Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Same old life. also it's hot here

Well, no one else is updating this blog. So...

What has life been like in Cambridge, MA lately? Hot, hot, and hot.
(yay living in housing with AC!)

Thus, I have been spending a lot of time at work.


I am start-trolling this summer, with two of my friends, one from middle school and one from MIT.

I have to put up with all kinds of stuff from those two. All I can say is it's at least better than a real job where I can't take 30 minute naps in the middle of the day at my desk sandwiched between two people.
(j/k! they are awesome people. I wasn't kidding about the napping though :D)

Cappie, at the Martin Trust Center workspace, with v2 of our arm (now horizontal!)
Hanna, at the MITERS workspace, with v1 of our arm (still vertical), working on CADing v2
A productive day at work scribbling on paper all day. XD;
The robot arm says "Hi" to all you all!

occasional BBQ where they feed us fooood. 
Oh gosh the food. They feed us a few times a week and it is excellent. I have also discovered the joy of the food trucks and also beantown taquiera. This summer is eat-out bonanza or something, because Hanna keeps giving me really strong stares when I do my usual dry cereal-instant noodle combination. >.> but my guilt at spending money on eating out instead of spending projects means I will probably find some other solution soon, since I don't think I can get rid of my guilt. (any advice, fellow putzen, on that?)

Oh the other thing I am doing is helping out with a go-kart class. The students are from singapore and the other day they bought a giant lobster instead of a cake for one of the student's birthdays:



What? What were they thinking? I don't even.

look at their pretty sketches!
I am excited to see how all their go-karts turn out. :3

Oh also I went to help staff swapfest:



And helped a tiny bit with the reorganization of MITERS. The back right corner used to be a loft with spare stock and now has awesome shelving we crufted from the physics department.

so... not clean! but getting there :3 and look, CNC mill in foreground!
Yea so my life actually has been a lot of same old, same old. Maybe someday soon I will do more sightseeing around Boston.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Froshoclock Trip (Putz Seniors), May 2013


Putz seniors made a trip to pennsylvania this past week. Here's how we fared after a week without internet.

Okay, I lie, most people had internet because of their Magic SmartPhones. But I didn't ;__;

Actually, we arrived in the dead of night at 2 am. But this is where we stayed (picture taken on the last day). Jenelle's uncle brought us boats but we didn't end up using them because it was raining one of the days we had free.

There were cows in this field, along with their cute calves that looked like sheep because the bull was white and all the calves were white, but I seem to have managed to not take a picture of them.



We were well-prepared food-wise. Also, do you see that oven? It is amazing. Space-age design. o__o pretty AND functional.


Jenelle was tooling on her paper, which she finished after 2 days.

We were also well-prepared with a lot of card games...


There was a creepy doll.

Manyu, making waffles for everyone! Yay! Not that anyone else was awake before like 3pm.


We also acquired the alcololz. In a drive-through. XD

There was a memorial to soldiers at the supermarket we stopped at.

James is laughing because I am taking pictures all the time. But I have no shame! Maybe! I mean without me taking pictures you wouldn't have this blog post. So there.

Sentinels saving the multiverse! It was even a kickstarted game initially. Oh man. I love this game. I was a skeptic, but now I am a believer in card games.

It was Jonte's birthday so we made chocolate chip cookie cake.


Hamburgers happened around a cookfire. Meat from one of the cows that would have grazed 100 yards away from us.

We took a hike and visited a graveyard on a hilltop. Then we carefully avoided trampling crops and walked in the Tall Grass looking for pokemon. Err. I mean. We walked.

More card games (ticket to ride this time). And Manyu making funny faces at the camera.



We had a tomato meat sauce, spaghetti, and beer bread dinner, complete with house wine.
Talk to one of us if you want to hear about the house wine (smelled like grape kool-aid, but I thought it tasted fine).
The beer bread was delicious! It used up two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon (we didn't have yeast, and the beer bread worked out wonderfully). 


We also played Betrayal on the Hill after dinner, which had some interesting stories too. There was some violence involved regarding the unbalanced nature of the game. Find us if you want to hear more...


The next day we did sightseeing. We visited the Flight 93 memorial.


There were laseretched placards from a nearby middle school there.

Then the Johsntown flood memorial.

This is us oohing and ahhing over the LED display representation of the flood events.

Motorized inclined plane, for transporting cars way high up the mountainside.


More sentinels! Do you see how many villain cards came out?? We... did not win this round.

Then Jonte, James, Manyu, and I went on a geocache finding adventure. We found the ruins of a house too.

Jonte had his out-of-control UA shades on, not indoors for once.

After a lot of bushwacking that we didn't expect (we essentially went in a straight line on the GPS, and then found the cache next to the side of a road...) we found the geocache!

and we added our name to the list. Frosh O'clock!


It was near some nice rapids.

This is where I discover how out of shape I am... I was pretty exhausted by climbing back up to the farmhouse.



At least it was pretty :)

The next morning Jonte made biscuits and then we (one of the cars) headed out.

Such a pretty farmhouse.

After 12.5 hours we made it back to MIT around 10pm and I was reunited with the internet. Yay!