dy/dx Day

For the first time since my matriculation at Cornell, I went to Slope Day as a willing participant. Part of the reason was that I figured I should go to Slope Day at least once, but the bigger part was that for the first time in four years, the main guest was not a rapper. I will listen to almost any kind of music, including country, folk, and techno Christmas music, but excluding rap and heavy metal. Anyway, the main feature was Walk the Moon, who does “Shut Up and Dance,” which is in the pep band folder, so I had to at least go for that song.

I started my day out by volunteering to help set up Slopefest, the carnival type event that takes place on Ho Plaza. The previous year, there had been games and food, but this year they decided to focus on the food to help keep people from drinking on an empty stomach. (Reasons for the switch – Budget cuts? Too many drunk beanbag tossers? A cornhole boycott?) Most of the food they were offering was sugar-laden, which I’m not sure is the best thing to eat with large quantities of alcohol, but I wasn’t in charge of the event.

After my shift carrying tables, setting up tents, and scooping five gallons of chocolate frosting, I returned to my apartment for a lunch featuring Fritos, a banana, and yogurt. Later that afternoon, I went back to the slope to see Walk the Moon. The plaza was significantly more crowded than when I had been there at 8:30 in the morning, and the best way to describe the slope was insane. I met a couple friends, then retreated to the far reaches of the slope where 1) I could hear things that weren’t extremely amped electric guitar or screaming, 2) I wouldn’t be trampled by drunk people, and 3) I couldn’t feel the bass.

View from the top of the slope

It was a nice hot sunny day for the middle of May in Ithaca so I spent over an hour on the slope listening to Walk the Moon. Funny story about the weather. The year before, the forecast predicted a major thunderstorm on Slope Day, right up until the night before the event. The Slope Day committee started to panic and make contingency plans for Slope Day to be held in Barton, which would have been terrible because Barton is a fraction of the size of the slope, and the amount of people and alcohol packed in there would have been awful. But they plan just in case. Then the day of Slope Day dawns. It’s a beautiful sunny day. Not a drop of rain falls all day.

This year, this was the weather forecast:

Weather forecast for Ithaca the week of Slope Day

It happened pretty close to what they predicted, but what makes it so amusing to me is that on Saturday (5/7), AAIV had our field day outside at Treman State Park. On Monday (5/9), the pep band had our last rehearsal of the year, which is always a series of outdoor concerts around campus. Thursday (5/12) was Slope Day. In between every one of these outdoor events, it rained. So thanks, weather machine. But no thanks for what happened at graduation. That would be coming up in just a couple short weeks.

There and Back Again on the Cayuga Trail

After our summer adventure on the Cayuga Trail, my roommate (the one also known as my partner in crime adventure) and I thought about it, and decided that a great follow up would be to hike the Cayuga Trail both ways in a single day. Seventeen miles is totally doable for a day hike. As the days and weeks of spring semester passed, we needed to pick a date if we were going to complete our epic hike before graduation. We decided on some time during spring break, watched the temperature and chance of rain, and finally selected Wednesday, March 30^th, for our feat.

We set out early, arriving at the trailhead shortly after eight. It was cool, an awkward temperature that was a little chilly for standing around but too warm for layers once we started walking. It was one-and-a-half jacket temperature. We had experienced the first half of the hike in the summer, in much warmer and more mosquito-ridden conditions, and so made our way across campus, through the botanical garden and arboretum, to the bluffs and Monkey Run, without incident. The trail was surprisingly wet, considering all the snow on campus had been melted for awhile, we hadn’t gotten much rain recently, and we were often on steep hillsides that shouldn’t have retained so much moisture.

The bluffs.  Compare to the picture from summer's post, which is much greener.

Like in the summer, we didn’t see many other people, just a couple around the plantations and a few more at the Monkey Run section of the trail. I wasn’t complaining; if Taughannock in the summer is Disney World, the Cayuga Trail is a random ichthyology museum, and maybe I happen to like fish a lot.

We hiked to the end of the trail before having our sandwiches and fruit picnic lunch on the grass. After eating, halfway done with our task, we headed back toward Cornell through Monkey Run, which actually has some cool trees. Yes, trees. It’s not one tree in particular, but all of them together – they’re all very straight and tall and don’t have branches until pretty high up. It’s more impressive in person, but here’s a picture.

The Monkey Run trees

Following the exciting trees, we returned to the creek and meandered our way back to Cornell. Weird sighting of the day: baby in a shoe. I’m not kidding.

Baby in a shoe

Finally, as afternoon turned into evening, we arrived back at the start of the trail. Not where we had started. That was another mile away. We took some celebratory pictures, then dragged ourselves back to campus. From there, I returned to my apartment, put on a cleaner shirt and washed some of the grime out from under my fingernails, met my partner in crime adventure and another friend, and we walked (yes, walked, on our moderately grumpy feet) another mile to the Commons to eat giant burgers. We did take the bus back up the hill to campus.

All told, we walked the seventeen miles of the Cayuga Trail, out and back, in about eight and a half hours. According to the time stamps on my photos, we hiked the “back” portion about an hour faster than the “out” part. Adding the miles I had to walk to and from the trailhead and to the Commons, I covered more than twenty miles by foot, my current record for a single day. So the Cayuga Trail both ways in a day is one item that can be struck off my to-be-hiked list; other hikes of interest include the rim to rim at the Grand Canyon, Katahdin, and the 4000 footers in the White Mountains. Guess it’s time to start planning. . . .

There . . . (East end of the trail)

. . . And back again (West end)

Four Hundred Seventy-Something

After four years of the Alma Mater, Davy, heckling, fouls, penalties, goals, 80s ska punk (“Take on Me”), and 80s rock (the rest of the music), I finished my time with the Cornell Big Red Pep Band with somewhere around 470 points, short of the 500 point mark, but a lot of pep band nonetheless. If my record keeping is accurate, I attended more than 250 events, almost 200 of which were rehearsals and hockey games. The remaining sixty events include field hockey, tennis, basketball, baseball, softball, wrestling, lacrosse, sprint football, volleyball, and a wedding reception.

As I mentioned in a previous post, besides ChemE, pep band was really the only other thing I did week in and week out all four years. There were some great moments, and stories to tell from the times that weren’t so great. Some that come to mind –

– The time we were at sprint football and it had been drizzling on and off but the manager finally decided to move us to a covered part of the stands. As we were moving, it started to pour, and continued to pour for the rest of the game. Good decision.

– The time we went to volleyball and the team lost the first two sets, then won the next two, so we had to stay for a full five-set match, then they lost the last set.

– The time the men’s basketball team clawed their way back from a pretty bad points deficit to tie the game in the final seconds, making us stay for overtime, then lost in overtime.

– The year the women’s hockey team kept scoring last-minute goals to advance through the playoffs.

– The men’s hockey game where two of the refs’ last names were Kitchen and Drain and it made the band’s night. Also telling Colgate (the school) that Crest (the toothpaste) is better, reminding Princeton they’re in New Jersey, and bringing up grade inflation and cheating scandals against Harvard whenever possible (actually winning against them is an additional bonus).

– Trying to figure out wrestling.

– My only overnight away trip with the band to Dartmouth and Harvard the year Boston got buried in snow and watching “Love Story” on the bus.

So I saw a lot of sports, and played a lot of music and had a lot of fun. If anyone’s interested, here’s a table with events listed per sport and year.

Pep band events charted by year and sport.  Not shown - 3 red/white hockey games,
which kick off the hockey season and involve both the men's and women's hockey teams.

Last pep band rehearsal.  Picture taken from somewhere on Facebook.

Trockenbeerenauslese

My favorite word from the wines class I took during my last semester at Cornell is trockenbeerenauslese. It’s the designation for the wine with the highest sugar content in Germany, where classifications are based on ripeness of the grapes when they’re picked. Yes, Cornell has a class all about wine, and yes, we drank in class.

It wasn’t all drinking all the time though. We learned about classification systems, labeling laws, signature varietals, characteristics of wine, and how to open a bottle of champagne, among other things. Most weeks we sampled an average of six wines by region, except for champagne/sparkling wine, which was saved for the last week of class. It was a good fitting end to the last class of my undergrad career.

Having sampled several dozen wines over the course of the semester, I learned about my taste in wine without having to commit to buying any full bottle of wine. Because I don’t like spending real money. Here non-real money mostly refers to BRB’s*, which are purchased with real money, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, I found out that I dislike the majority of red wines. Interestingly, the red wines I liked best were from Washington and Oregon. Their taste is said to be between the minerality of French reds and the fruitiness of California reds, both of which I didn’t care for. I also didn’t like the aged red wine that we tried. (Port cherry sundaes, however, are delicious.)

So it’s white wines for me. Thanks specifically to this wines class, Cornell produces a disproportionate number of Riesling drinkers. Riesling is the signature German white varietal, and is mainly known for being too sweet for “serious wine connoisseurs,” but it’s also grown in the Finger Lakes, and dry or sweet, I like it. I also enjoy Gewurztraminer (another German varietal and another great word) and New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, known for its notes of gooseberry. Chardonnay is also more than drinkable, though its main taste is usually white wine. (Except it’s apparently the thing to complain about over-oaked California Chardonnays.)

And that’s the story of how I came to drink white wine and become a Riesling fan. Send wine to Actually, the grocery store closest to me has a wine and beer license so I can just go buy my own wine. Actually, I don’t drink that much; I have part of a pack of beer that’s been sitting in my closet untouched for about a month now. Actually, my beer drinking is a whole other story. Maybe some other time.

*Cornell meal plan money that can be spent at a la carte dining places around campus. People like to try and pay for anything they can in BRB’s. Examples: Collegetown restaurants, groceries, parking tickets, Amazon orders.

Things I Learned at Cornell: Ice is Hard

In some of the many classes I attended in Cornell’s lecture halls, we learned about water. We saw how the density of water decreases when it freezes on its phase diagram, then were reintroduced to that phase diagram in thermodynamics. Turns out there are over ten types of ice. We calculated hydrostatic forces and surface tension and drew McCabe-Thiele diagrams for the distillation of water and methanol. There are, however, some things that can only be learned through real life experience. And through firsthand experience, I learned all about how ice is hard. Plus cold.

Before attending Cornell, I could follow along with any of the commonly played sports but really only cared about soccer (and in particular the hapless New England Revolution). Then I arrived at Cornell, joined the pep band, and went to 94 hockey games in four years. For all the skating (and shooting, passing, name calling, body checking, and fighting) I watched, it took until the end of fall semester of my junior year to get me out onto the ice in skates. The event was a skate night with the hockey teams, and many of the pep band members went. So I went too, and did something vaguely reminiscent of skating. I had fun, and and wouldn’t you know it, every time I fell the ice provided a nice, hard, unyielding cushion to land on.

Open skate at Lynah

Another year passed, and senior year was well underway when I returned to Lynah to skate for the second time in my life. A few friends and I had talked about having fun during the year since it would be our last chance to do a lot of things at Cornell. Apparently falling half a dozen times, slide tackling the boards on skates, and a blister that took weeks to heal weren’t enough to deter me from skating, because ice skating was on my list of things to do before graduating and leaving Ithaca.

I met one of my former roommates at Lynah on a Sunday night for open skate and fell slightly less. Something else I got from that night is perhaps the only picture of said roommate and I where we both look fairly normal. I also saw several fellow ChemEs taking a break from Olin, because sometimes you have to forgo perfect reactor dimensions and separation purities for your sanity’s sake and go glide in circles for a couple hours.

A couple weeks later I got the chance to skate at Yost Arena at the University of Michigan while I was there for the engineering grad school visit weekend. The day I returned to Ithaca, I skated at Lynah for the last time as an undergrad. And I didn’t fall once. But not to worry, I fully remember my lesson: ice is hard.