The First More-Than-Five-Hours Of Consecutive Sleep In A Long Long While

Also the first very long title in a long long while. I used to do this a lot and then title habits changed. Did anyone notice the comma streak I had a while back? Things like that happen here. I need to blog more.

Anyway, I thought I wouldn't have wifi here, because I have always been used to cheap hotels, but this one is actually really nice. My dad and I got a two-bed room, which also happened to be a two-bedroom suite, with televisions and phones in each room (and the living room), a full-sized kitchen, and two bathrooms. Two real bathrooms. Now all we need is a decent view.

But as I was saying, wifi, which means: a) I can finally go on Pandora again, and b) I can now chat with Khajiit all day long (also his name makes me miss Skyrim).

Yesterday's plane rides were pretty bumpy, or so I heard from the captain, but I fell asleep for most of it. On the first one, I woke up when the attendant came with drinks, asked for a cup of water, drank some, and fell right back to sleep. Trying to stay awake during the connection time was really, really hard. Good thing I was also really hungry, and in my 6am sleepiness I forgot to bring any US money.

But! I got off the airport, got picked up by my dad (after a while of him calling me trying to figure out where I was), and then he sent me off to a sushi buffet place while he went back to make conference calls to his workplace back in China. I got to eat a creme brulee for the first time!

Not much else happened though. I talked to Khajiit more, and today too, and now I'll be going out, as my dad says, to "see places," which upon further probing is going to be "Best Buy and maybe Walmart."

Shopping time!

Another Lazy Tuesday

I had set my alarm to 7:30, but seeing as I had slept only five hours earlier, I ended up barely dragging myself out of bed at 8:30, skipping breakfast to run to my meeting with my counselor.

Who, after asking me a bunch of questions including ones I had already filled out on a questionnaire, proceeded to tell me, "I think you're better off seeing [that other group of] counselors."

So I thanked him, left, and spent a good fifteen minutes figuring out where the engineering library was, because I was supposed to meet with Jessica to do our math history homework. I would link to the actual assignment, but that happens to be hosted on Fish Wings' official website, which would totally make the name "Fish Wings" obsolete, so I will describe the questions instead:

1. Multiply one mixed fraction by another mixed fraction using the ancient Egyptian way of doubling.
2. Solve an arbitrary algebra problem without using modern algebra and instead using false position.
3. Multiply two numbers in base 60 together in the Babylonian way. Divide two numbers in base 60 using the Babylonian reciprocal way. Ignore the fact that they had tables and therefore did not actually do that much math (not including time needed to make the tables, of course).
4. Solve a quadratic formula using geometry.
5. Solve a more complex algebra problem using false position again.

These questions took us a good hour (and I had already worked on some of them ahead of time), but they were also really interesting, especially the one where geometry was used to solve an algebra problem. I loved the proofs our teacher did in class. Maybe if I have time I can scan in a version of my own, but the internet probably does a better job of that.

After being productive, I went to the fancy-shmancy computer science building, which I will now call FSCS, and got an egg salad sandwich. It wasn't the best sandwich in the world, but it was alright. I liked the smoked meat one much better.

I also saw the new student lounge with plenty of people inside playing foosball, and I'll have to check that out one day.

I brought my lunch over to the architecture studio, just as Sam and Denise were coming out. We, along with two other people, May and Ralph, went to this deserted windowsill half a level below a lower tier of the roof, and after twenty minutes of debating and a lots of texts, we figured out that the windows facing us were those of Sam, Denise, and May's studio. Some guy inside waved at us, and we waved frantically back, but he got bored soon and left the window.

We then all went to get ice cream (Toonie Tuesdays!) and all chose the same base flavor coincidentally. I had maple walnut again with my base flavor, espresso, and it was really, really good. I don't think I'll ever buy ice cream anywhere else.

After that I went to my math tutorial, where we learned more about REF and RREF and my TA commented on my math shirt (and thought I was a math major). Some time after that I helped this middle-aged guy with both linear algebra and calculus, then got back to my dorm, decided to work, and ended up on RSS again. Oh, the wonderful life of internet.

Going, Going, Gone

I am leaving for Toronto tomorrow (a sufficiently large place that I feel, despite my general paranoia, confident in divulging this information to potential internet lurkers, which there are none anyway, but nonetheless). My mom and I are resolving passport issues (mainly hers). I will be resolving this issue in the future, right when I'm in the middle of my freshman year at college (which, according to the book I just read, is not a matter of if, but a matter of where), so it will be highly problematic and if I am not careful and/or lucky, I may have to resolve the impending illegal-status-problem during some oddly-timed exam.

Which will not be good. But I digress.

(Also, if I go to McGill, there will be no such problem, which is another plus, I suppose.)

I will probably be coming back a week later, if at all (well, I do hope to come back, but if I don't, someone tell Paperclip that I still owe them four textbooks, three of which are not under my name, plus an assortment of paperback books that are also not associated with me for some reason). This time will most likely be spent pseudo-prepping for bio/college/English/whatever else, and I will most likely be spending the pseudo-prepping time reacquainting with old friends.

I'm skeptical on internet access for the next week (or, for that matter, my amount of "free" time), so I won't be able to tell you in detail about my Penn-Swat-Princeton visit (or revisit, for Princeton), and how much I absolutely fell in love with Penn despite the rainstorm (walking into the Wharton building is rather awe-inspiring and breath-taking all at once, although the two often complement each other). Nor will I, for that matter, be able to keep up with blogs and comments (I'm sorry, Julie, I've been meaning to comment on your blog for a while now and I haven't found the chance yet), or my daily comic binge, which is rather sad, but I will deal with that (hopefully).

(I will also not be able to converse at length with Reese over his convictions that I should go to Swat, although he prefers Penn over Swat himself. That may or may not be a loss. I'm not sure.)

Most depressingly, I will probably miss the AP scores letter (I know I can call, but I'd rather not do that since it's way too suspenseful), delay my story until unknown times and depths, and not be able to vote on a senior girl shirt slogan/design. I will have to leave that to my (mostly) trustworthy fellow classmates.

Modern Technology

I would like to start off this post with a quote from Tamir (edited for language):

Thanks to modern technology I live in the woods and there are 4 trees blocking my street, none of which have been removed since last night in spite of calling the fire department at 4 pm.

Modern technology indeed. I can also add that, thanks to modern technology, I have discovered that many of my classmates are in a state of powerless, Internet-less panic. And flooding, of course, but lack of power is usually the first thing people apparently talk about when they share their latest news online.

(Perhaps it's because when you're in the public library, basking under *gasp* fluorescent lighting, sitting in front of a sluggish computer, it's hard to remember that you have six inches of water in your basement.)

Regardless, I am very glad that my power--and Internet--are all very well alive and perfectly fine. There was that brief moment yesterday when the lights came whirring to a stop, and my mom had contemplated turning off the laptop to conserve battery-life, but the lights came back on again and everything went on as usual. And the only Internet loss I experienced was due to my modem rebooting after the power loss.

I don't have a basement, so I don't have any flooding issues as well. Most importantly, all of the trees around our house have their roots firmly planted in the ground.

Not that it matters, really, because my house is one minute's drive away from a major road and a fire station (maybe the same that is not clearing the trees in front of Tamir's house), and unless a tree happened to fall in that short stretch of "neglected" road, we're guaranteed road access.

But obviously, there are both positives and negatives to this situation.

The positive is that there is no school tomorrow, yay! I get to sleep in late tomorrow, and, when I do get up, I have plenty of time to go over the AP calc problems Mrs. James gave us on Friday.

Of course, this brings up a critical negative: Mrs. James is probably panicking right now, with the mantra "May 5th is approaching" stuck in her head. We had already missed lots of class time with our snow days, and our limited knowledge of series and whatever else comes after them is definitely not good.

Speaking of school, I have also (accidentally) left a few books I needed to quote from for my research paper in my English classroom. I was hoping to get them tomorrow, and finish my last edits before I have to hand the paper in on Tuesday. Right now, I can only hope that "house nearly surrounded by water," as Mogley eloquently puts it, is good enough of an excuse for the deadline to be extended, if only for a day or so.

Hey, it's better than the hackneyed "my dog ate my homework."

No Internet for many people in town also means nearly no communication with other people (as my parents think the phone is the next worst thing after video games, at least for me). So I compromised by chatting with my friends back from my old city. Stella informed me that "there's something on the net describing what would happen if we lost the Internet." But upon further probing, it appears that she has lost the link for me to read more, so our conversation disintegrated into a series of pointy emotes (e.g. >.> and <.<).

I guess times like these I really wish we still socialized 100% like cavepeople--completely face-to-face with no technology whatsoever.

(Incidentally, the wind did not stop countless people from taking the SATs--or the PPPPPPSATs--this weekend. Well, all except for Argon, who had taken them the month prior and so left early. We're all such studious people, aren't we?)

Ps. I also just realized that this places Argon tied for most-tagged with he-who-must-not-be-named-or-else-the-tie-shall-be-broken.