Seven Days of Spring Break

Spring break tomorrow, homework today. Wake up to MATLAB. Rain rain snow snow snow, programming weather. Coffee for breakfast. Sherpa for lunch. More procrastinating, more computing. Barely done in time. Again. Sigh. No time to go to Seismic. Rent a tent...rent-a-tent? Three girls and a dude at 5 Guys. Too many fries. Fries dipped in ice cream, yum. Driving driving. Packing packing. Downloading music for the road. Too little sleep.

At dawn we go. Ski bums and traffic. Hunger. Getting off schedule. Oh, well. Walkie-talkie battleship. The Utah sun beating down on my face like it did in my dream in January. So much deposition and erosion. Oh, the glorious erosion. Sitting in a car makes my muscles more sore than Corona Arch hike. More driving, and will we find a campsite? Old western-looking sunset with spires and purple sky. Darkness, and stars. How many engineers does it take to set up a tent at night? Amazing Grace under the Milky Way (as performed on top of a rock acoustically).

Time travel and confusion. Coldness of the desert does not bode well for sleep. No firewood equals no coffee. So much driving. Evading the law GTA style, but not really. Furthest destination: Grand Canyon. Status: reached. It looks like the pictures, and amazing in real life. Extensiveness blows the mind. Arizona sunshine. One point five miles into the heart of the canyon. Crossing layers, crossing time. Even more time travel in DST-less AZ. Professional camp-setting-uppers-at-night. Quick! Be loud before it's quiet hours! Sing! And the story of Henry the tree/boy/man. (Pretty sure we ran over Bob the tumbleweed).

This place has everything, including hot showers. Wat. I got to drive all the way from Grand Canyon to Four Corners. Passing cars...vroom. Sky. Silence, and mostly sleeping (not by me, the driver). When I stopped driving and got 3g, MIT Haystack REU emailed me an offer. Approaching Four Corners, the CO side is obvious: corner with mountains. Snow on ground after crossing state lines. Campground didn't work out...getting super hungry. Golden only six hours away! But actually seven. Operation Straight-Shot. "When I wake up, well, I know I'm gonna be..." plays in Wendy's right after having a conversation about it. Weird. And awesome. Near-elk encounter. Train encounter. THE longest train. I-25 is a boring road to drive. It's not an all-nighter if the sun doesn't rise before you go to sleep.

Solid six hours of sleep after waking up at noon. Then it started to snow. Packing again, then driving some more, but only twenty minutes. Sleep. Warmth.

Whilst jamming: "What am I thinking right now?" "We should go to Village Inn." Yes. Free pie Wednesday. A third-annual tradition, and the last with all three of us being students. Sadface-happyface.

Sleep. And good food. I probably gain so much weight when I go home. Good times with great friends. I don't want to go back to school.

A Break (Or, "Oh Hey, It's Really Spring!")

It's my first Spring Break in college. Everyone asked me what I was doing, to which I replied "Going home" or "Sleeping" or "Baseball", which all ended up to be true, but there was a little more to it than that.

My first day back, my mom makes fun of my socks. No one at Mines ever makes fun of my socks, in fact I just got a compliment on my socks (from a guy, of all creatures), but really- I like my socks.

It didn't take long before I wanted to play outside. And it only took a few minutes before my right pinkie finger was twice as fat as my other one, because I was playing catch with my little brother and I was too stupid to wait until my other brother scavenged up a glove. Even though the old flat glove was awful (and I left mine at Maple), I concluded that I am just as unathletic as ever, being lame at catching, but my throwing skills took an upgrade since I'm so awesome at throwing dodgeballs by now (not really though). The grass, though mostly brown is starting to turn green. I love this time of year, and the weather this week was awesome.

The first few days were a little basketball-y. My mom likes basketball so after I took a nap on the couch Sunday (my bed was full of clothes...augh), we went to Mines basketball game in the NCAA DII tournament. Cool stuff, fun times. And I'm used to having to clean and make sure no one runs across the court, so it was cool to not have to do that. We won of course, and would face Metro Tuesday. So Tuesday my dad had tickets to the Nuggets game. I know, basketball galore. I told Brady to text me updates for the Mines game. At the end, the Nuggets won a supposedly amazing game by tying it with very few seconds left and going into OT. In short, as my dad said, it was "the most exciting boring NBA game" we had ever seen. Brady told me Mines lost. So I obviously wasn't so stoked about basketball. Besides, kids kept kicking and screaming and NBA players don't play defense and the players look so far compared to  me being on the court all the time. So whatever.

I ate Carl's pizza for the first time in forever (winter break). I also ate a lot of other good food. I realized I'm getting quite out of shape and need to exercise if I don't want to pass out during the Ore-Cart pull (I'm kind of joking but not really- I was sore all week from bouldering the Friday before- shows you how much I'm in shape.) But on a similar note, I'm really excited that there's only one more weekend after this until the weekend E-days takes place (and then Opening Weekend after that weekend). It's a good time to be alive.

I pretty much tried to sleep in until 1 p.m., and pretty much succeeded. Getting 10 hours in my old bed is nice, but of course I'll never be able to catch up on sleep lost this year and the rest of my will-be four years. But it was nice. It was also nice that a lot of my classes just had tests and everything due the week before Spring Break. This week, there was no math worksheets due, or homework, or NHV drafts (but a lot of readings that I have not done yet), or physics homework on Lon-Capa to do even if I wanted to, so it was a nice unstressful time. I did have time to fill out a couple applications though. But that's it for productivity.

I think a week was a perfect amount of time. Enough time to get my room messy. Get excited about the stretch run of freshman year. Realize that no one head bangs to TobyMac with you like your brothers (ha, well there wasn't really headbanging going on). Annoy my sister by serenading her with ukulele and making her mad that uke is way more easy than guitar. (Realize I didn't really learn any new songs for ukulele...oh well.) Stay up late, but sleep in 'cause I don't have to do anything. And eat hotdogs and listen to baseball (oh cool, look- a fake walkoff).

I really do love Spring.