GRE- Revanquished!

Let cries of rejoicing reach to the heavens- the dreaded Physics GRE has been vanquished once more! I felt much better about this one, as the answers kept flowing and if I didn't know something I really didn't know it, so didn't even hazard the guess.

But let's skip back a few days from that shall we, and I shall regale with the full tale. A few weeks ago I found out that a) Rachel had signed up for the test in Northfield due to justified paranoia, b) I had stupidly forgotten this and signed myself up for the test in St. Paul, and c) it was too late to switch test centers as the deadline for this was before we had not taken the October test.

But all was well- it was just one more symptom of the test hating us, no? I would drive Rachel down on Friday evening and pick her up again on Saturday. No biggy. Rachel made a reservation at the Archer House and all seemed well... until her hotel accidentally lost her accommodations. This lead to approximately two hours of us sitting worried and depressed in Northfield waiting for the staff to find another suitably close hotel room. Of course, being Northfield, most of the rooms were booked in every single hotel in town. The only relatively close hotel that could be found was a Motel 8 way down the road, and the only rooms that they had were smoking rooms. Rachel rightly got a taxi out of the deal to transport her to the test the next morning and I had to head out as I had not yet found my testing location, and I am paranoid.

After finding my testing site I called Rachel who, with our freaky ESP in full swing, was calling me at exactly the same time, causing us to leave messages on each others phones. Apparently the management had forgotten to tell her that they had another room with a jacuzzi and "a bed large enough to sleep 6 people" according to Rach, that was non-smoking. Huzzah!

So the test came... in St Paul they not only had signs this time (see above) but there were plenty of people exactly where the test was! We were all jam packed into one lecture hall for three hours and released, with at least my own self in triumphant pride. I proceeded to head to the Bulldog for a victory feast of a steakhouse burger, truffle fries (yes, TRUFFLE fries) and a ridiculous Belgian beer called Kwak, as pictured here:

 

Around dinner time I picked up Rachel from Northfield and we had a great chat with Alison, one of the people responsible for the theaters at Carleton and someone with whom I had worked closely while involved in the Carleton theater scene. We then headed northwards, were treated to drinks and dessert by our gracious landlord and celebrated the rest of the night with friends at a week-late Halloween party.

Now I am in the midst of deciding my future... updates to come as they do.

Until next time...

"Trusting in Providence is a very good thing, as far as it goes, but a chart and a compass are worth six of it, any time. Statistics have shown this to be true."
- remark written in manuscript for Life on the Mississippi. Quoted in Mark Twain and Human Nature by Tom Quirk (Univ. of Mo. Press, 2007).

ETS, among other things...

So as you may have guessed from the lack of updates, I've been a bit busy these past couple of weeks. What with the GRE not actually happening, trying to get two classes off the ground and getting profs to give me recommendations life has been busy.

Most of the reason that I haven't posted in a while is that me and my digital camera haven't been on the computer together and I really wanted to get some pics up about the Robots vs. Humans party that happened... jeez, 2 weekends ago now? Oy... But, my life has been very interesting in the meantime, I assure you. Some, errm, "highlights" of the past couple of weeks:

-Studying for the GRE. It's not fun, especially when they give you the wrong address causing you to miss the test and have to wait a month to take it again. Apparently they switched addresses at some point but forgot to tell us that the new location was in St Paul, not Minneapolis. Now Rachel and I are going to go down to Carleton to make sure that we don't miss the next one. I'm still bummed about not getting it done, but hopefully I'll be able to do better now, so it's not all downside.

- Gaming. The past two sessions have been very entertaining (well, at least for me, but that doesn't take too much). I was really tired of gaming before taking the two week hiatus but now I feel much more refreshed and on top of things. Last night's escapades involved roleplaying nerds being attacked by paper monstrosities, Russell's character losing his vocabulary and having to do a combination of charades and pictionary to have the other characters understand his instructions, and Ben's character convincing a geek that he was, in fact, a 12th level dwarf.

- The Wire. It is the cop drama that was finally done right. Every character is interesting even if they are all a$$holes. Very good (if confusing at times with all the nicknames), and a definite recommend.

- Admission Possible Party. I think this was the first one that I really enjoyed. Most of the time when I go to a party where I don't know anybody I feel really uncomfortable, but this party was different. Rach and I showed up midway through a game while there were still only a handful of people there. It was a good party game and segued into an even better one, at which point more people showed up and the party started getting better. The more communal feel at the beginning, plus the nostalgia-tastic music selection all came together to make me feel much more comfortable and have more fun. Yay!

- Classes. I have them, or at least theoretically I do. Friday morning I had 1 person signed up for basic computer, which started today. After sitting in the hallway for a sign up sheet for an hour I had 15 more people signed up and 5 more for my math class, a feat unparalleled in its scope. But, even though I sent out reminders on Saturday I still had 0/4 show up for my class this morning and only 1 out of the 6 people I had signed up for math class show up this afternoon. When I called they all claimed that today was no good. Oy... Wednesday will hopefully be a redo, but now I'm a day behind. Hope they like coming on Saturdays...

Well, that's enough griping for now. Hopefully I'll have the pics from the Robots Vs Humans party up pretty soon, but for now I must get back to work.

Until next time...

"The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself had done. There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life - life's "experiences" - are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side. "
- "Taming the Bicycle" by Mark Twain

C'mon, get down, get down with the sick-ness...

So I've been sick for the past couple of days, causing me to leave work early on Wednesday and not show up on Thursday. Don't worry, it's not the swine flu, just some kind of throat irritating, stuffy nose making, headache inducing bug. I'm on the sunny side now, so everything should be fine. Rachel was down with it too, but she's also feeling well enough to work now.

The Physics and English GREs are this Saturday, so tensions are starting to run high over here. When taking a break from studying means working on grad school applications, you know that something is wrong. But still, Rach and I think we can get it all done in time. My plan is to finish reviewing and correcting my mistakes from the last practice test, take another one tomorrow, rinse and repeat. Hopefully that'll be enough to push my score up another 50 or 60 points or so.

After the GRE we are looking forward to letting loose and going crazy with such events as a book fair, the Zombie Pub Crawl and the inaugural big Admission Possible party. Should be some interesting pics up about that come this weekend.

Until next time...

"Supposing is good, but finding out is better."


- Mark Twain in Eruption; Mark Twain's Autobiography

Too many things!

The above is a picture of SKROLBORG- the Viking Art of the Axe. See bottom of post for the show it is from. And COME!

Last week my dad and bro drove up from New York on motorcycles to hang out with me. It was definitely a ton of fun. As Rachel put it, "I have never eaten so well in my life!" Mostly because we decided that an extended gastro tour was the best way to show my fam around the Cities. Very strangely they appeared for the exact same time as we had the coldest days of July on record... heck, a lot of the pics around Lake Calhoun looked like it was winter out.

Awesome things we did included:
-visited many bars including the Muddy Pig
-went to the Science museum and saw Harry Potter (mini-review: very good. Hilarious, suspenseful and badass at all the correct points. Go see it.)
-went to the Tour de Fat, a bike and beer themed festival put on by Fat Tire
-saw a great Blues band at Famous Dave's
-not only convinced Siegi that Minneapolis exists, but that it is a great place to live (woohoo veggie restaurants and Green Way!)

Troubling things in my life include grad school hunting, GRE studying and making sure that I get all of my hours in for Americorps. Grad school hunting is proving to be scarier than when I last tried it, as now I'm trying to find schools that have both Physics Education and Physics courses, as I'm not sure which would help me out more right now. That question makes it all the scarier, as I'm actually at the point where I need to decide what I want to do for the rest of my life, a question that I have avoided for nigh on 23 years. But that could (and will) probably be a post of its own... For Americorps I need to do approximately 15 more hours per week than I normally do to get everything done in time (took one too many vacations I think...). I think I have enough work that I could do to get it all done, but it means giving up every day except maybe Sunday to work to get it all done on time. And the GRE sits there, mocking me and my lack of time.



I'm also currently involved with Panda Sandwich and WTF In the Garden of Eden. This relapse into doing tech is devouring my life, so come and see it on Wednesday through Saturday, doors open at 7 and show at 7:30. Is at Bedlam Theatre. Be there.

p.s. And yes mom, I am able to do tech and do all my other stuff as well. It just means I have no free time. *sigh*

Until next time...

"Suicide is the only sane thing the young or old ever do in this life."
- quoted in Mark Twain: God' s Fool, Hamlin Hill

Victory In Our Time

So, I return the blog triumphant! The foul GRE has been slain, my computer has been restored to me, and the geekiness has begun to flow once again as water. Life is good.

The GRE: The couple of nights before it I couldn't get sleep to save my life, so I thanked the Lord on High for allowing me 10 hours the night before the test. I showed up to the test bright and early along with all of the other test takers, only to find out that a) the place we were supposed to take the test was huge, and b) there were no indications as to where the test was to take place. We panicked for a little bit, but eventually the proctors showed up and we were able to find our rooms. I was a bit nervous at first, but as I got into the test everything became calm. Sure I didn't know how to answer some of the questions, and I had to guess on quite a few, but they were educated guesses and I knew how to do many others. So I left the test thinking that I at least did well enough to get into grad school, and really that's the point, now isn't it?

Life after the GRE has been beautiful. I got pleasantly smashed throughout Saturday afternoon and evening, and on Sunday Rach and I got to go do a reading of Teagle's new work, "Pain in the Neck." The play is about a bisexual and lesbian girl in a relationship, their problems, and the maybe-vampire that is preying on one of them. There were some pretty tripped out fairy-tale sequences, a Co-op employee who is probably a superhero in her time off, and plenty of that classically witty Teagle dialogue. It had some problems, but for a first attempt it was pretty damn brilliant. Good job Teagler.

I've also begun falling into the black hole of geekiness and money that is Warhammer 40k- damn you Pechous! I've assembled my first box of Imperial Guard (men with flak vests and flashlights vs untold horrors from beyond time and space- go Joe!) and am eagerly awaiting a Poorly Planned Purchase that I made on eBay the night before the test (I was REALLY exhausted that night and impulse purchases of several hundred dollars seemed to calm me down... thank God I didn't win more than one auction). I will probably be starting another blog detailing my adventures in painting and battling with my army, so you won't have to worry about too much of that stuff filling up the hallowed pages of this blog (I mean, there's not a lot of geeky stuff in here, right? Right.). Suffice to say that I am having far too much fun posing my little men and am very excited about fielding a fully painted and built force in a couple of weeks.

Also, my new RPG campaign is going to start up towards the end of this month. Once again, there is another site where you will be able to follow on that vein if you wish called Obsidian Portal. It's an awesome site that allows me to organize everything for an rpg and present as much as I want to to my players. I had a tremendous burst of productivity on it at work because...

Work:... all of the computers at my company are down! Noone can log in, so we are all using my lab computers/laptops to survive. Unfortunately most of my completed work is on my compy, so I used this as an excuse to avoid work until the system is back up again. It's kind of hilarious actually, because the only computers that work in our entire multi-state company are the computers in the residential computer labs. Apparently IT is trying to fix the problem right now, but seeing their past progress I'd say they have a while before it gets fixed. Oh well, plenty of time for me to catch up on all of the stuff that I've missed since the GRE started. And besides, for most of my stuff I don't need any prep- an internet connection is enough to get my students all in a row and signed up for their programs. I'll do a post a bit later on the cool new programs that I'm doing nowadays.

And one final note for now, as I'm getting a bit tired of typing: it's BEAUTIFUL outside! It's been 50s for a week now, and next week it's supposed to be 60s! Man Alive I am excited for Spring! Speaking of which, watch out for an extra-special Easter post: there's going to be a lot of fun happening on Sunday!

Until next time...

"The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people."
- "The Enemy Conquered; or, Love Triumphant" by Mark Twain

Note of Absence

As you may have noticed, I haven't updated the blog in a while. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, my laptop's screen is cracked and is being sent away to be fixed. Two, I've got my huge test coming up in two weeks and I'm starting to freak out. So, after April 4th and after my computer gets better I'll be back in full force, but until then updates will be sporadic at best.

So, wish me luck, and I'll be back!

Return of the Blog

Wow, it's been a while since I updated this thing, hasn't it? Well, most of the reason for that was me studying for the physics GRE which absorbed my nights for quite some time. The GRE was last Saturday... but I didn't take it. The why of this is because ETS apparently never got the money for my test and never bothered to tell me about that until I called on the Thursday before the test asking for my registration ticket. Now, granted, there were a few things I could have done here- like, realize that there was such a thing as a registration ticket in the first place and check my credit card statements. But still... couldn't you send me an e-mail besides the confirmation e-mail that I thought guaranteed me a place at the test saying that you never got my money? Oyveh Maria...

Anyway, with that out of the way until freaking APRIL (grumble grumble death plot grumble) I now have a lot of free time on my hands. Some of this I have spent cooking things, and other parts of it doing geekier things... like brushing up on Warhammer 40K.

Now, before any of you freak out that I'm going to be broke playing this game, two things:
1. I'm already broke, how much worse can it get, and
2. I'm not actually buying any pieces, codices or books; just borrowing, proxying, and pirating like a good boy.
Since Russell is already gung-ho for Abaddon Chaos and Pechous wants to be the Space Marines I am forced to play with the Eldar, aka Space Elves. (No, seriously, they even have pointy ears and everything!) So I stole the codex from online and looked up army lists, deciding on Alaitoc because I love stealth and snipers, and they have them aplenty.

Another thing that I have done with my life recently is go up to Duluth to go see Rachel's parents and get my snow tires. While we were there the Carrolls took us out to Timberlodge Steakhouse (Would you like to load your [insert already kind of unhealthy food item here] with [insert incredibly unhealthy sounding dressing/food item here]?) and to a concert featuring the British Quartet Cantabile.

They were described to us as a "singing/comedy group", which sounded kind of wierd, but describes them perfectly. Basically they are an accapella group that has toured all over the world singing songs quite beautifully and/or disrespectfully, and ESPECIALLY if the songs in question don't have any words. For instance, their first song was a medley of a bunch of famous orchestral pieces where they sang all of the different instruments at once, mocking it along the way. They also sang some really beautiful pieces without a hint of irony; one that especially got to me was "Bist Du Bei Mir." It's a German song that can be sung in three or four parts, and I have sung it many times in my youth with my brothers and my church choir, and I also sung it the last time I saw my great-grandmother alive. Hearing it sung excellently before a crowd was really awesome and definitely put a smile to my face as I tried to sing along.

However, what was probably their best piece was also the last of their program, where they took a Frank Sinatra song and sang it as if it were a broken record, skipping their words, changing keys in wierd ways and speeding up and slowing down at random. All in all, hilarious.

Well, I don't want to bore you too much, so I'll talk about how work has been going in my next post. Again, sorry about the delay in posting, and hopefully I'll be able to keep more in touch from now on.

Until next time...

"The reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost."
- Letter to James Redpath from Mark Twain, 6/15/1871

This weekend was filled with physics studying and geekitude. I'm starting to rework my way through my intro physics text to see if I remember all of the formulae for the chapters and am doing fairly well so far (though the occasional question with 2 variables still throws me for a loop...). I also got to play Arkham Horror on Saturday at Matt's game shop (we won, though it was close; Shub-Niggorath, Mother of Goatspawn, is one tough lady to take down), and continued the Vampire campaign on Sunday. I didn't get to do much in the latter besides a) find out that my patron was dead, b) negotiate some business deals, and c) become Granada's new head banker. Oh, what fun I will have...

Today was kind of my first real day of work in that I had some training but at the end of the day actually got to open my lab for the first time. It was a pretty easy day, as it was an adults-only lab and few people came, but I think I acquitted myself pretty well. I also got to work on my schedule, which is looking pretty sweet. I now have Sundays, Tuesdays, and every other Friday off, and work 5 hours on Saturday. I also got all of my vacation days settled through Thanksgiving, which is another relief. Tomorrow I try to run an open lab for two hours, which means lots of rowdy kids. Hopefully I will be able to control them well enough to avoid a complete devolution into chaos...

Well, that's about it. I just have some physics studying and some searching for entertaining programs for kids for tomorrow's lab, so I better get to it. Until next time...

"What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it."
-Mark Twain

The End of the Week, and Physics

Hey all, welcome back. Thursday was pretty low key at work- I pretty much just sat in my office rearranging things and looking through the massive piles of binders for useful tidbits of information. There were definitely some, like lesson plans for teaching basic comp 1 and 2 and examples of registration forms. So, I'm a little bit less scared now, and I got an idea to request a grant for a projector so I can lead classes by showing them examples on my laptop on the big screen. Should be cool.

That evening we had a massive undertaking to finish all of the lamb that was left (about half a gallon). We headed out to Trader Joe's (my first one!) to do shopping. That place is pretty cool, and has lots of really, really tasty looking things... like peanut butter filled pretzels. Totally started eating those as soon as I got home. They also have beer and wine, and a "make your own 6-pack" deal which I took advantage of. Despite all of these glowing aspects, I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of Trader Joe's. Sure it has a lot of organic foods and what not, but it also has one of the largest carbon footprints that I've ever seen, as everything is brought in from one of the two coasts. I mean, for the fresh vegetables and fruits I can understand as winter is coming (a moment of silence for poor Eddard...), but some of the other stuff just makes no sense. Where it really hit home was the beer. I'm generally the most eco-conscious when I'm buying beer and try to buy local, so it was with a bit of shock that I realized that all of the beer I had bought was from one of the two coasts. This probably wouldn't bother a lot of people, but it does for me. That and the fact that my pumpkin ale had "natural pumpkin flavor added..." bastards.

Anyway, Jason used the ingredients to make lamb green marsala (masala? I dunno...), my favorite Indian food, and it was good.

Friday I had more CTEP orientation, this time with our supervisors. It was actually really cool, as what we did most of the time was discuss technology issues and how they are going to change in the coming decades, as well as the ecological impact of these developments. Along these lines was a really cool video that we saw, which I provide the link to here, which gives glimpses of exactly how much technology is changing the world and what the future may bring. There is a discussion site for the movie that can be found here. I haven't checked the latter out too much yet, but if it's anything like our discussions after the movie it should be pretty cool. At the end of orientation we all said the Americorps pledge to "Get Things Done for America!", though about half of us read "persevere" as "preserve." Oh reading, what hast thou don'st?

That evening I took my first practice Physics GRE... and got about a 3rd right. Oy... yeah, there's gonna need to be a lotta studyin' before I can take this thing, especially in the memorizing of formulae and the refiring of my maths centers. I mean, seriously, is calc that hard that I can't do it reliably anymore? Oyveh Maria...

Well, that's about it. Until next time...

"We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years."
- Mark Twain's Notebook #22, Spring 1883 - Sept. 1884

Of Batman and other things...

So, first off, go and look up Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog RIGHT NOW. It will only be up until the 20th and then will disappear forever, and you will miss the cutest tale of a super-villain just trying to make the world a better place through nefarious deeds. And his nemesis is played by the guy who played Malcolm Reynolds and is called Captain Hammer. And did I mention it's a musical?


So, on other fronts, I've been watching a lot of Batman recently to prep for Dark Knight (woo!). It had been a while since I saw the first two Batman movies (starring Michael Keaton), so it was really interesting to watch them again with a better understanding of the whole mythos. First of all, the movies now strike me as incredibly Tim Burton-esque (not surprising as he directed both of them). The sets are all kind of twisted, the characters pretty gimicky and deranged, but none of it in a really threatening kind of way. I mean, the Joker is definitely psychotic, but he plays up the clown-themed super-villain angle quite a bit. I mean, seriously, who uses a 10 foot long extendable boxing glove anymore? Conversely the Penguin traded in all of his gentlemanly ways to become a monster (and, coincidentally, his gang looks a lot like the Joker's).

Another strange thing about those early Batman movies is Batman's willingness to kill. Seriously, in the first movie Keaton kills almost every single villain he comes across and his entire motivation is violent revenge. Heck, he flies the damn batplane into a crowded square and launches missiles and heavy machine gun fire! And even though he is at least as psychotic as the Joker by the end of the movie, the Commissioner simply says "yay Batman! He's a good guy!" It just seemed to me that Batman would at least seem as dangerous to the population as the Joker; he just happens to choose victims that are villains. Also, if you're going to kill them anyway, why not use a gun?

But still, they were pretty entertaining movies and helped me to get more in the mood for Dark Knight (like I needed any help... heck, I'm printing out "I believe in Harvey Dent" posters for my car... [side note: in the first Batman movie, Harvey Dent was played by Billy Dee Williams, aka Lando Calrissian. Crazy world, huh?]).

I'll be altering a bit of my Heffenzopf baking post to include some information that I forgot the first time around, so be sure to check back there if you have the recipe and want to try to make some. Also, I found two really good sites for physics GRE help- http://www.physicsgre.com/ and http://grephysics.net/ans/

That's about it for now; I should have my photos from NH up within the hour.
edit: they are at http://picasaweb.google.com/herzlbem/NewHampshire

"A lot of guys ignore the laugh, and that's about standards. I mean, if you're going to get into the Evil League of Evil you have to have a memorable laugh... What, do you think Bad Horse didn't work on his whinnie? (pause) It's a terrible... death whinnie..."
-Dr. Horrible