I've had many things to talk about, beginning at the beginning of last week (the week of the 19th). I've been turning them over in my mind. There was the visit of our illustrious ex-senator, Lincoln Chaffey. There was my mom's birthday. The excellent conversation (3 hours and 15 minutes!) that I had with my little sister on the occasion of her birthday, wherein I was again amazed at her unique type of insight into life and the world. There is la vida secreta, which is, because of stupid logistical and bureaucratic reasons, was becoming ever more difficult. It's gotten a bit better since then. I met with Baird at the gym this past Wednesday and we practiced for the oral exam, which was funny because all around us there were all these people lifting weights and breathing hard and we were just studying in the corner. Through the course of the evening he had to pretend to be alternately my roommate, my professor, my father, my best friend and my computer salesman. I told him it was getting hard for me to keep our relationship straight. We talked a little bit about how we didn't want to have neighbors with gatos. There is my new research project, which is studying the emplacement of air-borne volcanic pyroclastics on Mars during the Hesperian, with a very intelligent Englishman who tore apart my elementary questions about his research... and then put them back together again into better questions and answered those. He's coming to visit soon and he is so intimidating!!
The hydrology homework from the week before this last one went a fair bit better this time around, though the spreadsheet work almost drove me mad. One night last weekend I woke frequently from dreaming about spreadsheets, my mind racing and believing that unless it was actively accomplishing something in the false excell of my brain, it could not continue in this "falling asleep mode" that I was trying to force upon it.
I finished my computer program, finding out that I could do in 13+ hours what an Excell graph could do in a few seconds.
Jim came back from the moon meeting. I'll have to give that one a separate entry.
Next friday I leave for Houston for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC). I'm excited because I'll get to see a bunch of people from undergrad. If Ranor ever worked at AMES it would be so cool because we go out there sometimes to run experiments on Pete's hypervelocity gun. Plus I bet Ranor would get to go to LPSC and I cannot even come close to expressing how cool that would be.

Last night I fell asleep around 1am, then I woke up today around 10:30. I took a quick shower since the hot water didn't last very long, and I went back to my room and slept until 4pm. Hmm.....

In other news, I'm moving. I think it was a combination of things... I was complaining to Seth about my roommates and he said, "You know, you sound really unhappy there! You deserve to be happier than you are." and I thought to myself, yes, I do deserve to be happier than I am. Then a friend of mine came to visit, and for almost the whole weekend we had the third floor to ourselves. The difference between living there with my normal roommates and living there with someone I really like was astonishing. But once again I run into something that needs its own entry to fully explain. Then Seth decided to buy an apartment. I told him I was ready to make a move, and he swallowed me up into his plans immediately. We're going to be living with his friend Leanne a few blocks closer to Brown on a charming little park, really close to the bay. It's going to be so amazing. Seth is thinking about getting a washer and dryer. It's likely going to be more costly than where I live now, but Seth is right: I deserve to be happier than I am, and living with friends in a nice place where the kitchen is "ours" and there is a common room that is "ours" is going to be amazing. I can try and cook Seth some healthy vegetarian meals because I swear he knows even less than I do about cooking and with his dietary restrictions he's going to very shortly disappear. I just have to tell my landlord now and also ask him if I can get out of the lease early and move into Seth's place by the first of June. So now I have to go shoooopppppping or I am going to starve next week. Things are so busy right now that I really didn't have time to sleep all day today. But I think I really needed it. Tonight I'm going to Bethany's house to eat dinner and watch the lunar eclipse.

WATCH THE LUNAR ECLIPSE!!!

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Ok, ok, it'll have to be tomorrow, I realized I had to return my movies so I had to watch them all. The Gods Must Be Crazy II was awesome. To Catch a Thief was nice, but Carey Grant looked too old for his costar and I guessed who did it during the first ten minutes of the movie. I usually don't guess, either. Now I'm going to watch this movie called "Osama". I'm halfway through, but it had to be put on YouTube in 8 different parts, so I have to wait for each one to load separately. It's about life under the Taliban and this little girl who pretends like she's a boy so that she can work and feed her mother and grandmother, who are widows, and so cannot go out of the house since everyone needs a male to escort her when she goes out and they don't have one. You should watch it, it's pretty amazing so far. I'm trying to see if I understand any of the language... isn't it supposed to be Erdu? I heard the word "salaam" and the word for thank-you sounded a bit like "shakrun" (thank-you in Arabic) but they say say it WAAAAY differently than the Moroccans.

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Friday. I will update on Friday.

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Craiglist is pretty awesome. I mean, I can't really say that it's as awesome as Wikipedia, because Wikipedia is the most awesome thing that's ever happened to me, but Craiglist is pretty great.
I <3 U, WIKIPEDIA.
I mean, when I moved here to Providence I got my apartment off Craiglist (all the way from Germany!) Then when I got here I bought a lot of junk to furnish my room from Craiglist, and not only did I get lots of cheap stuff, I got to meet some nice people and get to know where everything is, since I had to drive all over kingdom come. That's come in very helpful many times since then. Anyway, tonight I'm on Craiglist once more, because I am considering moving out of my house. Just considering, mind you, but I thought I should give it some mental energy, especially since I've been complaining about my roommates so much this week and the walk to work has been getting colder and colder every day. (I was placated a bit when I came home today and Chris had cleaned the entire kitchen and done all the dishes, then he told me that he has a bunch of boogie boards and we're going to go boogie boarding this summer. He also knows like EVERYTHING about New England, so he's the best resource ever.) But anyway. Craigslist.

Now everybody knows that the funniest part of Craigslist is the "Missed Opportunities" forum, but today I was looking at the personals, and some of them are pretty hilarious, too. Like... what are these guys THINKING?!?!

I started thinking about which ones I would even consider answering, and I think the best one I came across was this one:

The tagline was "If I lay here"

And on the inside it said:


"If I just lay here"


And that was it.

Now there's my kinda guy. But I dunno, does it look like those are two guys? And what exactly is going on in that picture?

And then there is this guy

WOW.

Well, I guess I'll stick to looking for housing and free shit.

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Today was an interesting day. My usual Sunday involves packing up really early and going to the Rock (the library) and staying there in the same chair at the same table and doing hardcore work straight for between 6 and 7 hours. Then I go home. Last weekend I went shopping for necessities, and the week before that I went to a Super Bowl party. But this Sunday was a bit different because of President's Day. Half of my professors decided that this was a good time to go off on their various trips, cancelling class for the entire week (Inverse Theory and LVS! woot!). One of my professors was like, "Well... let's see, we're not allowed to have official classes over the holiday... so let's just have an unoffical class, same time same place. See you Monday." Greeeaaaat.
I have to try and do some research this week. Recently Jim's given me a really interesting project, and if I work really hard on it I could win myself some time living in Paris with Francois and Jean-Baptiste et les autres. Magnifique! Still, I rather hoped to hoodwink my way onto an Antarctic expedition next year. I've been drawing up my personal Five Year Plan, and right now it involves living like I've been living (eg saving hella money), paying off all my debts (it's possible, I swear) and then saving $6,000. That's perhaps a tall order if you add up all my debts, but we'll see. Then, when I graduate, I'll sign up for the expedition to Patagonia that I learned about at Pomona. I've got all the necessary qualifications and more, so they'd have to be crazy to turn me down. Especially if I had a field season in Antarctica under my belt. During the expedition you fly down to Patagonia and then you go through crazy intense training so that you learn everything about being safe in the wilderness. Then you go expeditioning. The point is to study the geology and ecology going on in the alpine regions of remote Patagonia. I think you go for three weeks at a time like several times throughout a year or something. And it's only $5,000 something for the whole thing, including housing and food. Of course, we'd be living in tents, so that's not particular expensive per day, but come on! We'd be LIVING IN TENTS!!! SWEET!
So I think I'll find a good picture of Patagonia to put on my wall and focus on gaining skills in my classes in order to be more useful to my hypothetical expedition team. That'll keep me focused and motivated.

So anyway, Sunday-- God has been calling me to church for the last couple of weeks... I always drive past the old Episcopal Church on the way to the library just as the service is starting... so since I wasn't going to go to the library this week, I decided to go to church after all. Sam said that the Episcopal Church was a little too full of costumes and incense and all that for my plain, Lutheran sensibilities, so I went to St. James, the Lutheran church in Barrington. The pastor there is a woman, apparently. I wonder what synod they are a part of. They have a little bitty church with a lovely wooden sanctuary and everyone comes up and kneels at the bench for communion. A nice lady gave me her service guide paper thing when I came in because I came in a minute or so late.

The pastor gave a good sermon (and short!). It was about the part of the Bible where they go up on the mountain and Jesus is transfigured and Moses and Elijah appear next to him. The disciples are like, "Hey! We should build three houses here, one for each of them, and we should stay up here on this mountain!" Then this crazy-ass cloud comes along and it's like, "JESUS IS MY SON! LISTEN TO HIM!!"
Of course, Jesus says that they have to go to Jerusalem, because this is right before the crucifixtion.

But what the pastor talked about was how people like to retreat from the world to find enlightenment, God, wisdom, peace, etc. When you go up to the top of a mountain, it's hard not to believe in God, with all the wonder that is stirred inside of you. It is easy to want to stay there forever to hold on to that feeling. It is also tempting to associate the feeling with the place, that there is something about this mountain that stirs the spirit. That's the same way Peter felt, perhaps, wanting to stay up there on that mountain where Jesus' true nature could be seen, shining through his skin, and where the forms of Moses and Elijah could be seen with him, proving to everyone that he was what he claimed to be.

But what she said was that key was that God is not only present on the tops of mountains. God does not have a particular place on the Earth- He is everywhere at once. He is just as present in the valleys as he is on the mountaintops. He's just easier to see on the moutaintops sometimes. So the real challenge for us, then, is to find God in the valleys of civilization... the valleys of our lives. Amid the cluttered wash of humanity. This analogy works just as well if you think of the valleys and mountaintops metaphorically. It takes great vision to go through great hardship and see how God works amid all that, as well as when things are going well.


That's my friend Michael, by the way. He takes amazing pictures. You can check 'em here.

Anyway, I spent the rest of the day napping (I slept last night from 10pm-8am, then napped today from 11am-4pm!) and scrubbing the floor, on which somebody has been spilling ice cream and blueberries. UGH. I'm trying to get ready because my friend is coming this weekend. I just hope that my filthy roommates can keep it together between now and Friday.

On that note, apparently I've been mentally blaming a lot of mess on Chris which was actually Emmanuel's fault. Emmanuel is also the one who has been eating our food (especially Chris'). Like, come ON! Why you gotta eat my food? Somebody has eaten almost all of my cinnamon, which is the only spice I own. I don't even know how it is possible to eat that much cinnamon. Chris had been suspicious for weeks but he finally caught him red-handed. Then Chris didn't know what to say, so he just said that it was totally fine for E to eat his food. Greeeaaat.

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"A little country church on a two-lane road, a bride and groom coming out the door- white lace dress and a red bouquet, "Just Married" written on an blue Chevrolet...

Don't that make you want to fall in love?
Don't that look like a picture of us?
A match made in heaven if there ever was
Don't that make you want to fall in love?

That just makes me want to give you my heart
Every forever needs a place to start
It's got to be a sign from up above
Don't that make you want to fall in love?"

--Kenny Chesney

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