Hunt of the Muffin

Last Sunday I decided I really wanted a muffin before church.

I spent about 45 minutes on Google, trying to determine what Charlottesville bakeries/cafes were open on a Sunday, and then finding one open at 10 AM was a tough job indeed. Luckily the church I was going to was downtown, and there are a lot of cafes in that general direction.

The first one was a cafe I'd been wanting to try out anyway, though apparently it moved about two blocks down the street from when I'd last seen it, this past summer.
It was in fact open. That was good.
So I go inside, and I look confused. When I asked the one employee if he had any muffins, he said no, they only get their muffins in on Mondays through Saturdays (wait, they don't bake them themselves? Hmmm, dodgy...) and sometimes leftover ones are half-price, but there are none today.

Employee started picking up the wrapped items on the counter. "But, we have a croissant, some... umm... carrot cake, paninis.... Cupcakes! Those are muffin-shaped!"

Poor boy.


I found my muffins on the third try. They were okay, the cinnamon-swirl one would have been amazing but the outside was a little stale. It definitely satisfied my muffin craving though, and the blueberry was spectacular.

I found a new church that I like a lot better and I think I'll keep going to. It's a bit smaller, of the two narrow sets of pews variety, but I liked the pastor and the atmosphere, so perhaps it's worth the drive downtown every Sunday.

walking to work this morning...

..I was reminded of one of those sights you see only on college campuses. Older, male professor-types riding bicycles to work, dressed in wool suits and dress shoes, with a reflective band around the right ankle and a briefcase bungee-corded over the back tire. Incredible.

Yesterday was the last day of exams and now the Grounds are empty, devoid of human life. It's kind of peaceful, kind of creepy.

Ten minutes ago I handed in my take-home exam. That was the last item for the winter exam period. So my penultimate undergraduate semester is now over!

It's funny, though I didn't have any "real" exams--no three-hour closed-book, in-class exam--this was probably one of the tougher exam periods I've had. A lot of writing to do. Yuck. But I got it all done, and now it is Winter Break time!

Between semesters, I'm going to keep doing research for Stefan. I wasn't able to actually collect much data during the semester in my independent study, and there are other things we'd like to know, so I'm getting paid for a few weeks this winter. It should be nice, keep myself busy during the days, and yet also relaxing.

Woes of Paper-Writing...

1. I just paid $1.45 for a 20-oz soda from the vending machines. I find that objectionable!

Dedication.

Oh wow, it's December.

Yup.

This week was the last week of classes for the fall semester! That's almost equally crazy. So today I had a presentation for my lab class, which was in lieu of a lab report for one of five physics labs this semester. My partner and I talked about a nuclear lab we did, in which radiation spectra were taken of a few different sources. But since it was the one required lab for everyone, we wanted to focus less on rehashing every single experiment and instead we focused on the practical side of the experiment. Namely, how do you decide what detector is appropriate for an experiment? So for a lot of our presentation we contrasted the main types of detectors.

Okay. So there's this class of detectors called scintillators, which means that the detector absorbs a high energy and emits a lower energy. The first scintillators used were in about 1906, way before technology caught up to the science they were trying to do. So they had materials that emitted visible light when hit by radiation. They would actually take a piece of the material under a microscope and count the flashes of light as it was hit by radiation.

Wow. That's some dedication to science.

kitty!

Last night I bought two more fish to round out the number of White Clouds in my tank to five (for the time being). And also I bought myself a catfish! YAY catfish!

The catfish just sits on the bottom of my tank and eats algae, it is very cute. I was going to name him Iceberg, but decided to call him Lettuce instead.

The other White Clouds are Magellan, Marianas, Archipelago, Amphitrite, and Kayak.

Protesting a Protest

Last week was "Proud To Be Out Week", here at UVA, with events every day to make the general student body aware of the prevalence of and obstacles faced by 'out' members of the community, especially other students. On Friday was a performance of "The Laramie Project", essentially a play written from the documentary of the responses in the Laramie, Wyoming community to the murder of Matthew Shepard. A few other universities were also having performances, I think that PTBOW is a national thing.

On about Tuesday, word got out that Westboro Baptist Church (yes, that one: the small congregation that protested Shepard's funeral, as well as funerals for soldiers and even the victims of the VA Tech Shootings two years ago) was going to come to UVA to protest the "Laramie Project" performance.

A counter-protest was organized. Anyone interested in showing Westboro Baptist Church that their hateful messages were unwanted were to show up outside the performance venue wearing black, to line the pathways to prevent WBC from preventing the audience from entering. I decided that I felt strongly enough about the issue that I went, though I've never protested anything in my life.

We organized an hour before the start of the play and lined the brick pathways, which at that point of Grounds extend in three directions. The protest-protest organizers passed out candles; the plan was to maintain silence no matter what WBC did or said, just in a line of solidarity and light. It was incredible to see so many people there, to see the radiant candles against the sea of black.

Westboro Baptist Church never showed up. A rumor spread about that they might have gone to Richmond to protest their "Laramie Project" instead of ours. It didn't matter, really, that we had no opposition. I think the overflowing support for the rights of a play to be shown, for a group of people to exist without hate, was a message in and of itself. It's a shame that we couldn't do that without an outside threat, but all the same... it was beautiful.


In the news!:
Local CBS news (check out the video at the bottom!)
Cavalier Daily (student paper)

One of my favorite signs at the protest simply said:
Love One Another
As I Have Loved You

Catch-Up; and Elections

Okay, yes, it's been a couple of weeks. About a week after I last posted, "Lear" went up, the weekend of October 23-25. It was actually pretty good! A lot of people came out to see it too, which was great. We had good numbers on the Saturday matinee, which is always the worst attended show, and the Friday and Saturday nights we had to put out more chairs to have enough seats. I like to think that I did my publicity job well.

And ever since then it's been catch-up time for classes, labs, seeing friends, so on. It's been kind of a crazy few weeks, but also nice in a way.

Apparently Mark Warner visited Cville on Sunday for a rally, and once again I didn't know until the day after. It's nice that politicians come to this town in their campaigns, though it is extremely blue (something like 75%?) so it's a guaranteed base of support.

Tuesday night I did some work before heading over to a friend's for a pretending to do homework while watching election returns party. I stayed long enough to watch Obama's Hyde Park speech, then drove home. A few apartments in the neighborhood were obviously having real parties, and I recall hearing the chants of "O-BA-MA" as I fell asleep. Not nearly as exciting as the evening other friends of mine had, who live in NYC and Chicago, another more lively places, but still... it was kind of crazy.

I'm really glad that the voter-registration folks will no longer be hounding Grounds.

put your back into it!

WOW I've been busy.

There are more cool things about the Physics Department here that I would like to share. Both of these happened last Friday.

1. I ordered some parts from a supply company, to the tune of about $15. The parts themselves were pretty small, maybe pen-sized.

On Friday my package arrived, and it was huge, the size of a shoebox. What could possibly be in here?, I wondered. The supply company sent a 'snack pack', which was pretty amazing. I think the food they sent me was almost more expensive than the parts I ordered.

I asked the Stockroom Manager if the food came with the parts? Or was I just confused? "They're not allowed to send those," he said, "but we don't tell them that."

2. ALSO on Friday was the Fourth Annual Physics Department Tug-of-War. I didn't know we did that, but apparently it's something the grad students have organized for the entire duration of my undergraduate career. They had planned competitions between different grad years, between library staff vs. machine shop guys, faculty vs. staff, and different research groups. None were planned for the undergrads, but since the tugging-of-war occurred in front of the main entrance to the building, we knew it was going on.

So a few spontaneous competitions were arranged as well. Somehow I managed to get roped in to competing in the undergrads vs. 2nd & 3rd year grads, AND the undergrad girls vs. grad girls. For the latter, there were two on each side.

I thought the Tug-of-War would be short-lived, and then the grad students would go back to work. Nope. It went on for an hour.

You know they're serious when the experienced competitors wear cleats.


I took pictures, but well... those will be up eventually.

Life Skills

A week or so ago I posted that I like soldering. A lot.

I remembered another possible-life skill today, meaning it is a skill I may possibly need/use for the duration of my career.
Technical drawings.

I love technical drawings. I don't know if I'm any good at them, but it's amazing to me that I can imagine something in my head, sketch it out in 3-D form and as a combination of 2-D components, and then a few days later hold the exact embodiment of what I imagined. It is amazing.

Hopefully that will work out for the adapter piece I drew today, because I have a cylinder that needs to fit inside and be held securely. If my measurements were off, or my drawings unclear...

Who says that labwork isn't suspenseful?