Thanksgiving 2017

Thankful for applesauce, ballpoint pens that write well, country music, dihydrogen monoxide, easy recipes, Fortran, grass, Hezekiah, ice cream, jigsaw puzzles, kayaking, long romantic walks into the sunset, mountains, needless hiking detours, orange, penguins, quilts, road trips, soccer, trees, unit systems in base 10, vowels, wine, xenon (and the rest of the periodic table), yaks, and, of course, Chemical Engineering.

And I’m also thankful for having a place to stay, being warm and fed, getting paid to do what I sometimes mostly enjoy, and family and friends.

This year I spent Thanksgiving with church and lab friends. There was lots of food, some alcohol, a game of pseudo-Jeopardy!, and much absurdity. On Black Friday I spent exactly zero dollars and zero cents and used the day to work on documenting the code I’m inheriting. Today, I tried to do my grocery shopping for the week but the store was closed because they lost power. It’s at least the second time that’s happened in my ~15 months in Ann Arbor so far. I know it probably reflects the power company more than the grocery store, but, just saying, Wegmans never failed me like that in 5+ years.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Taste of Home

One week, faced with eggs that needed to be used up, half an onion leftover from making beef soup, and pineapple leftover from pineapple chicken, I made fried rice. I cooked up rice and chicken, added frozen vegetables and all my leftovers, and it was almost like a meal from home. To be completely like a home-cooked meal, the chicken would have had to be leftover too. But it was enough to remind me of home. It’s funny, how the smallest things can remind you of other things, and how certain smells, tastes, or sounds are inextricably linked to particular times or places.

The Lindseth climbing wall at Cornell, before it was renovated, smelled of an unmistakable mix of chalk, sweat, damp climbing shoe leather, and a hint of wet concrete. There’s nothing like that smell and I have yet to conduct very scientific experiments at other climbing walls to verify that statement.

Last day at Lindseth before renovation

When you’re the first to walk into Lynah Rink before a hockey game, you can still smell the fresh ice. It’s different from middle-of-the-game fresh ice and open-skate fresh ice. Really.

Almost empty Lynah pre-hockey game

After fourteen years in various bands, a lot of other things remind me of band. Snickers (the candy) because the pep band always got them at men’s hockey games. 3 Musketeers (also the candy) because I would buy them from the band parents during our lunch breaks at music festival in high school. Hearing the vibraslap always reminds me of playing “Caribbean Rondo” in ninth grade. (The vibraslap is an important part of the ending.)

Catalpa trees – my seventh grade leaf project, in which I also identified different species of elm, oak, maple, and sumac, among others. Plus I learned that ginkgo is spelled with two g’s. Chickadees – one particular bird that sang what sounded like four notes of “The Star Spangled Banner” at absurd hours of the morning at our campground in Bar Harbor, Maine. Orange slices – halftime of soccer games. Hoodsie cups (with the wooden spoon) – elementary school birthday parties. Tuna sandwiches – picnic lunches on road trips. Also vital to road trips: at least one playthrough of our 1980s John Denver CD.

I could probably come up with absurd connections for dozens of other things, because that’s how my mind works. I’ll end with this obscure one: the color red and a particular university located in Ithaca, NY.