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

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

– assembling two 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– watching Jeopardy!

– eating

– eating exactly one box of blueberry Chex

– sleeping

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

Homeward Bound

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

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

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

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

Tuba Christmas

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

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

Tuba Christmas at the Farmers' Market Pavilion

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

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

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

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.

2019 Life of an Engineer book awards

Honestly, I didn’t read that much last year. I read less than half the number of books as movies I watched, which doesn’t even include the 7.5 seasons of The Office I watched on Netflix. But there were still a few good books I wanted to mention.

Best nonfiction:
In this basically uncontested¹ category, the winner is In Search of Bacchus, by George M. Taber². In this book, Taber visits twelve of the major wine producing countries around the world and gives a brief overview of the development of the wine industry, including wine production and tourism, in each. The book’s a little niche but gives a decent overview of some of the big players in the wine market. I actually think it would have gone well with the wines class I took at Cornell.

¹Apparently the only other nonfiction I read last year was two nature photography books.
²Taber is also the author of Judgment of Paris, which I read in 2017 and would also recommend.

Best fiction:

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan. When Rachel Chu travels with her boyfriend Nick Young to Singapore for his childhood friend Colin Khoo’s wedding, she meets his family of crazy rich Asians and enters a whole new world. I both read the book and watched the movie last year, and I liked both for different reasons. The movie was a visual spectacle (I expected nothing less) and the book was a tangled web of siblings, cousins, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, friends, roommates, children, grandchildren, and everything else in between. It’s a light read, but fun, and the interactions between the scores of characters are highly entertaining.

Head On, by John Scalzi. Crime mystery novel set in an alternate or near-future Earth where members of the population stricken by a flu-like virus become consciously “locked in” to their bodies and operate humanoid robots (threeps) to navigate the physical world. The book follows FBI agents Leslie Vann and Chris Shane as they investigate the death/possible murder of a Hilketa player. Hilketa is a new sport played by humans controlling sword- and hammer-wielding threeps. The goal is to decapitate a specific opponent and carry their head through the goalposts. The concept and characters are interesting and the plot is plausible enough.

Best graphic novel:
Hey, Kiddo, by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. A graphic memoir based on the author’s experiences being raised by his grandparents while his heroin-addicted single mother comes and goes as she spends time in and out of rehab. As he grows up, his grandparents provide some measure of stability and encourage his artistic pursuits. It’s a story of growing up amidst addiction and navigating often shifting familial relationships.

Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson. The evil Lord Ballister Blackheart has the services of shapeshifter Nimona thrust upon him as he seeks to avenge himself against his nemesis Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin. Havok reigns as Blackheart and Nimona’s plots don’t always go according to plan, and though the science fiction/fantasy parody mashup mainly remains light on the surface, there’s a depth to the story as well.

Best young adult fiction:
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, by Jenny Han. (Also P.S. I Still Love You, and Always and Forever, Lara Jean, the other two books in the trilogy.) The plot centers on what happens after Lara Jean’s private, never-to-be-sent love letters get sent to various boys from her past and present. At its heart, it’s a boy meets girl story, but it’s also about friendship, family, growing up, and enough other things that it’s not just bearable to read, but pretty good.