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.

Thanksgiving 2017

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

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

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

Happy Thanksgiving!

Taste of Home

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

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

Last day at Lindseth before renovation

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

Almost empty Lynah pre-hockey game

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

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

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

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.

Apple, apple, watermelon, strawberry

When I was first learning to play the clarinet, one of my music teachers told us how to count rhythms with fruit. It’s one of those funny things you do in band, like imagining you have a string attached to the top of your head that goes up to the ceiling and makes you sit up straight. But about the fruit. Words naturally have their own rhythms, some of which happen to coincide nicely with common musical rhythms. For example, “apple” is segmented into two even syllables that count off eighth notes neatly. We also use peach for quarter notes, pear for half notes, watermelon for sixteenth notes, strawberry for triplets, and blueberry for an eighth note followed by two sixteenth notes.¹

The title rhythm notated musically, verbally, and fruit-ically

The fruit was fun. Learning to play right hand C was not. The background you need to know for this involves two things: the key system of the clarinet and my hands. First, my hands. I am the size of a middle schooler. Second, the clarinet key system. The most commonly used key system is the Boehm system, and a handful of notes, including the C mentioned at the top of this paragraph, can be played either with your left or right pinky. When I first started playing in fourth grade, my hand was physically too small to reach the right hand C without much pain and struggle. I chose to avoid much pain and struggle by playing middle C with my left hand all the time. This continued throughout all of middle school and the first half of ninth grade. Then I started taking clarinet lessons.

During my very first lesson, my teacher asked me to play a two octave C scale and instantly noticed I was playing left hand C. She immediately started working to change that, because reasons. Actually, you need to be able to play both right and left hand C so that you can finger certain not uncommon runs and intervals.

Among the many ironies of my life, as I was being forced encouraged to play right hand C, we were preparing for our last concert of the year. One of our pieces was a medley of songs from The Little Mermaid. During “Under the Sea,” the third clarinets play an arpeggio in C, which is our home key². Except that the arpeggio goes from open G to middle C, a fingering change that moves from all holes open to all fingers on deck. I tried. I managed to get it a couple of times during rehearsal. Then I played the part with left hand C during the concert.

I’ve learned a lot of things in band over the years. I still remember my elementary school band teacher coming into the cafeteria at lunch time to sing solfege with the whole grade. Before every concert in middle school, we were reminded that early is on time. And then there’s all we learned about fingerings, working through tricky rhythms, breathing, shaping the line, balance, intonation, and right hand C. I play it like that by default now. Most of the time.

¹Five notes in a beat is “university,” six can be thought of as two triplets smashed together in one beat, and by the time you get to seven or more, you give up counting, fake lots of notes, and come in at the next downbeat.

²It’s our musical happy place. We have no sharps or flats.