June

Various little things

On top of Bunker Hill at the end of a long walk around Boston with Maja and James





Harbor Islands



Featherweight at the highest point in Boston Harbor, a lofty 155 feet above sea level



Techs racing after a thunderstorm

my impending untimely demise

deathblades, now known as RazErblades after my RazEr scooter.

Arka's

Where: Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.
Why 1: Trying to help with milk transportation/trying to see if MIT can help somehow.
Why 2: Milk is good. Cows are holy.

Temperature: 42C (feels like 48C) (118F, I wanted to add a comment here about stupid American untis, but am too tired)

Went on a 4 hr ride to a village. The car's air conditioner was failing because of the awesome heat outside. It was good.

On my way saw the following:






Will post pretty things later, its breakfast time in here. Our flight to Chennai, just got delayed, so will have another beautiful day to spend in Jaipur.

Putzuvuzelas

In the spirit of the Wereldkampioenschap Voetbal (Go Orange!), Putz decided it would be a good idea to obtain some vuvuzelas! James took the initiative and bought a quantity in bulk from China. This supply was purchased rapidly by summer residents of Putz. The blaring B flat is now heard often on hall as Putzen celebrate in the pleasure of making noise!

I painted my own dull blue instrument in South African colors with some of Maja's pretty acrylics and added an orange stripe for the Dutch.

This evening, the usual call for hall feed was accompanied by a chorus of vuvuzelas! In case you haven't heard enough in the past couple weeks, here is a video (because embedding does not work).

Tune to vigilance on Saturday at 3:00 to watch us cheering for the USA-Ghana match.

The capabilities of the vuvuzelas have been pushed to their limits. It has been discovered that they can play multiple tones, function well as rendezvous locating devices, and generate interesting sound interference patterns when directed against each other.

leggingz r hurrrrr

zomg!

From the Desk of the \m/it \m/echanical \m/ischief \m/aster

Look! A flying shopping cart!


I installed a utility winch on the ceiling of MITERS today. LOLrioKart is a fun vehicle and all, but it takes up way too much floor space. It's also really damn heavy. So the winch serves the dual purpose of being a work hoist for the times I need to change parts or work on the battery pack, as well as an aerial storage location.


I bolted the 1,500lb line pull ATV winch (a craigslist find) to a 1/2" aluminum plate, which was in turn anchored into the solid concrete (welcome to early 1900s industrial buildings) ceiling. If I installed everything correctly, each 1/4" x 2" Tapcon screw should hold a maximum of 1,100 pounds. There are five screws holding the plate on, so the failure point of the fasteners ought to be well above the winch's dead lift stall load rating.

I learned that the best way to use a hammerdrill isn't to push as hard as you physically can, but to let it float itself into the workpiece. By pushing on the drill hard, the chisel motion is dampened and not as effective.

I also learned that I am not nearly manly enough to wield a hammerdrill, nor to drive concrete bolts with a power tool.

Worst Nightmare

After days of dreaming about having really slow crappy internet in my apartment, a different version of my worst nightmare has come true. The internet in the apartment is fine, but I don't have internet access at work. Plus it takes like an hour to get there in the morning and about 1.5-2 hours to get home in the afternoon.
No internet and no something make Marie something something

My Past 3 Weeks.

As I am now back at MIT with internet faster than 28.8 kbps, I feel my adventures of the past few weeks should be shared with the putzen far and wide.

OREGON!!!
So first, as most of you know, I went to Oregon. This was my first time to the west coast, so I was pretty excited.

I hung out in Eugene for a few days, where I saw my cousin (who is in the sculpting grad program at the University of Oregon), rode in Leighton's electric hippie van, and met a few of Leighton's friends (which explains so much).

This is an awesome picture of a bunch of at the top of Spencer's Butte. I'm standing by my cuz and the rest are Leighton's crazy friends.
Leighton's mother also took us on a day trip to the coast and the aquarium. We saw otters and seals and puffins. They were so cute :)

Then me and Leighton went adventuring. We spent a night camping near the coast before heading towards Ashland to see Pride and Prejudice (which was suggested by Leighton's mother and was surprising good).

This is a photo from the coast which I think is gorgeous.

Then we headed to meet up with Tevie and Cathy Wu. On the way we were looking for food, we went through a little town known as Prospect. We were intrigued by the only three places in town; a "Cafe and Trophy Room", a pawn shop which was also the main residence of its owner, and the Liquor store which also had groceries. On the way out of town, a young mother holding a child stared us down, we are still not sure why...

The next day we headed toward Crater Lake with Tevie and Cathy Wu. We also went shovel riding and as mentioned by Tevie, I have some amazing videos.

This is Cathy Wu as she was confused how ride down on the shovel.


And one of Tevie!



And then my personal favorite of Leighton. I think his reasoning was that maybe more momentum was needed for this piece of plastic to work as a sled.



After saying goodbye to Tevie and Cathy Wu, we headed back up to Eugene for a quick stop before I left the next morning. The drive was beautiful.

HOME!!!
So then I headed home for a week, which was, well, home. I had quite an exciting time with some of my friends as we went on a trip to Pittsburgh though. We ended up driving into a storm which had been causing hail and tornadoes, getting locked down at one of my friends dorms, and then driving back trying to stay between two of the storm fronts. It was somewhat epic.

DRIVING BACK!!!
So this would normally not be exciting, considering I had a 9 hour drive by myself. However, 2 hours into my drive, in the middle of central PA, I spotted something which looked familiar. It was painted with a yellow stripe, had a 'T' with a circle on it, and had a 1 on the back. I looked at it confused, thinking it was just another random public transportation vehicle which resembled the ones constantly running up and down Mass Ave. But as I passed it (for it couldn't even reach speeds of 50 mph on the highway), I realized it said "Mass Ave-Dudley" across the front. I stopped at the next rest station, ate lunch, waited for it to pass, and then caught back up to get Putz the following video. Don't mind my excitement, but seriously, its like a super lost 1 bus.



So it probably was getting delivered, considering it looks new, but seriously, you would think they could turn of the sign for the drive up.

and finally...
PUTZ TRIP TO POST OFFICE SQUARE PARK!!!
So Tevie has been wanting to go, and we wanted to go for a walk.

And then another picture of Putzen looking, well, like normal.

Sorry for being so long winded. If you want more pictures look at my facebook :D
putzputzputzputzputz

Drunken Antics

So when Jenelle and I have super happy fun girly catch-up time, we develop strong neuroses and possibly mental disorders. When Tess and I have super happy fun girly catch-up time, needless to say, we drink. and then when we're done drinking, we CONTINUE drinking. and then i don't remember the rest of the night. Needless to say, I lost approximately 3 hours of my life last night. FORTUNATELY, I decided to document the events apparently????? Anyways, YOU SHOULD COMMENT AND TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED THAT NIGHT.

Here's some pics:

This describes the night pretty well.
Also there was nail painting! Somehow, I have no idea how, possibly by yelling a lot, we convinced James to let us paint his nails.

Arka was pissed because apparently I aggressively tried to punch him in the cock. I mean, to be fair, he probably deserved it.
There are a lot of these pictures.
Look! I even harassed a refugee! AHAHAHAHA I hope she doesn't hate me. Oh wait, she probably does.

Surgery!

Well, my week or so of lying down has begun. Surgery happened this morning. There was a small complication (about 20% of retinas (retinae?) become detached again when the oil is taken out) but was fixed pretty easily and hopefully it's all smooth sailing from here. I'm on opiates for the pain, so I'm pretty okay for now. The instructions they gave me at the surgery center said (among other things) no drinking, driving, or making binding/legal decisions for the next 24 hours, so you can take my word as you like for today; I guess I'm not really in my right mind.

In the meantime, here's something better to look at, at least in my opinion. Photo credit to Mike Bennie, who was up on stage and snapped photos of a whole bunch of other people too. (Here: http://web.mit.edu/mbennie/Public/Graduation/)

The OCD Project

So Jenelle and I decided to have super happy fun girly catch-up time, which ultimately degenerated into this:


Thanks to Reid for all the floppy disks! :D

Additionally, "The OCD Project" is a really terrible reality show on mtv that is simultaneously really fascinating, and you all should watch it!

Adventures in "Man-tana"

When I came back to Montana I felt an obligation to uphold some people's stereotype of me, so I went and killed things. I went gopher hunting with my dad and brother last Saturday. May 30th. I spent the afternoon riding in the back of a Toyota pick-up truck with my brother while my dad drove. Each armed with a .22, we shot about 600 rounds of ammunition at small rodents out on the Montanan prairie and ended up killing over one hundred of the critters between the three of us. If only the rodent problem on Putz could be solved so easily.

Random Adventures in CA and OR

When I'm at school I really miss being able to drive places and go on adventures, so when i'm at home I go a little crazy. I've covered about 2,000 miles in the past week. Somehow Cathywu put up with it.

I went to Ventana Wilderness the weekend after finals and climbed Junipero Serra Peak.


The Salinas Valley, Junipero Serra Peak is in the center


After 3 hours of sleep I woke up around 2AM and after some difficulty finding the trail started heading up around 3:45. By the time the sun came up I had reached around 3500 feet.


It's been unusually cold for late May. It was cold, possibly below freezing, at the campsite overnight (around 2000 feet). Above 5000 feet ice covered everything and there was a dusting of snow on the ground.


From the top I could see out to Cone Peak, Big Sur and the Pacific.


Pretty much the entirety of the Ventana Wilderness and most of the Big Sur area burned in 2008, these were the remains of some sort of small hut at the Summit.


I got back to the trailhead around 11:45 which was pretty good time for me.

The next weekend Cathywu and I went to Oregon to see L-word and Featherweight.

The drive up took about 8 hours. Although she denies it, Cathywu did in fact fall asleep somewhere on CA-37 before Vallejo and didn't wake up until the GPS fell on her when I was merging from I-505 to I-5. When we got to Redding I was really tired so I took a little nap and then bought a frappuccino. Since I don't drink caffine pretty much ever, I drank around a third of it was fairly wired all the way to Shasta.

Just over the Oregon border on I-5 some sort of fox or coyote jumped out at most 15-20 feet in front of us. I had almost finished with the "there's a thing in front of us and we're going to hit it" thought when we hit it, smashing up the front of the car pretty well, I didn't see what happened to the animal (though I doubt it survived). We got in about 4AM, L-word helped us set up the tent and we went to sleep.


The next day we went to Crater Lake, there was about 8-10 feet of snow at the rim (apparently that's what passes for spring with L-word's people) so most of the roads, trails etc, were closed. We took some pictures and then sledded on the shovel I keep in my trunk because I am an unfailing pessimist (and yes, I have had to dig myself out with it). Featherweight has videos that maybe she'll share.


After that L-word and Featherweight headed back to Portland and Cathywu and I headed back towards Shasta. The drive across Southern Oregon was really pretty.


We stopped for a while at vista point off 97 north of Shasta and Cathywu froze while I made dinner and took pictures until the sun set.


We then drove around looking for an open campsite in the dark on Memorial Day weekend and actually found one in the first place we looked.


The next day we drove over the Eddys to CA-3 and then took CA-299 back to 101 and eventually back home (with a detour to drive the avenue of the giants in Humboldt).

Journey to the Center of the Pizza Hut (and Other Epic Tales)

A few snapshots of what those of us who are still here have been up to the past week or two:

An Invitation to Blog

Hello Putzly brethren,
I have established this blog so that we can keep in touch and share our adventures over the summer. Whether you're in China or California, back home or here in Boston, take pictures and write posts. Tell us about your job. Show us exotic, beautiful, or weird locations and sights. Document your pilgrimages to the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Share any particularly stupid or amusing YouTube videos, reddit posts, LOLcatz, or other memes. Those of you who are staying in Boston, show us what we're missing (and make sure nobody trashes our home but us!). And take pictures of your adventures with other Putzen, be it fun events like Maker Faire or Burning Man, trips both exotic and domestic, visits to each other, or just hanging out. Even if you just have a few lines, or one picture, post! And if you think your life is too boring, well, you're probably right but the rest of us are equally bored and boring, so post!