“We’re up all night to get lucky”

Two of my friends from my undergrad visited me two weekends ago, and I started writing this post right after. As a result, you get a very brief summary of our adventures even though it’s a little outdated:

Day 1: Fort Collins

I picked up them up from the airport, brought them back to Fort Collins, and immediately walked downtown to check out bikes from the bike library and ride to the breweries. Our first stop got us drunk- a 1.5 hour tour with unusually strong beers (this was my 4th time on the tour) ended with us riding slowly to our next stop, Odell’s, and then Fort Collins Brewery after that where a 3rd UA ChemE alumnus met us coming from Golden, CO where he attends the School of Mines. That night we went out after an hour of Arrested Development (the most I’ve ever watched of that show) and met up with friends, drank a lot, and returned exhausted.

Fort Collins Brewery

Day 2: Boulder

New Orleans breakfast at Lucile’s- delicious, as always. After a walk around the CSU campus and a tour of my lab, we drove to Boulder and met with yet another UA ChemE alumnus, went on a long hike up the flatirons with her and her boyfriend, got dinner, and went drinking in downtown Boulder. We drove home that night and passed out.

Flatirons in Boulder

Day 3: Denver

Our final day, we drove to Denver and went to the aquarium where we saw lots of neat things. Afterwards, we went walking around downtown, saw a bit of the DaVinci Machines museum, and then went to the Museum of Contemporary Art. I then dropped the first two friends at the airport, drove the third one back to his car in FoCo, and finally got a bit of time to myself. I’m really bad at being with people 24/7, but it was a lovely weekend.

Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver

**

Anyway, things have been going well since then too.

My friend Caitlin moved here last week! It’s was sort of surreal at first because she belongs in Arizona in my head, but hanging out feels just like we’re in Tempe. Her first day of school was yesterday and apparently it went well, so she’s not ready to run away quite yet. Wait until winter happens. Also, my mom is visiting for a week starting tomorrow, which means I need to vacuum. But we’re going to Yellowstone on Saturday for a few days!

Lab has been pretty good: my current polymerization has been going smoothly, and tomorrow we see if we got what we expected. If so, we can move forward on so many projects, because it’s the base material for all 3 of our (the graduate students’) projects. I don’t know why I specified “graduate students” because that’s the only kind of student our lab has. The undergraduates all graduated, and the one that’s staying is now our master’s student.

I have a few summer research goals. I want to finish all these parts of other peoples’ projects I’ve been assigned (including writing), so my PI finally has no choice but to give me something of my own to work on. I also want to find out about the possibility of an internship, and when that might fit in to my research plan since I’ll more likely be going into industry than academia. I know I’m being impatient on getting my own project, but having been here a year it seems like I’ve been wasting time. But as I keep being told, most people don’t start research until their second year, and their defense project doesn’t necessarily start until their 3rd. That all just seems so late to me.

I realized that I’ve been missing music a lot. I’m attempting to rectify this by looking for an orchestra that doesn’t require you to have or be working on a degree in music- I’ve just emailed the music department here to find out about CSU ensembles, and if that doesn’t work I’ll look around FoCo. I wouldn’t mind doing some sort of choir or voice lesson deal, as I haven’t really done that since before high school and I loved choir. These desires to join choir resurface each time I go on a Glee episode binge, which I admit happened last night, so this search may not last as long as the orchestra search. I am determined to make that happen.

Speaking of extracurriculars, I got a taste of some other sorts of martial arts/defense classes. I went to watch my friend’s Aikido lesson because he’s trying to convince me to join (he is in TKD with me)- he says it’s amazing crosstraining and teaches you about defense in a more global way. I really do like the way it looks, and it seems pretty good for evasive fighting. But there are so many somersaults I think I’d probably throw up after one class. But I might just go try it anyway. I also tried boxing (again, coerced into going by another friend) but I don’t really like it much. Maybe I just don’t like change, and that’s why I’ve had the exact same hobbies since I was 5 years old -_-.

So, in summary, things are happening and life is good.