Grades came back a few days ago and I’m happy to report I snagged a 4.00. As of this particular instant, I’ve amassed 179 semester credits during my stint as a college student. Perhaps it may be time to graduate again? Naw. I’m having the time of my life. Why stop now?

Also in the good column: windows. I finally received word yesterday from the nebulous group known as “the window guys” that installation will commence on Tuesday. About damn time. I’m not sure if him scheduling it during a time when Tech is out of session was a ploy to drag feet, but in any case, I’ll be locked and loaded for a more efficient domical.

In the not so good column, I’ve manage to acquire some variant of the local plague this week. I’ve spent the last few days largely sitting in my chair watching Law & Order and playing on the facebook. On a more fundamental level though, for health reasons I’ve had to switch from beer to screwdrivers in order get some added vitamin C. Huge struggle that has been, but I’ve managed.

So far as my winter break plans go, I’ll be returning to Minnesota tomorrow in the AM (the 23rd) for so turbo fast Christmas action and then departing back to Houghton on the 26th so I can supervise the window installation.

Since I’ve been running a lot more lately I’ve rediscovered the importance of stretching out before and after putting in a good session. Of course, one thing leads to another and henceforth I’m sort of on this flexibility kick. Bahh, who am I kidding, I’m just doing it so I don’t look like such a dork being barely able to touch my toes when I’m getting ready for a run. Anyway, yeah getting flexible hurts like hell. There is no purer form of torture then trying stretch parts of your body that aren’t used to being bent like that. My ultimate goal isn’t to be able to do the splits or anything, just get more flexible. This has the added benefit of potentially reducing injuries when I do a big old yard sale on Ripley.

Any pointers on this? I run about 3-5 times per week, between 2.5 and 4 miles each run with a 10 minute stretch before and then a nice stretch in the sauna afterwards. I’ve seen some improvement but I’ve only been at this for a few weeks.

Yesterday I skipped out of work and went snowshoeing with six other people. The plan was to scale Brockway Mountain which is up near Copper Harbor. I had never been up to the top before and I can tell you it was a hell of a view. This is Adam and I standing at the top.

Couple pointers for those who will attempt the same: Lake Bailey isn’t quite ready to walk on. Don’t follow the trail we made, it has some “directional dependence” (aka no, that 20 foot cliff wasn’t climbed up, it was jumped off). That is the trick you see, before I didn’t think you could get hurt snowshoeing which sort of limits the fun of it but now the ever present hut for things to jump off things always keeps things interesting. Actually, that is an interesting point: why is it the goal of a lot of individual sport is to spend as much time flying through the air with whatever piece of sporting goods equipment enabled you to be there the first place? For instance, ski jumps, bike jumps, cliffs and so on. I mean yesterday we came upon a tree that had fallen over a stream about 15 feet below. You bet your ass I jumped off that one. One of the guys was exceptionally insane basically jumped off the mountain. Anyway, it was a good time. Now I think I’m going to go hit the slopes for the inaugural run of the season.

Update: 12-20-2005 9:12 pm
Kostya posted a link in one the comments to his pictures and videos of the trip. I highly suggest checking out the videos.
http://www.me.mtu.edu/~kbulgako/snowshoe_lookout/snoshoe_1.html

Ambipolar transvestite. That was the search phrase submitted to google that secured me victory over the weekend. For the uninitiated, there is a “game” (really more of a side effect of work avoidance and Sailor Jerry) where the purpose is to get google to return a single search result. The rules are simple: enter any two correctly spelled words and hope for the best. As you can imagine it quickly degenerates into an iterative process which, depending on the state of things and how many people are playing, becomes a bit of a game of memory. Anyway, I’m happy to now ensure that no one will ever win with that phrase as google should be crawling over this page within the next 24 hours and will now report two results. Enjoy.

As a side note, if anyone is having big problems getting cock-blocked by my spam filter, let me know. I’ve been doing some tweaking to keep those bastard spammers on the run.

5:47:16 pm - That’s the time that I offically finished all my homework for this semester. Finally.

Yeah, I’m quite certain this is the only picture on the internet with my and my glasses. In context, this is me just cranking on a research proposal that is due in less then 30 hours. So yes kids, that is the game face.

Hmmm, I should really update this more often. Anyway, here’s some nifty images I took last week using the Scanning Electron Microscope. It is actually part of my research Hall thruster that I broke a few weeks ago. I wanted to figure out why the piece made out of molybdenum became so brittle. As it turns out, those images indicate that it was probably within 10% of its melting point so it cause a lot of re-crystallization which reduce the strength of it. In any case though, they sure look neat.

It has been snowing like crazy up here the last few days. In essence, it started snowing on Tuesday and hasn’t stopped since. When speculating at when it will stop, people give a nervous laugh and usually say sometime in the March-April time frame. I don’t care if it ever stops since there is actually enough snow to go snowshoeing. Funny story there . . . I’ve never snowshoed before so before I left, I for a second ad the door and ask “So, ummm, is there anyway I can get hurt doing this?”. We all pretty much agreed there wasn’t. So I roll up to the Tech Trails hop out of my truck and into my snowshoes and just stand there. Now what? I hadn’t really thought about that either, I mean what do you do with snowshoes on? Just walk around I guess. So I hiked all over the woods occasionally meeting up with one of summer’s bike trails. Yep, I did some bridges too. What I discovered though is that snowshoeing is best when you have someplace to go, and you’re not by yourself. For the week I’m trying to get some shoeing trip together where we’re go up north and get lost for a few days, so if that sounds interesting, drop me a line.