The Amazing Adventures of Bacon & Tofu

Alright, we have gotten a little ridiculous about this staycation business.  Sat and I have been talking about writing about the second half of our mini vacation for the longest time but were both too lazy to write.  So here it is for you – albeit, a condensed version.

Day 3:

On Saturday we got a slow start but left to pick up my parents at their hotel around 11 since we all had to be checked out by noon.  On our way over we stopped by Vons to pick up some breakfast and some tape (dad’s luggage split on the way to CA).  After we picked them up we headed to Long beach to check out the aquarium and Queen Mary.  The aquarium was pretty cool – but BUSY.  As some of you already know, I don’t do well with crowds, they make me a little crazy.  Had I not been having my crazy anxiety and personal space issues I probably would have really enjoyed it. (I’m sure Sat will post some pictures to compliment this text, but if not, check out his Flickr – they should all be there.)

Read the rest of this entry »

While I am not officially out of the woods yet, Summer Session I all but wrapped up this weekend. I was TA’ing for both CSE20 (discrete math) and CSE120 (operating systems), two very different courses in many ways. I hadn’t TA’ed for either of them before so it was a bit of a challenge to get up to speed with material I hadn’t seen in years. Summer sessions are only 5 weeks long so they cram a lot of material into not a lot of time and it leaves both the students and the instructors scrambling to keep up. I had the pleasure of working with a couple of pretty cool grad students, AA and CBL, who were the instructors for the courses so things were much better than they might otherwise have been. Still, I am glad that I won’t be TA’ing for Summer Session II as I am pretty burnt out on the whole thing.

I got all of my exam grading out of the way yesterday so I was able to spend this morning with Colleen. We had a pretty big weekend last week and we’re going to have another big one this coming week so I decided to play it low key and not force the issue on going out adventuring. Instead, I suggested that we wander down to REI for some “window shopping.” (For our East Coast friends, think Eastern Mountain Sports but in the Western U.S. and in the form of a co-op.) This might have been well and dandy had it not been for one pesky fact: Colleen and I are terrible window shoppers. Now, I’m sure there are multiple ways to be a terrible window shopper, but in our case it is because we always end up buying stuff. So, what was it today? It might be better off to ask what wasn’t it today?

Read the rest of this entry »