Like an exoskeleton

Tuesday, day four of our journey, was a ( teary farewell to Gatlinburg )

Why the hell do I ( enjoy hiking so much? )

As Andrew is also documenting on his new hiking blog, he and I have spent the last two days ( on the road South. )

Onward!

Stuff like this is worrying me more and more as my trip to China gets closer. Lake Tai is the source of Taihu stone used in Chinese gardens for millennia, and it was once a prime tourist destination. Now it's become so polluted that rice farmers don't dare touch the water without gloves since it makes their skin peel. What can we do about institutionalized negligence in such an ecologically and historically important part of the world? For so long the mantra in China has been economic growth before anything else... it's frustrating and depressing to read stuff like this.

...but if I were to make a fundraising video, I wouldn't make it a priority to scare small children. Jimmy, your eyes and hands terrify me!

So I sit down at my desk and check the email to find this fun little tidbit:



So it looks like somebody ripped me off for just over a hundred dollars. Fan fricking tastic. The mess of bullet points eBay tries to pass off as "instructions" leave me totally confused. There's a list of things to do based on how I paid: the first item is for PayPal, which is how I paid, the second is for checks, the third is for credit cards... but wait! I paid through PayPal with a credit card! Which do I do? And then the fifth bullet is a different set of instructions for PayPal! There's even a few typos... I double-checked that the message was actually from eBay just to be sure that some twelve-year-old who can't spell "copy and paste" wasn't trying to dupe me. Why do the eBay help pages have broken links? This is ridiculous! They won't even let me file a complaint until ten days have elapsed... so HOW THE HELL am I supposed to even do THAT much?!


But then I found this. And it was all better.

The drought that cut Minnehaha Falls down to a trickle and kept my umbrella dry all summer has finally broken in a pretty spectacular way. The worst of the storm hit just as I was walking the dog. The million-dollar playhouse someone is building at the corner sourced a vast vulgar smear of reddish runoff streaking across the road, and the blacktop on a hill just past that was a rippling whirling rapids racing past our feet. Huge droplets crashed down just as we ventured from tree cover in a cacophonous roar. As we looped back the neighbor's puppy bounded out of their garage and streaked over to say hello, as the damp, apologetic owner tailed him in her soon-soaking cotton sweatshirt. The puppy turned it into a game, and I was too giddy from the rain to be angry at her for not keeping him leashed.

I've been biting my tongue trying not to brag but I can't stand it anymore. On Saturday I picked up one of ( these )

but I'm OK. I just went over there and took some pictures of the wreckage. Sounds like about 50 cars were on the bridge at the time. Fortunately none of my family or close friends was on the bridge.

This evening I went to see Low at the Weisman Art Museum, a Gehry-designed piece of splintering shimmering architecture on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. I took a few ( pictures. )

In the style of last summer's post, I present ( another bike ride!! )

I move into Comstock Hall tomorrow, and orientation is Monday morning. There's someone in the engineering program from Swarthmore, a Christina '09, who I think might be one of my lab TA-ees. I know my roommate's name, although I haven't taken the initiative to email him yet, and I think it would be a bit silly to email him at this point. He's from Villanova, so we three will be maintaining the Philly contingent. I'm pretty psyched to be downtown, with a car, a bike, and a bit of disposable income, meeting a whole slew of new people from all over the US.

Holy shit, am I out of shape. I just biked maybe five miles tops, and I ache ( all over. )

As it stands, we're scheduled to go on eleventh out of 15, which will put us at about 11:00 PM. I've asked Ben (the guy in charge) whether he'd mind us moving up a bit, so if you want to see us, come at around 10 or 10:15 just in case.

The Psych department has hired me to develop a computer-controlled visual stimulus over the next month or so. Frank Durgin has all kinds of awesome shit sitting around his lab, like 3D headsets, motion-tracking cameras, and dual-widescreen monitor setups, and he seems like a really cool guy. I'm psyched (ha, ha) to have my first real engineering job; I never thought Shot-for-Shot would turn out to be a business networking forum (Jeremy Freeman Fuck Yeah!). They also want me to fix a treadmill on wheels.

The Jolly Rogers are going to perform this Friday at the Rose Tattoo Cafe concert. Start time is usually 9 PM, although we haven't gotten a confirmation email yet. I'll keep you all updated when the schedule comes out.

I'm in Whistler, slopeside, having finished the last of three days of massive boarding in huge powder. Totally radical. I'll hopefully post more tonight at my aunt's, when I don't have eight minutes left before the resort's 24-hour fifteen-dollar wireless internet extortion exercise expires.

This morning, as I was stopping my alarm, I bashed my forehead against the corner of my desk. Look where it landed:



It looks more impressive in real life. The rain changed to snow today, too. I think it's a sign.