anfin’s Blog

Hi friends. So while I’m sitting here procrastinating some more on the work I need to get done by the end of the day, I figured I’d actually post something. Being that I have nothing in particular to post about I will probably be rambling for the most part so if you have no patience for such things I suggest you don’t read on.

So let’s see. I’ve had Christmas break and started a new semester since the last post. My schedule is crazily confusing this semester. and it’s mostly because of my education class. The class meets over two class periods on Monday and Wednesday and then for only one class period on Friday. I do get to TA techniques this semester, and I’m having a fun time with that. However, my hours are weird because of having to work around the ED-20 schedule. My other class is CHM-34, otherwise known as Physical Chemistry II/Techniques II. What a combination, right? It doesn’t involve much lab time at all, but the lab reports are killer. I spent the better part of my long weekend (as in several hours a day and then some) trying to finish the first one, and it’s supposed to be the easy one. One of the hardest parts is working with a computer program called Igor. It’ll be a really useful program once I actually know how to use it, but until then it will be the bane of my existence.

I’m also playing intramural basketball and bowling this semester with IGU (Independent Girls United)(i.e. the team for upperclassmen girls who aren’t in a sorority but still want to play intramurals). IGU is doing really well in the overall intramural standings. I’m pretty sure that we are beating everybody else right now, and if we can do well in bowling and basketball it will stay that way. So far, bowling is going very well. There’s one girl on our team who scores of 130 every time she plays, and I’m also decently good despite what you all might have observed. As some of you know, it is generally my fervent goal to break 100, and I usually fail. I was thus very happy when I got a 105 in the first game, but I was a great deal more excited about the 167 in the second game. That’s right, 167–my new all-time record. It seems that I somehow gain some sort of temporary bowling skill every time I’m actually in competition.

Bowling may be going well, but my basketball team could be doing better. We lost our first game by about 30 points. Luckily, however, I am not on the IGU team that counts for points in the overall competition so that fact that my team stinks is not a huge issue. We actually played the other IGU team tonight, and they are very good (hopefully good enough to win the overall title) so they beat us too. It was still a lot of fun, and though I missed somewhere around a thousand shots, I actually scored a three-pointer (my first ever in any sort of officially organized game) on the buzzer at the end of the game. This may have been my only score the whole game, but let me tell you, I was excited. It may have been a complete mess of random luck, but it still happened. And my excitement from this led me to finally finish this post which I started last week. The end.

I did anyway. Yes that’s right. I started the Putnam this morning and with only one 2 hour break for lunch finished after dark. For those of you who are wondering what in the world the Putnam is, I’ll tell you. The Putnam is a math test given nation wide on the first Saturday of December. It is designed for undergrads and consists of 12 outstandingly difficult questions. How difficult you ask? Well if it’s any indication, the mode score is generally a 0 (in a good year it might be 1). In other words, over half the people that take it get a 0, and what’s worse, the test is out of 120 points instead of 100. Anyway, my goal for the day was to get a 1. It’s possible that I might have assuming the graders are feeling generous, but honestly, I highly doubt it. That’s right I spent my entire day trying to score 1 point on a math test and it probably didn’t happen. In conclusion, don’t you just hate those people who, in the face of the other test-takers saying, “I think I might have started to have the right idea on 1 or 2 of the problems,” walk out of the Putnam telling the professor, “Yeah, well, I really didn’t have time to refine my proof…”

Well I’m still alive. Since my last post, we met up with Grace in Winchester and then went to London for a bit on the way to Stratford. I actually saw a few people from Furman at the train station who were on study abroad. We actually had to share a taxi with them to get to the train for Winchester because the train that was supposed to take us there was canceled. Anyway, we didn’t do a whole lot of touristy stuff in London, but we did go to see Guys and Dolls starring Patrick Swayze. He might have been the crowd-bringer, but I really think that his co-stars stole the show. Particularly the guy who played Sky Masterson and the girl who played Adelaide. Anyway, the play was fantastic even if it was a bit on the expensive side. We were all really glad that we went to that even if we didn’t get to do a lot else in London.

After the play, we took a sleeper train to Edinburgh. This wasn’t the most pleasant experience due to the fact that our seats were next to the heater which was kept on almost the whole time. We couldn’t really get to sleep because of all the heat even though people a few seats down were freezing. Oh well. We had fun once we got to Edinburgh. We spent yesterday touring the castle and Holyrood House and just generally exploring Edinburgh. For lunch we went to Deacon Brodies and had some traditional Scottish fish soup which I’m pretty sure contained parts of the fish which I am not accustomed to eating. We were ridiculously tired last night when we got to our nice rooms due to all the walking we did. Today we went on a tour of a part of old Edinburgh which is actually underground now. We also went to the Scottish National Gallery and some some cool paintings. So I’m about to run out of time so here some pictures and I’ll see you all in a few days.

That’s right. Despite the forcast I read last week, we’ve had nothing but sun since we got here, and it hasn’t yet been too cold. Granted, I’ve been wearing three layers of clothing one of which was Gortex, but still, it hasn’t been as bad as people have been warning me of.

 Anyway, we had a very pleasant plane ride. We sat next to some nice people and there were good movies. However, I never really was able to sleep. Strangely, I never even really felt too badly tired until after being awake for 32 hours straight we finally went to sleep Stratford-upon-Avon. We really didn’t get much sightseeing done the first day due to the hecticness of train-times to Stratford, but we did walk around Stratford a bit.

 After a lovely night’s sleep and a good breakfast (during which we met some really nice kids our age who were at an acting school in Birmingham) we set out for Oxford. We got to eat fish-n-chips at the Eagle and Child Pub. Hooray! We then had a grand time walking around Oxford. We also went to the History of Science Museum and went to Christ Church College (which as may interest one or two of you is apparently one of the places where Harry Potter filming occurred). We successfully made it back to Stratford via train and we are about to go out again into town again. And that’s the end of your quick update. The end.

Oh wait, I forgot the pictures. Now it’s the end.

It is amazing how completely helpless I am without my cellphone. Upon accidentally leaving it in the library yesterday, my life went from being reasonably carefree to almost unbearably hectic. I had many plans which were completely thrown out the window because they were impossible without the apparently necessary ability to call someone at a moment’s notice. It seemed that eveytime I went to do something, I had to stop mid-action because I realized it simply couldn’t be done without that simple little communication device. It had also been my backup alarm which led to dire consequences when I failed to set my alarms last night after a looooong day. Yes, everyone, I have actually, officially, as of today missed a class at Furman. I woke up at 10:00 and made it to my 10:00 class at 10:05, but alas, I shall never really know what happened in my 9:00 class. I normally would have been very sad to lose such a record as the rare I’ve-never-missed-a-class-while-at-Furman record, but I was going to have to miss CHM-33 on Friday to leave for my trip anyway. Thus, I’m almost glad that I missed my first class in the way that I did–without a conscious effort.

Well, life is going pretty well. I’ll be in England this time next week, and I have successfully bought train passes and made housing arrangements. I’m also pretty much packed and am happy to say that everything that I need can indeed fit into one backpack with room to spare. Hooray! Basically, everthing I would need to be worried about concerning the trip is out of the way, and now I can just look forward to a week of fun.

In other somewhat-related-but-not-so-much-that-I-feel-like-explaining-
the-relation news, it’s the end of my hair as we know it.

I present to you an epic battle

So the appendices of math books normally contain a list of answers to some of the problems in the book, right? Well our discrete math book contains a section entitled, “Lots of Hints and Comments; Some Answers.” Entries include, “The answer is not 20,” “This one is not so simple,” and a picture of a guinea pig. Lovely.

I have now learned that, assuming I ever go to a three hour party during which I drink at a steady rate of one 12 oz. bottle of beer every 30 minutes, I will be seriously imparied after 0.739 hour and I will be legally intoxicated after 1.24 hour. It will then be 6.6 hours after the start of the party before I will legally be able to drive and 8.94 hours before I will no longer be seriously impaired. Finally, my maximum blood alcohol content will be 0.164 g alchohol per 100 mL blood. So now you know what I have learned in my mathematical models class. Now imagine you are a lowly freshman in an introductory Calculus class who has come Math Resource Center to dive into homework, and you hear the upperclassmen in the room deriving such a model. I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as a funny image. The end.

However, it must be noted that I never claimed that I would be. Anyway, hello all. I know that I have been rather silent for the past couple of weeks, but really, I was very busy. Now, though, I have survived last week with relative success, so perhaps I will be a little bit better about blogging. Perhaps. . .

Consequently, I have actually written a post or two in the past couple weeks only to quickly erase them because I thought they were rather stupid. One was entitled something to the effect of “John Glenn, the energy crisis, and impressive toads,” and I don’t even remember what the other one was about. In other words, you haven’t missed much. I’m a boring person.

So it’s official. I’ll be going to England over Thanksgiving Break. It may kill my grades, but I really couldn’t pass up the opportunity. My goal is to pack as completely lightly as possible. One backpack: that is all that I will allow myself. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m feeling very powerful right now, for I have been given the task of grading CHM-11 labs. That’s right, a tiny portion of all the CHM-11 students’ grades is in my hands.

Hmmm. . . Well, I really don’t have anything else to say. See, I told you I was a boring person.