Canto XLI

Well, how about a quick hair update. It's already reached the comfy fuzz stage. The annoying, itchy & scratchy stubble only lasted a few days, so that was nice. I could really go without all the ZZ Top/Harley jokes. Although I did enjoy Joe's remark about stabbing hippies at Altamont. Damn hippies.

In other, non-hair-related news, I'm now in Colorado. After finishing up the TA junk (grading a final) & packing my office, the last week was pretty slow. By thursday afternoon, all the graduate students were just waiting for the long weekend. Because we're moving offices, there was a long weekend (5 days!), so just killing time until then. Today was the day to go back to work, unpack and settle into the new place. But not for me, and I got my Indian office mate to unpack for me and choose a desk. I'll settle in when I get back. This weekend, for Memorial Day, we had a BBQ with cricket. I've got to admit, cricket is kinda fun. But slow. However batting & bowling are fun. And the BBQ was tasty. Special thanks to Steph for making way too much food. Good times were had by all, and here's a link to some pictures. Please to enjoy!
So why am I so far away from home? There's a theoretical physics summer school (NOT a conference as I was emphatically told when I accidentally called them that in an email) called TASI held in Boulder, CO every year. So far the talks are pretty good. I've only fallen asleep in one of them (out of 8 in the first 2 days). Although I can already tell that 5 hours of lecture every weekday for 4 weeks straight is going to be way too much. Other down sides include that fact that I'm in some UC-Boulder dorm room. I HATE DORMS. I don't know how I lived through them for a whole year. God I hate them so much. The food is on a rigid schedule that would only be appreciated by the 70+ crowd (the dining hall closes at 6:30!), but not by a bunch of graduate students. And we're not allowed to drink beer outside, only inside our rooms with the doors closed. Lame. However, now that I'm further west, the Liquor Store has Black Butte Porter, and it's on sale! Delicious, except for the fact that I can only enjoy inside our smelly dorm room. There was a wine & cheese social the second night we were here. Well, there were some cheese cubes, a cake and other snack food. And 1 (one) box of Franzia Chardonnay. Not even a choice between red & white Franzia was made available. When that box ran out, someone went and got another one. It was quite the event. Anyway, today I got Intrilligated for the first time. A very pleasant experience. But it's going to be a long month of physics. Hopefully I learn a whole bunch and make this worthwhile. I guess it depends on how much I put into it. But with shitty wire spring mattresses and paper thin pillows, I'm not getting much sleep. I'm trying to "run" in the mornings, the altitude is going to make me amazing, but really it's more of a plodding motion. My legs were just two lead weights attached to my torso. But in a few weeks I'm going to be amazing. Amazing.

Okay, that's all for now. I'll try and keep you posted on how the talks go. Steph is going to be in town for our anniversary and we're going to go up to Rocky Mountain National Park. I'm hoping for some elk sightings, followed by a wolf sighting, followed by the wolf taking down a sickly/young/old elk.

Canto XL

I think if this were a real blog, the title would be "In which I shave my head", only now I've ruined the punchline for everyone reading this. Well, you'll just have to scroll down to the bottom and read all about it. First, in other news.

Frisbee playoffs were last week, and we played pretty well. We made our way into the semis where we lost to Mech-E. But overall a very good season, and I had a great time. I already miss frisbee. So in a 16-team tourney in which we were seeded #2, we played 3 games. The first was won by forfeit (apparently, 11 am is too early for undergrads). The second, we won, but it was close. The person running the whole thing came over and basically called the game at the end of the point, when the score was 9-7. We 'won' 9-8. But it turns out Discus, the God of Frisbee, has been seeing both Irony & Justice on the side, and in our next game, the same thing happened to us. We were given 5 minutes to play when we were down 3, and only managed to score 2. Another 9-8 game, this time not in our favor. There's always next year.

And last week, school is finally over. Sure, I handed in the last few assignments late and I just barely scraped through it this term, but it's all over now. I'm calling it senioritis. This was probably my last year taking classes, doing homework and all that garbage. Today I have to help grade the final for the class I'm TAing, and then my school duties are done! It feels great. I've been doing classes and homework and junk for more than 20 years. Wow. And now it's over. I'll be enjoying a cigar this weekend to commemorate it.

Okay, the only other news is the hair. First, a retrospective. I last had my hair cut in October, to my usual short length. Steph and I were going to take pictures once a week and keep track of how the hair and beard grow as a function of time (it's monotonically increasing!), but didn't stick to that too well. And since we didn't label the pictures, I don't know when they were taken; I can only roughly guess their chronological order based on hair size. But here's one I can accurately pin point, and comes roughly 1 week after Thanksgiving. Always gracious in victory.

Well, that's a little more than 1 month after the trim & shave. Here's a current photo to let you know how big it had gotten.

Well, I had just combed it out to make it seem bigger, but still, that's a lot of hair in just 7 months. First up is the bleaching. That's right, I bleached my hair. Actually, I have to admit it was fun, and I might try that again.


I liked the surfer look. But I certainly couldn't just stop there! I wanted to go over the top, and was going to dye it bright purple/pink. This, I must say, was a bit of a failure, and the picture makes it seem much more pronounced than it was. But it still looks kinda cool.

And now for the shaving. Well, this was an event for everyone to enjoy, and everyone got in on the act. On a personal note, let me just say you shouldn't really trust a bunch of theorists with scissors.

Finally, here's the aftermath of the initial shearing. Yes, that's my desk in the background. The umbrella was used to catch all the hair. Also, I'm modeling a new Oregon t-shirt which is kinda weird. It's a Skull-and-Bones, only with a Duck, and says Oregon. It's funny. Man, the alumni association should be paying me for all the advertising I do out here. I love to wear my Oregon shirts out here.

But why stop there? You can see that the hair is slightly mottled from the bleach/dye job and it's very uneven. So sunday morning I shaved it for reals. All gone.

My head feels very cold all of the time now and it just doesn't feel right. I shake my head and my beautiful locks no longer bounce with it. So I've been wearing my old hat.

And that's how it is. What a tale, huh? Hope you enjoyed it!

Ed. Note: I'm going to try and figure out how to get the pictures rotated correctly later. Just tilt your head or screen to the proper angle for now.

Canto XXXIX

And yet another 2 weeks. Well, at least this time I'll have a little something to talk about.

About a month ago my high school class started up a reunion webpage (it's a private site so I'm not excluding you by not including the link, you're already excluded). I'm not sure how I feel about this. There are 3 competing thoughts in my head:
1) I keep track of the people I care about, so who the hell are these other people?
2) The creepy stalker part of me (no small piece as we all know) just looks at all the different people and their bios judging them.
3) The actual point of this whole thing is that I would guess there are about a dozen or more people I am genuinely fascinated by and would like to see again, and this seems like a good venue to get that started.
There were a lot of people in high school I knew and would consider friends, but then we graduated, we to different colleges and work and moved and all that stuff and I never really gave many of them another thought. I feel like Homer when he's looking for his soul-mate. He looks around the bar, and they all tell him exactly what kind of friend they are. Chum, compadre, associate, contemporary, well-wisher (in so much as I don't wish you any specific harm). Who are these people to me now? Now it all comes flooding back. Man, I hated high school.

Anyway, this brings me my friday night. There seem to be at least 3 Lincolnites from the class of '98 in the Boston area, including myself. And so I went out with one of them for some beers (along with Steph and another Lincolnite from '97). It's weird. I knew this guy for 4 years. We would talk occasionally. I guess this would fall under "associate", we interacted enough at school, but not much outside. But it was fun. It's amazing how much has gone on in everyone's lives. We also went to see a movie, "Hot Fuzz". I can highly recommend this movie, if you liked Shaun of the Dead. Basically it was a kinda funny British movie for the first 1:15 minutes. Then for the last half hour to 45 minutes, it got real funny. They just decided to go over the top, and it was awesome. I suppose Steph and I will get around to Spiderman 3 later this week or next.

And then saturday rolled around. Cinco de Mayo. My goal was to get a bunch of grading that I've had stack up the last few weeks finished up. But when I first got in, I got an email with the subject "batting cages?" It was a beautiful day out, and of course it's only saturday, so there's still plenty of time to get it done later... It was a lot of fun, but now I'm in pain. I didn't realize what a total body workout it would be. I think this should be the new hit exercise. Basically, this involved three of us waiting in line with a bunch of kids up to about 12 year olds for the slow and medium pitch cages. Then being taken to school by those very same little kids. There was one kid there who couldn't have been much older than 6 or 7 - the pitches were coming in at the height of his head - and he still hit better than us. Of course afterwards, we had to get some ice cream so we went to the Wendy's down the block and each got a Frostee. Nice. But now I am in pain. I knew my hands and shoulders would be sore, sure. But my abs really hurt! It actually hurts to laugh & cough. What's up with that? Full body workout.

And saturday night we went out to a party in Watertown. Lots of drinks, good food and karaoke. I even tried my hand at it, after 4 beers. These are the things you do when you drink. "I am very sorry for... attempting to sing." But good times all around.

Sunday was mostly spent lying in pain on the couch. We went out for some breakfast at a diner near our place. And frisbee in the evening (who schedules frisbee games for sunday at 6pm?). We won, and are 5-0 heading into the playoffs this weekend. Not bad, except we only had 1 sub, so I basically played the whole game. So that's now compounding the pain from batting practice. I think I need to get younger... High school was 9 years ago!!!

So now I need to get everything done that I didn't do over the weekend, plus the usual work stuff during the week. Sigh. Sounds like somebody has a case of the mondays.