing impossible poses made me not care if I sweat in day to day life and realize how much I need to work on stretching. The last of my trying new things adventures I can think of to tell you about is ice blocking. Even though we had friends in high school who liked to slide down hills on large blocks of ice, I never actually had partaken in this particular activity. That is until recently, when I slid down the slopes of Gasworks park with a group of friends in interesting formations. Pyramids were probably the best, and this is definitely a thing we should try together at some point.

I'm sure I have tried other new things and learned other lessons this summer, but those are some of the big ones that jump out to me. Otherwise, I have been spending my time trying to explore Seattle a little bit, going climbing every once in a while, seeing friends, and enjoying the heat while it is here. By the next time you hear from me, I will hopefully have tried more new things to tell you about. Maybe by that point, I will have hung pictures on my wall and convinced my housemates to do their dishes. The latter is not likely, but I can dream.

Lots of love,
Riley

Visitors, Lab, and Sub-Par Editing

This past weekend I got the opportunity of showing off Ithaca’s splendor. It is a rare and welcome occasion when I am visited up here, a place which my hairdresser once said sounded like “a magical land”, and which takes probably the same amount of trouble to get to (which explains the rarity of such an event). My grampa and his lovely bride the N-factor came up to the magical and mysterious land of community-owned bookstores, rednecks, and solar powered candle shops in order to see me and to drop off an automobile. (The N-factor’s real name is Nancy, but there was an abundance of Nancy’s in my life at the time I met her, so she was christened by none other than myself with a most distinguishing, and a trifle badass, nickname.)  [Also I have an automobile!]

While they were here, we had a plethora of nice meals and introducing friends to family. The Ithaca commons did not fail on at least two occasions to provide live music and eclectic folks. I remember one conversation, after walking by the hemp store, about how certain items displayed rather prominently in the window were illegal. I had to point out to my elders that glassware itself is not illegal.

The trip also included a visit to Niagara Falls. I naively thought that it would be somewhat less of a tourist attraction than it was, but the entire town is hotels, Casinos, and tour buses. That’s not to say I didn’t have a good time. We saw it from the top of the Skylon tower (the best view of it, at the price of an expensive lunch), went into the mist on a Maid of the Mist Tour, and saw it from behind the falls. I finally tried lobster, and have now been to two foreign countries on this passport. I have until 2021, so I hope I can get a few more.

Unfortunately much of my grampa’s visit was marred by me having to study/do homework. This week was the last week for two of my classes, so I was doing finals-prep (as well as midterm prep for orgo, due to Scott’s wish to have us take three midterms for a six week class) and trying to wrap up the last of the problem sets. Even more unfortunately, I have a peculiar talent of consistently beginning really excellent books right before I become too busy to give them the attention I would like. The day you posted on the blog it was to be 93 degrees, so I holed up in the nicely air-conditioned library and found a copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I finished it on Tuesday (two days before two finals). I have also done this with Atlas Shrugged, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Shining during the semester about which I say: “I didn’t know how bad I felt until I felt better.” At least I am consistent.

As previously mentioned, this week I took two finals: orgo and heat and mass transfer. I officially am not required to take any more chemistry courses, so naturally there is a little empty space in my heart. Fortunately I think I am going to take principles of biochemistry for my advanced science elective, so I can keep riding the “I love chemistry while normal people tolerate it for the minimum amount of time” train. My parents and brother are also on this train. It must be genetic.

Now that heat and mass is over and thermo is yet to begin (it will on Monday), orgo lab is the new most-work-required class. It’s also extremely stressful. Their motto might as well be: We are going to put you in a room full of noxious fumes (we actually had to evacuate the lab on the first day because we vaporized some benzoic acid. Nbd.), expensive equipment, things that might kill you, and breakable stuff, and ask you to do a bunch of things you’ve never done before with minimal guidance and require that you do it in a small amount of time. Also you must wear a silly apron whose strings keep breaking and lose a ridiculous amount of points on lab reports for not doing things you didn’t know you were supposed to do. You must also overhear your lab partner telling your TA she will be gone and in an attempt to idly make chit chat discover she will be attending her grandfather’s funeral. At such time you awkwardly decide to go dump something in the organic waste bottle on the other side of the room and regret bringing it up altogether. (Well, maybe without the last part.) The days when we only have one lab to do aren’t too bad actually, and it’s definitely a change of pace from your normal lecture/discussion/problem set type class, but I’m more of a survivor than a thriver in the lab.

There is certainly more I could talk about, but I feel like I have been scatterbrained enough writing what I have already written. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” (In hindsight I’m pretty sure I’ve written longer blogposts before, but usually I exhaust what I was intending to talk about in that time while this time I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Perhaps I’ll write again relatively soon, depending on if things get busier again.) I really do hope we get a chance to Skype sometime… (Am I pathetic enough yet?) I don’t have much going on this weekend since thermo hasn’t started yet and we basically have the week off from lab because of the fourth of July. If you are around with even a little time I hope you will think of lil ol’ me! I hope your summer’s going well so far.

Much love,

Lola