Leap Day

It’s a once-in-four-years opportunity to post on Leap Day, so here goes. I had some errands to take care of, as well as some things I wanted to do, plus a couple more things that kind of needed to get done (like cooking dinner), so I was occupied all day, and now I’m writing this at 11:30 at night.

After breakfast, my day started at the grocery store. I didn’t find anything good in the clearance section, but the chicken I usually get was buy one, get one (of equal or lesser price) free, so I saved 37% on my grocery bill. I returned to my apartment to drop the food off, then immediately headed back out to catch the bus to central campus to return a movie to the library. Michigan’s spring break officially started at noon, so central campus was relatively quiet and I passed by a number of students with suitcases heading toward the transit center to catch the Michigan Flyer to the airport.

At the library, I exchanged my DVD for Captain Marvel and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (a rewatch) and borrowed a couple of books as well. I didn’t buy anything at the Friends of the Library book sale last week, but this week at the bookshop I found a Pixar movies puzzle and picked up a couple mass market sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks from the 1980s. I was looking for ridiculous, so one of them is about breaking Newton’s Third Law with a nice dose of conspiracy and the other is about slaying Morkeleb the dragon. I was really tempted to get the one about a space delinquent in space jail solely because the blurb on the back ended with “but then the space pirates arrived,” but I resisted.

Back at my apartment, I had a grilled cheese sandwich and mandarin oranges for lunch, then baked up a batch of banana walnut muffins both because the bananas were too ripe to eat and when I baked banana muffins a few weeks ago I meant to add walnuts, had the walnuts on the counter, and forgot to put the walnuts in. By the time I finished baking and cleaning the kitchen, it was about 2:45 pm, around time for the Revolution’s first game of their 25th season. On the same day that the MLS season started, the men’s teams of ECAC hockey were finishing their regular season. So I watched the Revolution starting their season, followed by the Cornell men’s hockey team ending theirs, both on ESPN+, where for just $4.99 a month, you too can watch obscure sports that 15 other people care about.

One of those teams gives me high blood pressure. The other is currently USA Today’s number two ranked men’s college hockey team in the nation. Guess which is which. If you need a hint, the Revolution got right back into disappointing their fans by losing to the Montreal Impact 1-2 and Cornell men’s hockey enters playoff season in good form, having defeated Clarkson (ranked #7) 5-1 on senior night. In between games, I practiced for an upcoming concert. In between hockey periods, I cooked/ate dinner, and though the broadcast cuts to commercials during the period breaks, I did hear the Cornell pep band play the first three (of six) verses of the Alma Mater for senior night. After the hockey game, I did another round of dishes, put together a bit of my puzzle, and wrote this post. Good night, and Happy Leap Day.

Home

When I finally made it home (we’re still back in December 2019), I had no plans except to go to Wegmans, bake a cake, and watch the latest Star Wars movie. It’s amazing how successful you can be at meeting your goals when you give yourself two weeks to go to a grocery store and watch a movie. Overall, my accomplishments for Christmas break included the following: 

– baking white chocolate/macadamia nut/Craisin cookies, cream puffs (choux pastry + crème patissiere), and a two-layer cake with whipped cream frosting and chocolate ganache all from scratch

– assembling two 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles

– using Netflix to watch Kim’s Convenience, The Irishman, The Two Popes, Mary Poppins Returns, and The Last Jedi, the last in anticipation of seeing The Rise of Skywalker at the movie theater [It was good. It’s a Star Wars movie, so be prepared for plenty of illogical decisions and departures from the laws of physics, but there are also lightsabers, spaceships, and lasers, which, let’s be honest, are the main highlights of a Star Wars movie.]

Clockwise from top left: cookies, slice of cake, cream puffs, top of cake

– getting dim sum. For all its self-proclaimed excellence, Ann Arbor doesn’t have many options for Chinese food, and none, as far as I’ve found, for dim sum.

– exploring Castle Island and Boston (Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market, the Common, Chinatown) [More on this in a separate post.]

– spending an abnormally warm Saturday afternoon raking leaves leftover from November

– spending a typically cold Tuesday morning (the day before I left) shoveling snow/slush off of the driveway. When I’m home, I shovel the straight part of our unnecessarily long driveway. I have a method, and it exercises both sides of the body equally.

Clockwise from top left: Clouds on the plane ride back to Ann Arbor, sunset over lake,
sunset at home, puzzle #1 (puzzle #2 was an underwater scene)

– going to Wegmans, where I admired their cheese selection and bakery

– ordering Christmas cards on New Year’s Eve. Christmas in January, anyone?

– not losing Monopoly to my brother’s girlfriend and her brother. Turns out if you actually follow the printed rules, the game doesn’t take twenty-seven days to play.

– not burning the church down at the Christmas Eve candlelight service

– watching Jeopardy!

– eating

– eating exactly one box of blueberry Chex

– sleeping

So that was Christmas break 2019.  It was great, and then I had to return to Ann Arbor to finish up another year of grad school. 

Homeward Bound

Back in December, I scheduled my flight home for the day after the last band rehearsal of the year. As it turned out, rehearsal got cancelled, and my flight could have been. It had been a while since I missed a bus, or had to fly in wintry weather, so it was about time for another Travel Misadventure™. Things started fine. I met with my advisor at 8:30 in the morning so we could talk before I took off for two weeks. I finished packing, cleared the perishable food out of the refrigerator, and left the apartment relatively clean. Leg one of the journey, catching a bus to central campus, went fine. I then walked to the city’s transit center to catch another bus to the Detroit airport. We got to the airport fine. I also got an email saying that my flight would be delayed . . . by 13 minutes. Fine, no problem.

At the airport, I went to print my boarding pass, only to be told by the kiosk that I would have to go to the desk. There, I got stuck behind all the people in the airport with very complicated problems requiring rescheduling of flights and consultation of supervisors. I wasn’t bothered because I took an early bus and did eventually get my boarding pass. Security moved quickly, and then of course my bag got pulled out for personal inspection. The TSA agent examined an assortment of candles and a box of chocolate before getting to my jar of cookies and bag of cut up fruit. She had no problems with any of these items, and we were all sent along on our ways.

I located my gate, went to buy dinner snacks, and when I got back to the gate, my flight, scheduled to leave at 7:06 pm (originally 6:53 pm), now had a departure time of 8:02 pm. I wasn’t completely surprised because there had been bad weather all along the east coast that day. Also not completely surprising: another delay to 9:08 pm. It was then some time before 5 pm, so I only had another . . . four more hours to wait in the airport. It’s a good thing I don’t mind airports, and I mostly didn’t want the flight to be outright cancelled.

I wandered around the terminal; looked at Christmas decorations, prints from the Detroit Institute of Arts, dining options, expensive souvenirs; found the flight to Orlando, recognizable by the number of screaming children wearing princess dresses; discovered a Chick-fil-A to be opened later this year. By the time I returned to the gate, the gate agents were there (with snacks), and our departure time had been (yet again) revised back to 8:00 pm, which was likely to be close to our actual departure time since the incoming flight from DC was on its way by then. I settled in to watch YouTube videos until boarding, which began around 7:30 pm. Shortly after, we were in the air, and landed in Boston by 10. Shortly after that, I was home.

Tuba Christmas

Quick post about a thing that happened last December before I went home for Christmas and New Year’s. After getting back from AIChE, my plan was basically to do whatever research necessary, go to band, be inducted into a frat¹, finish my class, and get out of Ann Arbor at the earliest possible date. Which I did, after doing one thing for fun – Tuba Christmas.

I learned about Tuba Christmas a few years ago, and always kind of meant to go, but one year it was really cold and another year I think I had something else going on. Last year, I was determined to go, no matter the weather or whatever else was happening. As it turns out, it was pretty cold and Handel’s Messiah was being performed at Hill Auditorium at the same time, but I chose Tuba Christmas. As may be deduced from the name, Tuba Christmas involves tubas (and euphoniums), playing Christmas carols. The musicians range from band students to retirees, all gathered together to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

Tuba Christmas at the Farmers' Market Pavilion

The event took place at one end of the Kerrytown farmers’ market pavilion while the Sunday Artisan Market was also going on. [The Artisan Market features handmade items created by local artists and runs on Sunday afternoons from April to December.] Tuba Christmas lasted about an hour with over a dozen different carols. For each carol, the musicians would first play, then the audience was invited to sing along the second time through. It was fun, and I’m glad I finally got to go and experience it.

¹Not actually a frat. It was Tau Beta Pi (TBP), the engineering honor society, which I’ve been eligible for since I was an undergraduate at Cornell. They kept sending me letters, so I finally went to check them out. They require volunteer hours and seem less intent on selling the Michigan™ brand² than most Michigan-affiliated groups, so I joined.

²Maize and blue, block M’s, the Leaders and the Best, Go Blue, the Michigan Difference, etc.