Odds and Ends

Before leaving Ann Arbor, besides wrapping up as much research as possible and more or less packing up most of my belongings, I went for a few final adventures around town. I got to experience a last spring season and see the wild violets, bloodroot, dandelions, daffodils, tulips, trillium, wild geraniums, etc. bloom. Despite telling myself I wouldn’t, and that 250 mm (400 mm field of view full frame equivalent) isn’t that much zoom, I went bird watching with my camera to catch the spring migratory season, featuring red-winged blackbirds, robins, grackles, mourning doves, great blue herons, and more. There were also plenty of squirrels like always, plus rabbits (eastern cottontails), baby geese, a beaver, a painted turtle, and mating snapping turtles.

Clockwise from top left: wild violet, wild geranium, bloodroot, trillium

Clockwise from top left: snapping turtle, rabbit, painted turtle, baby geese

I baked cranberry orange scones, molasses cookies, and cranberry apple bread to use up ingredients in my freezer and pantry and celebrated warmer temperatures with courtyard lunches at the office. During my usual perambulations I discovered one weekend that Traver Creek had overflowed, flooded some of the trails, and washed out a wooden footbridge. In honor of Star Wars day, I put together a mini Lego Millennium Falcon that I added to an online order for free shipping. For the first time since Covid happened, I went to a library program, on how to birdwatch with the Washtenaw Audubon Society (sidenote – the first book I borrowed from AADL was Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven; the last: Star Wars: X-Wing: Wedge’s Gamble by Michael Stackpole).

Left: swollen Traver Creek (bottom) and flooded trails (top), right: same locations a few days later, with water levels slightly down (bottom) and the bridge replaced (top)

Millennium Falcon microfighter

My lab had a celebratory barbeque/game night party at our advisor’s house for a few of us who were going to leave Ann Arbor soon (we ended up holding four dissertation defenses in just over six months). I also tried to meet up with some friends that I hadn’t gotten to see much during the pandemic times. One of those meetings was when I saw the mating turtles. Another time a friend and I biked downtown to play arcade games (including both Star Trek and Star Wars pinball and skee-ball) at Pinball Pete’s and drink a quart of sangria at Casa Dominick’s. Finally, our lab plus friends met up at the best (and only) bar on North Campus for after work drinks one last time.

Right before I moved my parents and I spent a day downtown returning my office key for the $5 deposit, visiting U-M’s Museum of Natural History and Museum of Art, and spending my M-Den gift card. And that was some of my last months in Michigan. Until next time, Ann Arbor.

Pinball

The Year in Ann Arbor [2021]

Well, “year 2 of the pandemic” wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear after 2020, but here we are. For a couple blissful weeks in July, it looked like we might be able to slowly start reducing Covid restrictions thanks to vaccines and declining cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, then along came the delta variant, followed closely by omicron.

January was a quiet month for me. I went on a winter adventure for the sake of photographs and walked over 8 miles in snowy weather. It was completely worth it. Otherwise, I hung around my apartment, cross stitched for the first time since 2013, played the library’s special pandemic winter version of the Summer Game (aptly called the Winter Game), organized four years of research files, and started watching Kim’s Convenience on Netflix.

In February I worked on my big Acadia National Park cross stitch project and (re)discovered audiobooks and podcasts as a good side activity for cross stitching. I used to listen to audiobooks on cassette tapes, but I never could get into podcasts because I’d either be doing something, get distracted, and stop paying attention to the podcast or not be doing something, get distracted by the need to do something, and stop the podcast. Selections for February included Jane Eyre, Persuasion, and the Office Ladies podcast (an episode by episode recap and behind the scenes look at The Office). With my first paper (finally) accepted and published, I began working on and finalizing simulations for my next paper.

As the semester went on and the university continued transitioning back to in person classes and activities, during March all students in on campus housing, including grad students, were required to participate in weekly asymptomatic Covid testing. I strategically scheduled my tests for the same morning engineering would give out free donuts on North Campus so I could pick up a donut on my way back to my apartment. With my bike still out of action with a flat tire, I hiked the trails around my apartment for the 94,858th time. To celebrate one year of the pandemic, I gave in to the likely pandemic-induced brain melt and requested Twilight from the library.

April turned out to be one of my more eventful months of pandemic life. Although Tax Day 2021 was delayed, I filed in April because I had no reason not to. MLS and the New England Revolution also started up their 26th season, and I got my bike tire tube replaced (it was punctured by a metal wire, likely in a gutter masquerading as a bike lane), began the saga known as writing my second manuscript, finished the Acadia cross stitch, and received my first Covid vaccine (Pfizer).

With the weather warming up in May, I continued hiking as usual and also took my bike on an extended ride down the Border to Border trail into Ypsilanti. When a friend from Cornell was in Michigan to visit family, I met up with them at the arboretum for my first in-person social activity in months. Other notable goings-on: baking a carrot cake, finishing Star Trek: The Next Generation, watching soccer.

I kicked off summer in Ann Arbor on the second day of June by baking some quintessential summer staples, pumpkin cranberry bread and pumpkin muffins. At the beginning of the month, I staked out the peony garden, and that was followed by a hunt for periodic cicadas. Midmonth, the AADL Summer Game started, I checked in with Cornell ChemE at my virtual 5th reunion, and I worked on the incredibly tedious tasks of making manuscript figures and compiling the world’s longest Supporting Information section. Later in June, I baked the famous Doubletree cookies, then while on Reddit, read a post that discussed Dungeons & Dragons, wondered how exactly D&D worked, remembered a blog post from years ago about Critical Role (an internet show in which voice actors play D&D), and started in on Critical Role’s second campaign. Similarly to podcasts, it’s a great cross stitch side activity because you don’t really need to watch half a dozen people sit around a table and talk for four hours straight, but it’s an entertaining background for the repetitive nature of cross stitch.

The back and forth editing process with my advisor started on my manuscript in July. Thanks to the aforementioned vaccines, I attended outdoor church for the first time since the pandemic began, and the library reopened for browsing. The lab had its second virtual defense, I stopped by Art Fair to watch the chaos, and the Revolution unbelievably was having what was shaping up to be their best season ever. At the end of the month, I took two buses and a plane to go home for the first time since December 2019.

I spent most of August with my family at home, where I got to go to Wegmans, see a Revolution game, hike a fair amount, and take a road trip up to Acadia National Park. I planned most of the Acadia itinerary, and we hiked some of our usual favorite trails as well as some new to us.

Back in Ann Arbor for another semester, my first achievement of September was catching up on all 17 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy. I also made my return to my office and started making preparations for graduation while finishing Star Trek: The Original Series before it left Netflix.

In October, I jumped right into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and my research group took a road trip up north to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We visited Pictured Rocks, the Porcupine Mountains, Copper Harbor, and Mackinaw City. Upon our return, I got back to work because I had my data meeting scheduled for the end of the month.

By November, the defense countdown was on. I submitted my second manuscript and NaNoWriMo-ed my thesis in the office while enjoying the weather outdoors when possible. After closing out the MLS season as the Supporters Shield winner (best regular season record) for the first time ever and setting an overall record for most points in a season, the Revolution lost in the first round of the playoffs, ending the hopes and dreams of Revolution fans yet again.

Finally, the time had come, to talk of many things, but actually just my micelles. In December, I got my thesis written and distributed to my committee, and shortly before Christmas, at long last, held my dissertation defense. After passing, I celebrated Christmas and New Year's in Ann Arbor with The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Night Before Critmas, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a bike ride along the Ann Arbor portion of the B2B trail when it hit 40 degrees on the last day of the year.

The Year in Ann Arbor [2020]

2020 was not the year most people thought it would be, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20, right? To document life during a pandemic, unlike other years I’ve been writing monthly posts since March, so this post will be a summary of summaries. [Find each month here: March April May June July August September October November December.]

For the third time in four years, I began the new year at the airport, flying back to Detroit at the beginning of January. I reread The Fellowship of the Ring, ate pineapple tarts delivered from Singapore and picked up at home at Christmas, had a band concert in which I made my debut on the triangle, and was recruited to attend a couple ChemE seminars and have lunch with faculty candidates.

In February, reports of a new virus in China were circulating, but it was believed to be localized and people didn’t need to be concerned unless they had recently travelled to China. We procrastinated and complained in the office, our lab had group meetings, band rehearsals for our third concert of the season continued, I watched the end of Cornell men’s hockey’s very successful season and the start of MLS’s 25th season, and I started Star Trek: The Next Generation.

By March, it was becoming clear that the coronavirus was not contained in China. Days before classes went online, conferences and visit weekends were cancelled, churches stopped meeting in person, and sports were delayed, I performed in what might end up being my last concert with the Ann Arbor Concert Band. Later that week, our lab had our last in-person group meeting, and I went to my office for the last time to pick up books and notes before non-essential research (anything not virus-related or necessary to keep cells/animals alive) was shut down. As Michigan got an official stay at home order, I finished watching The Office.

I worked from my apartment through the month of April and started exploring the neighborhoods and parks of Ann Arbor on foot. Community came to Netflix, MLS re-aired old matches while the season was on hold, and I baked peanut butter cookies and cinnamon rolls, assembled jigsaw puzzles, read from my bookcase, and finished writing the first draft of my manuscript v2.0.

During May, businesses started reopening with cleaning, mask, capacity, and distancing requirements. As a computational researcher, I continued computing in my apartment, though the university tested opening a limited number of labs for experimental researchers. I began my quest to visit every park in Ann Arbor, which turned out to be a great pandemic activity. Basically free, essentially infinitely ventilated, can be done alone, generally easy to remain distanced, is a source of vitamin D, reduces cortisol (stress hormone), and produces endorphins (can lower symptoms of depression and anxiety).

With coronavirus numbers looking much better, the stay at home order was lifted in June. I spent the month on my bike in all corners of Ann Arbor hunting parks down. The Ann Arbor District Library put on the 2020 pandemic version of the Summer Game. My baking masterpiece of the month was a pineapple upside down cake, and I finished the available Great British Bake Off episodes, started rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender, and ate, slept, and did research.

July was hot and humid, just like summer should be. While I sweated my way through dozens of parks and miles on my bike and avoided the oven, Jeopardy! opened up their vault and aired old episodes, and MLS started back up after four months. They bubbled up in Orlando for the MLS is Back tournament (the Returnament), where each team played three group stage games that would count in the standings followed by knockout games that didn’t factor into the standings but would earn the team a mostly meaningless trophy. The Revolution picked up a win and two ties, then were knocked out in the round of 16 (the first knockout round).

Students returned to campus in August for a limited number of in-person classes and on-campus activities. I didn’t think it was a great idea, but covid numbers in Washtenaw county looked pretty good, so I wasn’t vehemently against it. The MLS regular season picked up again with regional games (with the three Canadian clubs stuck in Canada only able to play each other), no fans, and regular testing. At the end of the month, I submitted edit 927 of version 2 of my manuscript and had my first day of 21st grade.

The university’s (lack of) coronavirus plan was a major point of contention in September, as minimal covid testing and quarantine housing conditions, among other things, drove the grad students to strike, the RAs to strike, the dining hall workers to want to strike, and the faculty senate to vote no confidence in the university president. Matters were somewhat resolved and people settled in for the semester. In other news, I finished Parks and Recreation before it left Netflix, met up with a couple individuals for the first time since March, picked up my clarinet very briefly, and saw goats.

October was my birthday month, and to celebrate and enjoy fall before everything froze over for six months, I visited several parks in Ann Arbor in search of fall colors. Covid cases at the university rose enough for the county to issue a shelter in place order for the undergrads, and nationwide cases and hospitalizations were trending upwards (again).

I was finally forced to put on pants in November when temperatures dropped, but I continued my outdoor wanderings (in shorts) whenever possible. The election happened. One of my coworkers defended via Zoom, I watched a livestreamed wedding, and the Revolution finished the regular season with enough points to make the playoffs. To the surprise of many people, they won a play-in game, beat the number one Eastern Conference seed in the round of 16, and emerged victorious in their conference semifinal game, earning themselves a spot in the conference final. Also, I baked molasses cookies and cranberry orange scones, made cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, had breakfast for dinner, and my manuscript, after a couple rounds of revisions, was accepted. One of those things is not like the others.

And finally, we made it to December. The Revolution lost in the conference final, but that means they made it to the conference final. I tried to venture outside a few times a week, it snowed (and melted), and I started cross stitching again. And my paper was finally, after many trials and much tribulation, published.

One Hundred Days of Solitude

Well, we’ve reached over a hundred days since I intentionally went to a public place to interact with real live people. Besides a five-minute visit to my office to pick up my books before labs were shut down, I’ve been to exactly two indoor locations – the grocery store and my apartment. I haven’t ridden the bus, been driven in a car, or flown anywhere for the better part of four months. We’re technically allowed to go places now, but I’ve stuck to my apartment and outdoor locations while waiting to see how reopening goes. Approaching the end of the month, the numbers in Michigan looked pretty good, both in terms of cases and deaths. Michigan Medicine posts the number of COVID-19 positive inpatients they have every day, and they hit a low on June 17/18 since this all started in March. However, that number then rose 50% in 4 days. Time to lock everyone back in their closets? Not quite yet. They went from 6 to 9 patients, and only time will tell if this is statistically insignificant or the start of another wave.

At the beginning of the month, Governor Whitmer lifted the stay-at-home order, effective immediately on Monday, June 1. Indoor gatherings with less than 10 people and outdoor gatherings with less than 100 people and social distancing were permitted. As this was only a week after Memorial Day and its unknown numbers of barbeques with unknown quantities of people practicing unknown degrees of social distancing/facial covering, I declined to do anything other than stay at home and do research and watch Netflix. On Sunday, June 7, my church restarted in-person services outdoors. I didn’t attend because 1) I didn’t want to bike there and 2) unknown quantities of people practicing unknown degrees of social distancing/facial covering. I did, however, bake a pineapple upside down cake. It was a midcentury-esque masterpiece.

Pineapple upside down cake

By Monday, June 8, retail, restaurants, pools, libraries, museums, offices, etc. were all allowed to be open with varying social distancing and capacity restrictions. The places that were left closed at this point were things like gyms, bowling alleys, movie theaters, and nail salons, where groups of people congregate and/or are in close contact for not strictly essential activities. I did my roughly biannual intensive floor washing on Tuesday, June 9, because turns out dust is a thing. On Wednesday, June 10, I finished watching all of the Great British Baking Show episodes available on Netflix. Friday, June 12, the Ann Arbor library started the coronavirus/socially distanced/virtual summer 2020 Summer Game and I started rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is even better than I remembered.

The weather was too nice on Saturday, June 13 to not go out, so even though I knew it would be “crowded,” I set out on my bike for the Bird Hills/Barton Nature Areas area. After the world’s most unnecessary detour, I made it and added a couple more parks to my list. It was indeed busier than my usual mosquito-infested, swampy haunts, but not too bad away from a couple spots. On Sunday, June 14, I again watched church on Facebook live, then did a load of laundry, and ate my last two freezer pancakes for dinner. I did my semi-annual file backup/SD card reformatting on Monday, June 15 and otherwise got research done over the rest of the week. Plus baked a batch of popovers for the heck of it on Wednesday, June 17 (I got flour at the grocery store and it wasn’t 900 degrees in my apartment).

Looks very refreshing.
(Fuller Park pool, closed, at the beginning of June.)

On Saturday, June 20 I went grocery shopping in the morning (still basically 100% of people wearing face coverings¹) and in the afternoon headed out to visit another group of parks. Why the city of Ann Arbor thought right next to the M-14 was a good place for a nature area is beyond me. Nothing like the sounds of the birds and 75 mph traffic as you walk through the woods. Anyway, joke’s on me because I took the time to visit this park. I still wasn’t attending church as of Sunday, June 21, so it was another Facebook sermon with questionable audio for me. The rest of the week was research as usual; I also visited parks, ate sandwiches, baked apple cobbler, watched Netflix, reread books. The university committed to a partially in-person fall semester with a modified schedule, but we’ll see how well that works out once students return en masse.

On Saturday, June 27, I took my bike out to the northern half of Ann Arbor to visit my remaining parks north of the Huron River. With that done, I’ll have to start ranging farther afield into lesser known territories. On the plus side, biking in high heat, humidity, and sun makes my 85-degree apartment feel cool . . . for about ten minutes when I first get back. Another Sunday, another Facebook sermon on Sunday, June 28. Then I finished out the month with a couple days of work. On to July. I’m still not making plans to go anywhere/do anything while I wait and see how things go. Like I said, the numbers in Michigan still seem pretty good but other states are not looking great.

¹A side note on masks/face coverings from my science-ish perspective: Even if they aren’t super effective, and are hot and uncomfortable, I’d rather be careful. And no, you are not suffocating yourself, with carbon dioxide or otherwise. 1) Air is already mostly not oxygen (78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen by volume). 2) You don’t extract all the oxygen from air you inhale. Exhaled air is still ~16% oxygen; in other words ~80% of the oxygen that’s inhaled is exhaled. 3) Masks are porous. The pore size of cloth is on the order of microns. Air molecules are hundreds of picometers, or 5-6 orders of magnitude smaller. Your exhalations are not hitting your mask and rebounding back into your respiratory system. (Virus sizes are on the order of nanometers, so would not be filtered out by a cloth mask, but respiratory droplets are again in the micron range and could be stopped by a mask, which is the point.) 4) Doctors, nurses, dentists, construction workers, etc. are not all passing out at work from hypoxia every time they put on a mask. So even if you don’t really think masks do anything, you’re not killing your brain cells by wearing one, and you might even be helping other people. Isn’t that nice?

Coronavirus Chronicles – May

Another month of working from home and social distancing. The stay at home order from the governor was extended twice, first to May 28, then to June 12, but more businesses have been allowed to open under varying restrictions. Manufacturing could start back up in the middle of the month, plus at some point garden stores and bike repair shops were also reopened. By the end of the month, parts of northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula were permitted to open with limited customers, distancing, and face coverings. For the rest of the state, gatherings of less than ten people are allowable, retail can open for shopping-by-appointment, and nonemergency dental and doctor services will soon resume.

By Friday, May 1, I had my manuscript back from my advisor to edit. #HereWeGoAgain. On Saturday, May 2, I took a second try at a basic sugar cookie recipe. Something went wrong the first time I made it, because I remember the cookies not coming out great, and this time they looked and tasted just fine. The only difference I know of for sure is that I halved the recipe except for the one egg. It’s possible the extra half egg fixed everything, but I’m pretty sure I did something wrong last time. Either that or Mercury was in retrograde.

North Campus

Sunday, May 3, I got up early and went on an adventure to visit ten different parks/nature areas near¹ me. I worked out a route that would connect the parks as part of my latest efforts to see how many parks in Ann Arbor I can visit, because what else am I doing with my time. Over the next week (Monday, May 4²-Friday, May 8), I continued editing my manuscript, saw Ken Jennings’ first appearance on Jeopardy!, and rewatched the first four games of Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time featuring Jennings, Brad Rutter, and James Holzhauer. Mostly I’ve been watching a lot of TV, but on Sunday, May 10, and Monday, May 11, I streamed The PhD Movie and The PhD Movie 2: Still in Grad School, which are/were available on the PhD comics website, and sum up everything terrible and wonderful about grad school. [The PhD comics author, Jorge Cham, came to Michigan a couple years ago and I happened to actually read the right email with the information about his visit, so I went to see him.]

¹Subject to your definition of near.
²Star Wars day. May the 4th be with you.

It rained a lot on and off throughout the rest of the week, but I got outside a few times to wander through the woods and check on the creeks and rivers. Saturday, May 16 was a lovely day so I took the opportunity to loop through another set of parks after groceries in the morning. On Sunday, May 17, I listened to Facebook sermon #10 and baked another batch of cookies. These were chocolate and meant to go with the jar of marshmallow spread I had in my cabinet that I picked up off the clearance shelf at some point for a dollar.

A walk in the woods . . . after some rain

Monday, May 18, began another workweek with my manuscript, virtual advisor meeting, and virtual group meeting. I also worked my way through my puzzle collection (only a couple left), read, did a couple laps around North Campus, continued my nightly viewing of Jeopardy!, watched Star Trek, ate, slept, etc. And on Thursday, May 19 I explored more parks, because I’m really not kidding when I say I have nothing better to do. I also get to see the different neighborhoods in Ann Arbor and figure out which nature areas have potential for repeat hiking.

It was forecast to rain basically all of Memorial Day weekend and the week after, but it turned out to be sunny and hot instead. I finally had to switch our thermostat over from heating to cooling and stop opening the blinds because the apartment is a giant solar oven, and we still hit 80 F for the first time this year on Sunday, May 24. On Memorial Day (Monday, May 25³) itself, I stayed inside to avoid potential crowds and ended up getting some research done. By Tuesday, May 26, I finished my last puzzle, so I can add that to my coronavirus accomplishments along with aimless wandering and eating ice cream straight from the carton. I went out in the evening/night for the first time in months on Thursday, May 28 just to get out of my apartment. Saturday, May 30 was grocery day (no spam, yeast, or flour) and I went for a walk in the afternoon through some of the nature areas by me that connect to each other. Today, Sunday, May 31, after the daily crossword puzzles, this week’s sermon, and an egg and cheese sandwich for lunch, I took my bike out for the first time since March and went to a couple parks along the Huron River. The river itself and the main parks were pretty busy (I would say crowded, but not packed), but the wooded areas were decently quiet, minus the ever-present traffic noises.

³Also Towel Day. Don’t panic, hoopy froods.

That’s another month for the record books. The university tested reopening half a dozen buildings this past week, with check in procedures, mandatory face coverings, distancing in labs, and 30% capacity. It seemed to go pretty well, so they’re moving forward with opening more buildings, but because I do computational research, I’ll be in one of the last groups to be allowed to go back in. I don’t mind, because I’m still getting things done, and I’m waiting to see how reopening in general goes.

A House for Hermit Person

It’s been over a month since the official stay at home order from the governor. Since then, the only two indoor locations I’ve been to are my apartment and the grocery store. I’ve more or less been working on manuscript_v2.0 in the hopes that reviewer 2 likes it better than he/she did last time. Our research group has gotten more used to having virtual meetings, with only occasional internet interruptions, and we also have weekly individual meetings with our advisor. Other than that, I mostly hang around the apartment watching a lot of Netflix, complaining about my internet connection, complaining about the screaming children not social distancing outside my window, and wandering around my region of Ann Arbor when it’s either too nice to not go outside or too awful for anyone else to want to be outside.

At the end of March, Tau Beta Pi had to adjust and hold required meetings online on Zoom, which went okay. April Fools’ Day was mostly canceled, but I scraped together enough energy and inclination to bake a half batch of peanut butter cookies. On Thursday, April 2, we had group meeting, then I went to explore a natural area I hadn’t been to before, and finished my reread of The Lord of the Rings. The next day, Friday, April 3, I filed my taxes for 2019. Since I now spend the vast majority of my time in my apartment, as opposed to a lot of my time, I spent the afternoon of Saturday, April 4 tending to a yeasted dough so I could make cinnamon rolls.

Peanut butter cookie tower 

I listened to Facebook sermon #4 on Sunday, April 5, and watched the first ever MLS game on Monday, April 6 (MLS is re-airing classic matches since the season is suspended). On April 6, 1996, D.C. United travelled to visit the San Jose Clash and ended up losing 1-0 to a goal from Eric Wynalda. If no goals had been scored in regular time, they would have gone to a running start penalty shootout. Also, the clock counted down. Seriously. Thursday, April 9 of the same week, I decided what I really needed was to watch the Revolution lose their third (of five) MLS cup finals. In 2006, the Revolution headed to Texas to take on the Houston Dynamo. The game featured a ridiculous number of the best Revolution players in the team’s 25-year history, including Matt Reis, Jay Heaps, Shalrie Joseph, Steve Ralston, and Taylor Twellman. After the teams traded goals within two minutes of each other in extra time (Twellman and Houston’s Brian Ching), the game went to penalty kicks. Reis made a penalty and saved one, but Pat Noonan hit the crossbar, and on New England’s fifth penalty kick, with Houston up 4-3, Jay Heaps had his shot saved. And that’s how the Revolution lost MLS cup, not for the first time, and not for the last.

Sunday, April 12 was Easter. I did two loads of laundry (regular and sheets) and listened to the Easter sermon. Over the next week, research continued, and I worked my way through episodes of Community (now on Netflix) and Star Trek: The Next Generation [the one with Captain Picard, William Riker, Data, Worf, and the Reading Rainbow guy (LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge)]. I also watched the Revolution lose the 2004 Eastern Conference final to D.C. United. At least Taylor Twellman, providing commentary on the game and team, was entertaining. On Friday, April 17, I discovered another nature area while wandering around avoiding people, and on Saturday, April 18 I picked Game of Thrones back up. If I do finish this 700-page brick, I still have The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (all 5 books of the trilogy), Dune, 3 Foundation books, 5 of 7 Harry Potter books, and a couple dozen other miscellaneous books on my bookshelf.

Finger Lakes puzzle

Week 5 of Facebook sermons was Sunday, April 19. That week, I put together my puzzle of the Finger Lakes region, made a friendship bracelet, and read Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid about his childhood in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s, as well as (finally) finishing a preliminary draft of my manuscript. On Saturday, April 25, I met (virtually) with friends from Cornell and was introduced to Quiplash and Drawful. The former needs to be played with people who have similar senses of humor and I can’t tell what anything is in the latter. We also defused some bombs.¹ All in a night’s work. I made French toast for lunch on Sunday, April 26 and did some more wandering when the afternoon was warm and sunny with no rain, snow, graupel, sleet, or hail. Now we’re in the last week of April with the stay at home order extended for another couple weeks. That’ll take us to the middle of May, and it’ll have been two months since I really went anywhere. I don’t think we’ll be at a place where we can (or should) go ahead and open everything right back up, but we’re starting to talk about letting experimental researchers back into labs. The computational/theoretical people will keep on keeping on.

¹Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

That Which Shall Not Be Named

As you may have noticed, things are happening right now. Big worldwide things. As of my last real time post on Leap Day, things were more or less cautiously proceeding as normal. I had returned to Ann Arbor from New England for another semester with my micelles and it was time to (finally) write my manuscript (again). Soccer season was starting and college hockey was ending regular season play. I had a band concert in a week. The weather was overall improving and it looked like spring was on its way. Then, everything changed when the fire nation attacked.

Sunday, March 1 was the first Sunday of the month, and I attended church, prepared communion, and had lunch as usual. The next day, Monday, March 2, was the last band rehearsal before our upcoming concert. In order to run everything one last time before concert day, the band voluntarily stayed late. For the rest of the week, my lab continued as normal, which is to say we all continued not showing up to the office and working strange hours when we did make an appearance. Michigan was on spring break, but universities across the country were starting to switch to online classes and asking students to leave or not return to campus from breaks. Our lab was told to have a plan in case we were asked to ramp down/communicate remotely/work from home.

On Saturday, March 7, I watched the Revolution open their home season against the Chicago Fire. New Polish designated player Adam Buksa scored his first goal for the team, but the game ended in a 1-1 draw. Sunday, March 8 was our third band concert of the season, featuring pieces composed or arranged by composers with ties to Michigan. What was a little different for the band was that we had a guest conductor, an Ann Arbor public school teacher, but it ended up being fun for both of us. It turned out to be a pretty good concert, then on my way back to my apartment, seeing the hoards gathering for the Bernie Sanders rally that same day, I started thinking it might not be such a great idea having all the students converging on campus coming back from who knows where.

Classes resumed on Monday, March 9 and Tuesday, March 10, even as the number of confirmed cases in the United States crept through the hundreds. By Wednesday, March 11, Michigan made the decision to cancel classes for the rest of the week and move to online instruction the following week, like dozens of other universities. Since it still seemed relatively tame in Michigan, we had a normal group meeting on Thursday, March 12, though about a third of the lab joined us via BlueJeans.

I didn’t go into the office on Friday the Thirteenth, but did venture out on Saturday, March 14, for groceries. Kroger was busier than usual for early-ish on a Saturday morning; was out of paper products, certain canned goods, pasta, and frozen vegetables; and people were a little pushier than normal. This was about the time that everything started exploding. MLS suspended their season for 30 days. NCAA playoff hockey was cancelled as Cornell was having its best season in years. PhD visit weekends, conferences, seminars – all cancelled. Church went from still meeting but cancelling lunch and taking other precautions to Facebook sermon with the option of meeting in small groups. The Ann Arbor District Library closed and pushed back all due dates, so I guess now I can watch Spider-Man: Far From Home seventeen thousand times if I want.

Sunday, March 15, I had no desire to be on public transport or ride my bike to church, so I stayed in and watched the sermon from my desk. The next week, we were highly encouraged to work from home if possible. Midweek, on Wednesday, March 18, we were officially told that nonessential research would be shut down on Friday. Pro and con of computational research – we can work from basically anywhere, at basically any time. Yay us. On Thursday, March 19, I made a trip to my office to pick up most of my things, because if I didn’t grab my books, the one vital fact necessary to publish my paper would have been in one of those books. We also had our first fully virtual group meeting that day, plus I made enough chicken chili and cornbread to eat for dinner for the next full week.

By Friday, March 20, I finished rereading all the books I had out from the library, and picked up where I left off in my reread of The Lord of the Rings (book 4, in The Two Towers). Things were a little calmer at the grocery store on Saturday, March 21, then on Sunday, March 22 after my second Facebook sermon, I made pancakes for lunch and finished The Office that night.

After that, life settled down a bit. We did officially get the stay at home order on Monday, March 23, though by then people were generally trying to do that anyway. The emails with subject headings like URGENT READ THIS RIGHT NOW OR ELSE detailing constant policy changes have been greatly reduced. I’m watching Netflix writing my paper from my apartment. I’ve been enjoying our grey, windy, mid-40s weather solely because it means if I venture outside, very few other people also want to be outside. So that is what’s been going on in Ann Arbor so far, a couple weeks into hiding out at my apartment. Two down, at least four more to go.

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.

Winter semester+

The plus is because the semester officially ended at the beginning of May, but I’m going to recap until the end of May, because I’m writing at the beginning of June. So besides inadvisably trekking through the arboretum, I did a lot of other stuff.

I TA’d again, and in class related news, I had 44 students (up from 32 the previous year), and graded 8 problem sets (up from 7 previously) with 5 questions each, which amounts to 352 problem sets and 1,760 problems, plus/minus undone/incomplete assignments. There was also a midterm, that I graded entirely by myself, and a final, that I graded with my advisor immediately after the students finished taking it to get the class over with. I was required to had the pleasure of holding three office hours per week, for a total of 45 hours of instruction, plus/minus time spent on Reddit. When not grading, picking up work to be graded, returning graded work, or helping students with homework that I would later grade, I fielded emails, mostly about the homework, which, as you might know, I graded.

When I wasn’t fending off students, I was doing what I’m mostly paid to be doing, as in, research. I had meetings with my advisor a couple dozen times in five months, for an average of slightly more than one meeting per week. Since I was TA’ing for him and we sometimes have phone meetings with our collaborators, that’s pretty average for my research group. Also average for us is only having group meeting about every other week, enough for everyone to present once a semester. Near the end of the semester and into summer, we had three defenses in the span of five weeks. To celebrate, we had a lab party at our advisor’s house where we had dinner and played Pandemic and saved the world. As people prepared to graduate, the lab decided to become social and start drinking together.¹ We attended a few happy hours and also a Detroit Pistons game.

¹Drinking with my lab goes like this: We arrive at the bar between 5:30 and 6 pm. Half to two-thirds of the people present order a beer. A couple people order fries. A few more people order dinner food. We talk and finish our meals/single drinks. We leave before it’s dark out and are home by 8 pm.

Band continued as usual. We had our last sixteen rehearsals and three concerts of our fortieth season. The January concert featured overtures, including Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand Overture” (for Three Vacuum Cleaners, One Floor Polisher, and Concert Band). Yes, really. I hadn’t played anything that fabulous since PDQ Bach’s “Grand Serenade for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion” my senior year of high school. In March, we had a joint concert with Measure for Measure, a men’s chorus founded by former UM glee club members. We played “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with them, and Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture” by ourselves. If you’re a band or orchestra person, you’ll know it if you hear it. Our final concert of the season was on Mother’s Day and to celebrate we played pieces by female composers, plus Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with a UM music school professor.

The band at Hill Auditorium with Measure for Measure

(taken from Facebook)

Outside of band, I had the opportunity to play some clarinet music with people from church. For whatever reason, we seem to have an unusually high concentration of music school students, so a couple times so far, we’ve done informal concerts where the music students plus me play. In February I did a couple pieces from Lord of the Rings accompanied by harp, which was a first for me. Then in May I played the third movement from the Mozart clarinet concerto with piano accompaniment for the first time since high school. Both my accompanists were better than me, but I enjoyed myself and no one’s ears bled from my playing, so we’ll call it a success. It wasn’t all practicing and performing for me, though. Within a span of a week in April, I attended a harp recital, a piano recital, and a glee club concert. I saw the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra perform in January for Mozart’s birthday at the beginning of the semester, and after the end of the semester, I went to see the Detroit Symphony Orchestra play Hadyn's concerto for two horns and Brahms’s fourth symphony.

In April, I also went to see Avengers: Endgame on opening night, the first time I have ever seen a movie on opening night. In preparation, I had been watching the previous 20 movies, and I was happy with how they wrapped this phase of the MCU up. I brought musician’s earplugs that I had from pep band, which was a great decision because my brain did not hurt after three hours in the theater. I closed out this five-month stretch with a church Memorial Day picnic featuring barefoot soccer, Secret Hitler, and speed Scrabble. My feet were bruised for over a week, we spent all of Secret Hitler yelling at each other, and I can’t spell, but it was a great day. Now on to summer.

Dinner for One: Grocery shopping and cooking for the single grad student

Last time, I discussed some of my favorite meals to make (including pizza toast; new this year – pizza quesadillas). This time, I’ll talk about some of the skills and things you should learn when cooking and grocery shopping for you, yourself, and you.

First, you should learn how to cut onions into sixths (or any other fruit or vegetable into any unintuitive fraction). My current meal schedule involves a lot of cereal for breakfast, a lot of sandwiches for lunch, and dinner on a three-day rotation, meaning that I eat the same dinner for three days in a row, then switch to a different dinner for the next three days. Sometimes I cook all three portions at the same time, or if it’s a quick meal, I cook each night. If I’m only cooking one portion, I sometimes only need 1/6 of an onion. 1/6 is a third of 1/2, which divides the onion up nicely to fit in my meal schedule.

Next, get used to knowing exactly how many cups of milk and slices of bread you have. Unless you want to make multiple trips to the grocery store every week, that’s got to last you until the end of the week. Additionally, you are solely responsible for consuming any food you buy; nobody’s going to take care of those leftovers for you. On the flip side, at least nobody’s going to eat your cookies when you’re not looking. But on the other hand, if you decide it’s a good idea to try the new broccoli flavored Oreos, nobody’s going to eat those for you when you’re not looking.

On a related note, after some time tracking your bread and milk consumption, you will probably also be able to give a full inventory of the contents of your fridge. [At this moment of writing: 2 cups of milk, 1 stick of butter, 9 eggs, 1/4 of a batch of bread pudding (3 pieces), a can of Sprite, a can of Coke, an old apple, ~1/2 pound of baby carrots, ~1/2 jar of jam, canned wine, a bottle of cherry soda, 9(?)/16 of a pan of pumpkin cranberry bread, 3/8 of a block of cheese, wrinkly grapes, leftover pumpkin, 2 dinners worth of leftover baked chicken/broccoli/carrots/onion/potatoes, and assorted sauces/condiments (ketchup, chili, siracha mustard, Italian dressing, fake hoisin sauce, bbq sauce, and mayonnaise).]

When you go grocery shopping, you should buy family-sized packages of food because it’s (usually) cheaper by ounce, you’ll eventually eat it all, and after all, you are a family. Of one.

Since grocery shopping is also your social activity for the weekend and nobody is waiting for you at home to go to a movie or be driven to a soccer game, feel free to spend some time deliberating in the aisle whether saving 1.24 cents per ounce on generic orange juice is worth it to you. Other things to consider: Is paying 50 cents extra for Frozen-themed cheese sticks a good deal if they amuse you when you pack them in your lunches? Should you buy a Hot Wheels car so you can tell everyone you finally bought a car? How much peanut butter is too much for a single person to have?

Finally, eat ice cream directly from the carton. Because you can.

Bonus: If you also don’t have a car, avoid buying any liquids (bottled water, milk, soda, juice, coffee, alcohol) if possible, because liquids are dense and thus, heavy. Any groceries you buy, you carry.

Bonus 2: In the same vein, shop for pasta by which kind has the highest packing fraction. Space is valuable in your backpack/grocery bag/whatever you’re using to haul all your food home. Shells, penne, and anything spiral shaped takes up too much space. Macaroni is pretty good. You get a higher packing fraction from spaghetti, but spaghetti is harder to eat and doesn’t adhere to sauces well.

ChemE 6350: The Theology of Colloids

[October 2018]

The actual reason I was in Houston was not, shockingly enough, to see space shuttles and astronaut gloves, but for a conference. A rheology conference. Rheology is the study of the flow of matter, but because it’s a scary science word¹, it often gets “corrected” to theology, as you might have guessed from the title of this post.

Also shocking, more than three dozen people were in attendance at this conference. The conference attracts all the rheologists (not theologists) in the country, including former Cornell ChemE classmates, lab members, and a professor. Due to graduation, all of us are now at different schools, but it was nice to catch up with some familiar faces. My current lab had a few of us in attendance, plus our advisor, another professor and student from the University of Michigan, and one of our collaborators. Besides all these people who I personally knew, there were also professors who I met when I visited Carnegie Mellon, professors whose papers I’ve read, and a couple of those names who everyone in the research area just knows. If you’ve never heard that academia can be a bit incestuous, you’re hearing it now.

The Gerald D. Hines Waterwall park, right next to the mall where we were staying

This particular conference ran from Sunday evening to Thursday morning. The only event on Sunday is a welcome reception which basically turns into all the professors cross-examining each other about research, all the students alternately avoiding/being ignored by their advisors, and everyone eating free food while trying to see who’s there that year. For the next three and a half days, the day begins with a plenary lecture followed by seven hours of talks by students and professors. I presented during the last slot on Tuesday, which wasn’t a terrible time. I had a day at the conference to prepare, time afterwards to relax and listen to other peoples’ talks, and it was so late in the day no one bothered to show up. The talks cover everything from theory to molecular simulations to experimental techniques about polymers, colloids, polyelectrolytes, surfactants, and more.

In the evenings, after the talks are over for the day, the conference plans an event. Monday night was a trip to a local brewery, where we had dinner, got as much beer as we wanted to drink, and received a pint glass with the society’s logo on it. It’s the drinking accessory I never knew I wanted. Tuesday night was the awards banquet. I didn’t attend because it costs extra money and you have to dress up, but I went to the pre-banquet reception because it was open to everyone, I had a drink ticket, and there was free food. Wednesday night was the poster session, also with free food. I’m a fan of this conference for several reasons. One, it’s small enough that it’s not overwhelming, but large enough that you’ll probably be able to find someone else doing semi-relevant work. Two, we went to a brewery. The last time I attended, the conference was held in Baltimore and the social event was at the aquarium. And three, free food (and alcohol). You could almost survive on free food alone if you supplemented with granola bars.

At the brewery (Monday night)

On Thursday, one of my lab mates, my travelling partner, and I left the talks a little early (sorry to anyone still presenting) to wander the mall and get Chick-fil-A before leaving for the airport. At the airport, our basic economy tickets afforded us the opportunity to board with group 4 and sit in the window seats in the very last row, the third-to-last row, and the sixth-to-last row. We had an uneventful flight back, and with that we returned to a cold and dark Ann Arbor. It was a good trip. I fulfilled my graduation requirement of presenting at a national conference, saw some fellow Cornell alumni, had Texas barbeque, went to Space Center Houston, met up with a Cornell friend attending school in Houston, and had fun.

¹Phenolphthalein, a common indicator² used in acid-base titrations, is one of my favorite science-y words to spell because of that “lphth” string in the middle.

²The one that goes from clear to bright pink at a pH of 8.2. It’s often used in freshman general chemistry labs, and no matter how many times the TA reminds everyone to put the indicator in the base before beginning the titration, someone will always forget. Half an hour later, when this student has dumped three gallons of acid into their beaker without witnessing a color change, someone will cautiously bring up the indicator. When a single drop of phenolphthalein is added, the solution will go from clear as a mountain spring to 90s neon windbreaker pink.

The Year in Ann Arbor [2018]

January – We loved the timing and convenience economics of the 5 am flight back to Ann Arbor so much that we did it again this year. I arrived in Ann Arbor bright and early, went grocery shopping, and spent the rest of the day watching TV on my bed. When classes started, I began my mandatory semester of TA’ing, my first time as a grad student but my third time overall. Bessel functions made their return in a problem set, we got back to work in the band room preparing for our second concert of the season, and I ended the month at the Michigan Theater celebrating Mozart’s birthday.

As the TA, I had the pleasure of writing up all the homework solutions, which meant I had the pleasure of solving all the homework. February brought the return of the COMSOL problem set, which I tackled with, of course, all the pleasure. The Revolution began preseason and once again, fled from Foxboro to play in the Mobile Mini Sun Cup in Arizona, where they emerged victorious [this would, sadly, be a highlight of 2018 for them]. I watched most of the games thanks to the internet and also caught highlights from the Olympics. In other news, I finally gave in and bought a DSLR.

In March, my TA duties included attending a seminar titled The Power of Peer Review. Literally the only reason for that title is the alliteration. About a dozen people actually showed up and almost all of them were there because they had to be. At least there were snacks. I also carried on with grading, holding offices hours, and research. Outside of work, I began watching/rewatching the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in anticipation of Avengers: Infinity War, which I still have not seen.

Easter this year was in early April. To celebrate we had lunch after church, an egg hunt (I got to hide eggs again), and a piñata. Very traditional. Since classes ended, I got to wrap up TA’ing for the time being, and I attended several band and chorus concerts in support of music and friends in the school of music. At some point during the month, the guy who writes PhD comics came to the university, so I went to see him talk.

May is a big month for early PhD students. Last year I took my doctoral candidacy exam; this year was the preliminary exam. I passed and immediately headed out of Ann Arbor to visit my brother in Chicago. I met up with my mother there and this time I got to see Chicago instead of haul my brother’s belongings across the city. We visited the zoo, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Field Museum, plus saw Cloud Gate lots of times.

When I returned to Ann Arbor in early June with my mother, I took her to see the peonies and other bus/foot-accessible locations in town. At church, we observed the end of the school year for the kids with water balloon games, a water balloon fight, pizza, and a movie. My lab had a summer BBQ at our advisor’s house, followed by a game of Pandemic (we won). At the end of the month the World Cup started, so there went the ragged remains of our motivation and productivity at work.

In July, I continued the summer tradition of biking across most of Ann Arbor. My future roommate and I paid a visit to the food trucks at the Farmer’s Market for dinner one night and got a chicken jerk wrap and pizza. Art Fair came to town; I went to look at the prices. I got caught up on Marvel movies and started on watching every theatrical Disney animated feature film. With the availability of $25 tickets, a coworker and I went to see Manchester United and Liverpool play at the stadium.

Summer continued in August. Midmonth, my new roommate moved in. I took advantage of a library event and went to see Jennifer Pharr Davis, who wrote Called Again, speak. I took advantage of the library itself and finally saw the fourth season of Sherlock. I have very mixed feelings about this season. As summer wound down, I made a return trip to Chicago to meet up with a friend from Cornell.

At long last in September, our church moved into a building that we’d been renovating for the past year. Band started back up. I went to see a free showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey that was accompanied live by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. We participated in fall by going to a cider mill for cider and donuts.

October brought the arrival of my first academic conference as a graduate student. Another student and I flew down to Houston together a day early and spent the extra time at Space Center Houston. At the conference itself, I listened to dozens of talks, met up with several Cornell acquaintances, presented, and otherwise tried to subsist on free food and alcohol.

In November I took an extended break from work and travelled to Singapore to see family, some of whom I hadn’t seen for fourteen years. We saw a lot of people, ate a lot, and did all the touristy things.

December – On the way back from Singapore, we had a whirlwind stopover in Hong Kong. Back in Ann Arbor, the ChemE department hosted a Christmas party [food + alcohol = the one(?) time a year the department gets together], and I made Christmas cards and meatballs. Since I used all my vacation days to go to Singapore, I remained in Ann Arbor for winter break, and spent time with families from church and played Ticket to Ride and Exploding Kittens for the first time.

Minutes: I practiced 4165 minutes (69.4 hours) in 10 out of 12 months, or about an hour and a half a week. Hey, at least I practice.

Miles: Rode 254 miles in 9 out of 12 months. I moved closer to my office so I can walk instead of bike, which is where a lot of my miles last year came from.

Numbers: Books – 63+2 rereads, split 21/44 nonfiction/fiction

Movies – 58+11 rewatches

The Year in Ann Arbor [2017]

January began with a 5:30 flight back to Ann Arbor, followed closely by the start of round two of kinetics and heat and mass transfer. In between problem sets, I read thirty year old research papers and continued playing with the Ann Arbor Concert Band (AACB).

In February, classes continued, I watched the Revolution play in the Desert Diamond Cup via the internet, and I once again started working with Fortran code for my research project. #FortranLives

March brought fun with COMSOL Multiphysics, which was only slightly less temperamental than Aspen Plus. [Note: For non-science/ChemE people, COMSOL solves differential equations such as those for heat and mass transfer. Aspen is a chemical process simulation used mainly (exclusively?) by chemical engineers.] At the end of the month we took a road trip to Ohio to meet with some of our lab’s collaborators.

In April, the MLS season was well underway, with the Revolution drawing four of their six matches that month. I gave two presentations, wrote two final reports, and took a final exam in the span of five days, while also preparing for my doctoral candidacy exam (DCE). On Easter, I was given the responsibility of hiding the eggs for the Easter egg hunt.

The big news in May was taking and passing the DCE. The AACB also had its last concert of the season before breaking for the summer. I baked thumbprint cookies for a church Memorial Day picnic and backyard soccer game.

With June came the start of summer. I took a break from research for a couple hours to see the peonies at the arboretum, ate a vegan sloppy joe from a food truck, and visited my brother in Chicago to see him graduate. On the way back to Ann Arbor, my parents and I saw sand dunes, checked out the Meijer Sculpture Gardens, stopped by Holland, and paid another visit to Greenfield Village and the Ford Museum.

In July I biked across most of Ann Arbor. Multiple trips to the farmer’s market and library were made. Research also picked up, I actually (finally) started getting results, and I read thirty years of papers on the rheology of every salt/surfactant combination possible except the one I’m interested in. After much searching (and some help from a friend), I found an apartment for the next school year and was officially not homeless.

I was, however, temporarily homeless for a couple weeks in August. I was (very kindly) invited to stay with a family from church and ended up house and cat sitting for them. One of the cats ignored my existence unless he needed food. The other loved my feet and would not let me eat dinner in peace. After I moved into my new apartment, I made a trip to IKEA and got to assemble Swedish-named furniture.

The fall semester started in September. I only took one class, on methods and practice in scientific computing, which was almost more trouble than it was worth, but I did get to program in Fortran. #FortranStillLives At the beginning of the month, band rehearsals started up again, and I dutifully made my return to the band room; I also went rock climbing for the first time in over a year.

October was occupied with research, class, and keeping myself fed and clothed. I tried a couple more restaurants in Ann Arbor (One Bowl, Jolly Pumpkin) and baked brownies, bread pudding, and beer cake.

In November, I went to my first hockey game at Michigan and saw Michigan beat Ferris State 7-2 at Yost Ice Arena. Additionally, I gave my first group meeting presentation. There was yet more baking to celebrate lab birthdays and Thanksgiving with both church friends and my research lab.

December started with an 8:00 am phone meeting with our collaborators, successfully using a debugger to find a segmentation fault, and documenting our code, because best practices. I finished my one class with a final presentation and report, was kept out twice until midnight by church Christmas dinners/parties, and finally returned home days before Christmas. At home, I ended the year with a lot of eating, sleeping, and watching TV, including Jeopardy!, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and The Great British Baking Show.

Life-Size LEGOs

What do a saucepan, the bottle opener of a multitool, and a borrowed mallet have in common? All three were involved in assembling my brand new IKEA furniture. I moved for the seventh time in six years of college in August and for the first time ended up in an unfurnished townhouse. After three days without a bed and a week without any other furniture, I got a ride to IKEA and finished furnishing my bedroom, minus desk chair. (I lasted a solid month without any chairs in the apartment.)

Over the next week, I assembled a bookcase, desk, and dresser. I started with the bookcase, which was about as simple as it gets: sides, top, bottom, backing, and shelves. The problems began with the screwdrivers required. I have an entire precision screwdriver set with several dozen screwdriver bits. Key word: precision. Shockingly enough, screws you might find in a computer or watch are not the same size as screws you might find in furniture. I grabbed the largest Phillips and flathead bits I had, ignored the call IKEA for help page in the instructions, and started putting pieces together.

This continued until I reached the back of the bookcase. The backs of cheap IKEA bookcases are a dense cardboard-type material that you slide into a slot and nail into place. Problem number two: I don’t have a hammer. Instead of summoning a hammer from the sky Amazon or borrowing one from any number of people I know who might plausibly own hammers, I started looking around for solid metal objects. I only own a limited number of solid metal objects, so it didn’t take long for me to settle on my pot. My faithful pot, which has now cooked me two years of pasta and rice, served nicely as a hammer.

A couple days later, I worked on the desk. I pulled out my trusty precision screwdrivers, ignored the fix this item with a friend page in the instructions, and inserted the first of many screws. Everything went fine until the end. I had gotten the top aligned, everything was secured in place, and then I looked down at the remaining dowel in my parts bag. Dowel, singular, not used in any of the remaining steps. Third problem? Or not? After flipping back through the instructions, I believe it was an extra part. If not, the desk hasn’t fallen down yet. I should have counted, but there were no spare parts for the bookcase and I really wasn’t interested in counting four dozen screws, three dozen cams, three dozen dowels, and various other miscellaneous parts.

This brings us to the dresser, which I left for last after realizing that I would have to assemble each and every drawer. This is also where the multitool and mallet come into play. My screwdrivers and I ignored the tipping hazard page in the instructions and got the frame of the dresser screwed together, aligned, and standing. Next, the drawers needed to be put together. After temporarily misplacing all my drawer fronts (they were on my bed), I identified the backs, sides, and bottoms and got to work. I attached the sides to a drawer back. The bottom slid in nicely. The front needed to be secured by ridged plastic nails(?). Return of problem two: I (still) don’t have a hammer. I decided to spare my pot, the drawers, and my neighbors’ ears and borrowed a mallet.

Finally, after several hours, a scraped palm, and a lacerated toe, I could insert the drawers into the dresser. The last step was tightening plastic screws to keep the drawers from being pulled out all the way. Problem number three: my precision flathead screwdriver was not just probably too small, but entirely, utterly, much too small. I started looking around for other flat metal things and settled on the tip of the bottle opener on my multitool. I’ve been wondering if a coin would have been better, but the multitool sufficed without too much damage to the screw heads.

And that is how you assemble IKEA furniture with exactly none of the proper tools. Except the provided hex key. Long live the IKEA hex key.

The Nineteenth First Day of School

It’s that time of year again. The leaves are starting to turn brown change color. The temperature drops twenty degrees overnight. The air starts feeling crisp and fresh in the mornings. Parents are giving their wallets to Target buying shiny new pencils and notebooks. Half-asleep Smiling happy children shuffle onto eagerly board bright yellow school buses at dark o’clock in the mornings. Yes, it’s back to school for children all across America. And me, if I’m not considered a children any more. And if we ignore that fact that I didn’t leave last year so I’m not really coming back this year. I’m just . . . here . . . all the time.

To celebrate my nineteenth year of schooling, I thought I would answer some back to school questions. Questions (taken from various blogs across the internet) and answers below. Sorry, no pictures with Pinterest signs.

School: University of Michigan

Grade: 18th (hypothetical question – how much school is too much?)

I am _____ inches tall short and I weigh _____ pounds only slightly more than my IKEA dresser.

Favorite color: Orange

Favorite food: Dessert

Favorite thing to eat at lunch: The only thing I eat for lunch: Peanut butter and jam sandwiches

Favorite animal: Grumpy cat. Also dogs.

Favorite book: Books about people climbing and hiking things; science fiction; comedic sci fi fantasy; books without characters falling in love at first sight/meeting their true love/falling in love at first sight, breaking up because of a horrible misunderstanding, then realizing they really are meant for each other because true love

Favorite movie: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Pixar movies

Favorite TV show: Jeopardy!

Favorite scientific calculator: Still the Casio fx-300ES.

Something I really like: Well-marked bike lanes that don’t end suddenly on the highway and cars who let you make left turns when you signal

Something I really don’t like: When food you haven’t had for that long goes moldy

Something I want to do this year: See the New England Revolution win MLS cup, but I’ll settle for baking cookies. Maybe also cake.

The best thing that happened today (this weekend): Buying apples at the farmer’s market

When I grow up I want to be a: Employed

Since I’ve Been Gone

Life in academia-land has gone on mostly as usual in the past month and a half. My last two days of classes required me to complete two presentations (polymers and transport), two reports (kinetics and polymers), and a problem set (transport), but I did it without losing too much sleep. The transport final passed without excessive trouble, then I spent the next month preparing for the candidacy exam. Spoiler alert: I passed, earning myself the right to spend four more years at the University of Michigan working toward my PhD.

In the meantime, there was also:
World Penguin Day (April 25)
National Star Wars Day (May the Fourth)
National Eat What You Want Day (May 11, but basically every day for me)
Mother’s Day (May 14) (Happy Mother’s Day. Better late than never?)
National Bike to Work Day (May 19)
Towel Day (May 25)

On the research front, the main news is that I passed the candidacy exam. I’ve also read more about CTAB, CTAC, CAPB, SLES, SANS, SDS, DPD, MD, the CMC, and related topics than I ever wanted to.

Since the weather’s gotten mostly nice, I’ve been biking to work, as well as to band, the grocery store, and the library (with stops at the farmers market). I’m at 84.5 miles for the year, and I’ve ridden at least once in every month of the year so far. It’s not a huge amount of mileage, but that’s 84.5 miles of not driving, not that I have a car. Also, I’m really good at just barely missing buses, so I’d rather bike than set up camp at the bus stop for an hour. Because if I left to go somewhere else, I’d get back to the bus stop just in time to see the next bus pulling away. Because that’s how my life works.

Ann Arbor Farmers Market

I had my last concert of the season with the Ann Arbor Concert Band. The concert included a march (“Paladin”), a slow piece (“Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon”), a trumpet feature (“The Three Trumpeters”), a trombone feature (“Shoutin’ Liza Trombone”), a bassoon feature (second movement of “Hungarian Rondo,” with the soloist being the winner of the AACB Young Artist competition), a whole band feature (“The Band Played On,” narrated by the mayor of Ann Arbor), and “Slava!” The first time I heard “Slava!” I was in ninth or tenth grade, and the wind ensemble played it before I was in wind ensemble. It’s a fun piece; the whole concert was a fun way to end the season.

I also baked a batch of snickerdoodles to use up eggs and butter, completed a jigsaw puzzle of the space shuttle launching, watched several movies (still working through the library's musical selection), read half a dozen books (nothing that great), cooked, cleaned, ate, slept, and did all the other necessary grad school-y things.

PS: The title is a play on the song “Since U Been Gone” which was in Pitch Perfect which was one of the movies I saw since I last posted.

Ann Arbor News

New ID card. Yellow instead of blue. Still gets me into the ChemE building at all hours and onto buses any time, not just weekends and after 6 pm on weekdays.

New basement lounge. Different: no couches, lockers, or fridge. Same: windowless, full of ChemEs and hints of despair, confusion, and lost dreams.

New desk in a shared cubicle. Cubicles = maximum grad student packing in minimum space. Office accessed by basement but has a ground level window next to me. Can’t find a power outlet along my wall of the cubicle, but there is an ethernet cable for the ethernet port my laptop doesn’t have.

Olin Hall (Cornell)

New ChemE building. Two of them, actually. One old, classic engineering building cinder-block and tile construction. Stairs could use polishing, and maybe some fake wood panelling. One new, shiny and glassy with its very own cafeteria.

The North Campus Research Complex (NCRC) (Michigan)

New standard issue dorm furniture. Still using under the bed as prime storage space. Still cooking everything in one pot and one frying pan. Still don’t own an umbrella.

New band. Went from concert band to pep band and back to concert band. A return to tuning, dynamics besides triple forte, time signatures involving sevens and nines, key signatures with more than two sharps or flats. The sixteenth note runs remain. Getting reacquainted with old pieces and composers. Also miss Cornell sports.

New church. Found one. Has fed and driven me more than I deserve.

McGraw Tower (and Uris Library) at Cornell

New clock tower. With carillon, not chimes. Sounds the quarter hour differently. Rarely plays anything recognizable. Also no Jennie McGraw Rag, Alma Mater, or “O Christmas Tree” Evening Song.

Lurie Tower (and engineering quad) at Michigan

New grocery store. Wegmans is better. But Kroger has a free item every Friday.

No new hat yet.