The Year in Ann Arbor [2019]

Another year in Ann Arbor. For the first time in three years, I did not start January at the airport. Instead, I was already back in Ann Arbor following my Singapore trip. I baked pecan rolls, began my fourth round of TA’ing (second time as a grad student), wandered through the arboretum, practiced for the second band concert of the season, and did research, that thing I’m paid to be doing.

In February, I continued my TA duties and baked a lot – snickerdoodles, brownies, lemon bars, pumpkin cranberry bread, and pumpkin chocolate chip muffins. The Revolution began preseason and got ready to disappoint all their fans as usual, though we didn’t know it for certain then.

March was the month that my family got Netflix. With hundreds of exciting shows and movies to choose from, I have thus far mainly watched The Office and the Great British Bake Off. Things started warming up so I went out on a bike ride on the border to border trail. I also filed my taxes, gave a presentation on COMSOL, and went to see the Detroit Pistons play the Orlando Magic at Little Caesars Arena (they won, 155-98).

To celebrate lab members graduating, we had a lab party in April where we played Pandemic and again saved the world. I attended a harp recital, a piano recital, and a men’s glee club concert. As the weather improved further, I went on bike rides to the botanical garden and along the river, and continued stomping through the arboretum.

I began May by grading the heat and mass final. As soon as I finished, I went downtown to celebrate the end of the semester with lab members and alcohol. In research news, I finally put something in the rheometer. The rest of this exciting month included building a LEGO robot, the first trip to Blank Slate of the season (I got peanut butter cone crunch ice cream, would recommend), mandatory gender/sexual harassment training, a trip to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) to hear the Haydn horn concerto, a rugel-off (two of my coworkers and I all made different versions of rugelach), and a Memorial Day picnic. There was also barn soccer, barefoot soccer, bad soccer (thanks, Revolution), better soccer (thanks, Mike Lapper), and the beginnings of Bruce Arena soccer. The last three are because the Revolution decided that starting the season 2-8-2 (2 wins, 8 losses, 2 draws) was really not good, fired their coach, fired their general manager, and hired Bruce Arena. For a team that never fills up their roster because “roster flexibility” and likes to find “good deals” in the Slovakian fourth division, this was . . . revolutionary. You can read more about spring here and the Revolution here and here.

In June, I went to see Beauty and the Beast put on by a local theater group, it was peony season at the arboretum, and I walked across a pool of cornstarch and water. At the end of the month, friends from Cornell came to visit and we spent four days catching up while also visiting the U of M art museum and natural history museum, escaping from an escape room, making the rounds through Greenfield Village and the Ford Museum, hiking at the Pinckney Recreation Area, and walking through the botanical garden and arboretum. And eating. There was plenty of eating.

Days after my Cornell friends left, another Cornell friend came to visit in July. After spending a couple days in Michigan seeing the DSO and fireworks at Greenfield Village and the Meijer sculpture garden, we headed off for a whirlwind tour of Toronto, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. In Toronto, we saw the Scarborough Bluffs and walked along the lakeshore through Coronation and Trillium Parks, then headed back to the United States via Niagara Falls and viewed the falls from both the Canadian and American sides. We stopped briefly in the Allegheny National Forest before driving on to Dayton to see the prairie where the Wright brothers developed their flyers. Following all the excitement, I returned to research.

August marked the end of summer, but not before I biked to all corners of Ann Arbor because that’s what I do in summer. At the end of the month, my mother came for a visit. We did all the free Ann Arbor things and hung around my apartment. Plus there was research. In case my advisor reads this, I worked very hard every day and did lots of research. End of summer recap here.

Classes started again in September. I enrolled in my last required class, which required coding in Matlab, which I hadn’t touched since my Intro to Computing class my freshman year at Cornell, because real engineers engineers stuck in the 1970s code in Fortran. I made (yet another) trip to Greenfield Village for fall flavor weekends with a friend and her family. With one game to spare, the Revolution clinched their playoff spot. In May they had a 1% chance to make the playoffs.

October was more of the usual. Research, class, band rehearsals, baking, watching TV. There were trips to the arboretum in search of fall colors, bike rides, and a Michigan hockey game against Cornell's ECAC rival Clarkson.

For the first time since I graduated from Cornell, I got to see Cornell hockey when they came to play Michigan State in November. They won. Let’s go red. We had our first band concert of the season, and then I headed to Orlando for AIChE, the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. My coworker and I presented, listened to talks, looked for free food, met up with former labmates, classmates, and professors, and when the conference was over, went to Disney World (Epcot).

Finally, we made it to December. I finished my class, went to Tuba Christmas at the farmer’s market, and took off for home. Once home, I did a lot of sleeping and eating. There was also Jeopardy!, Wegmans, a day trip to Castle Island/Boston, Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker, jigsaw puzzles, reading, and baking – cranberry/white chocolate/macadamia nut cookies, cream puffs, and a cake. And that was 2019.