Category Archives: school

Completely Random

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I seriously cannot remember the context at all, but sometime on either Friday night or Saturday, I was talking to someone about this book. I haven’t layed eyes on it in probably 20 years and didn’t know if I was even remembering it correctly…

…then yesterday, I went over to my friend Jenn’s place and found it on her bookshelf. SO random. Coincidence?
Went on a Monday mission with Glen, Fuzz and Jake. We stopped by 303 (where I finally found some size 7 first bloods), then out to skate the Brighton park. On the way home, we made a gas station stop. Glen and Jake went the healthy route with some dried banana slices and apricots. Fuzz got cigarettes and beer. I got peanut butter M&Ms and doritos. Quality dinner. Anyways, I got super hung up on this…

…candy necklace, candy bracelet, and some sweet pink shades! Too bad they would never fit.
After having the longest summer of my life (at least weather-wise), autumn hit on Saturday.

(some fall leaves on campus)
Gotta love my Processes grader…

…and what I “learn” in school.

Stream Ecology Field Trip

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When I found out that my stream ecology class was going to have two Saturday field trips, I was extremely bitter. Our first one was yesterday, and we all had to meet at the INSTAAR parking lot by 5:30am. Running on about 3 hours of sleep, I was not feeling too hot yesterday morning. I tried to grab some breakfast at Safeway, but after walking in and pulling some things off the shelves, I was told they weren’t actually open. How annoying. So I met up with the rest of the class, and we headed off. Luckily we did stop at a Starbucks in Golden so I could get some overpriced munchies, and then we continued on until we got to the Upper Snake River, a spot beyond Keystone at about 10,500 feet elevation.

It was freezing. There was ice around the edges of the tributary that we were working on in the morning. Basically this site is an acid mine drainage area, and we were helping out with a tracer study. Another group hiked up to the top of the tributary and dumped in a lot of salt (NaCl) as the tracer for the experiment. We were basically responsible for taking samples of the water every 15 minutes at certain sites. This allowed for some lounging in the sun  in between sticking my hands in water that was a few deegrees above freezing.
After a little while, there were about 3 or 4 us at each of the two sites we were responsible for, so Chuck and I decided it was a good time to go for a hike.
the rocks on the way up… covered in lichen
the view was awesome…
While we were up there, we saw the suburban come back up with the other half of the class. We were supposed to switch roles with them, but we decided that we were in no hurry. So far there had been way too many people for the jobs available, so why worry? After convincing ourselves there was no way we could be in trouble, we took an extra few minutes to enjoy the scenary and then headed down. Turns out, everyone was waiting for us for the next activity. Oops…
We headed to the spot where the Snake River (the acid mine drainage water) meets Deer Creek (apparently pristine water). If you see the color of the rocks in the pictures above, they change color along the width of the river from the different m

etal precipates. The first thing we did was measure temperature, pH, and conductivity across the width. The temperature was around 6 degrees C. The pH and the conductivity ranged across the width due to the two waters mixing, but in general the pH was around 3-4. Pretty acidic water. Next up was measuring flow rate.

Jeff, our TA
The dust from some motor bikes that went by.
Using a pygmy meter…
Collecting benthic invertebrates…
the super white rocks are from aluminum oxide precipitate
The stone flies we found in the Snake River. The only critter we found that could manage to live in super acidic waters.

Overall, the fieldtrip was pretty awesome. I complained and complained about it before, but it was so nice to get outside up in the mountains and do a little fieldwork. After the trip, though, I was completely wiped out. We didn’t get back to Boulder around 6pm. I picked up a board from Glen, drove home and relaxed. Forget Saturday night…

(I took all the photos with my blackberry… and tried to oversaturate the color to make them a little more pleasant to look at. Still can’t wait to get my camera back… )

Just Another Hot Summer Week in CO

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I think it’s been over 90 every single day. Joy. I really miss Matunuck. Every morning I wake up and keep straining to hear some waves crashing and to know I can just roll out of bed and into the ocean. But no… I just roll out of bed in my bedroom which is easily 90 degrees all the time now and rely on the shower to wake me up. And to make things even better, I woke up feeling like crap with a nice summer cold Monday morning.

Most of my time and energy this week has been dedicated to teaching the Engineering Projects Class for the GoldShirts Summer Bridge, which is a bridge program for an incoming cohort of freshman engineering students to CU. I was a little nervous to work with some older students after working with middle school students all year, but it’s been great. It reminds me of my teaching experience in Baltimore and makes me miss all those students even more. Here are some of my students for this week and next:

Their second day was a challenge… within the 2 hour class, they were given some materials (including 2 pizza boxes, aluminum foil, black poster paper, bubble wrap, cotton balls, a plastic bag and some tape), 25 minutes to design, and about 50 minutes to build a solar oven prototype and clean up. Here’s a few of the results:

The next day the students put their solar ovens outside with a HOBO stick and a probe to measure and the temperature inside the solar oven as it sat out for about an hour and a half.
One more week with these students… I can’t wait to see their final products.
Other than work, my week started off slow. Monday and Tuesday I went to sleep at probably 8pm because of my cold. A little lame, but I’ve never kicked a cold as fast as this one. By Wednesday, I made it to yoga, and on Thursday, I drove up to the new Broomfield park with Jason to meet up with Glen, John, Nate, Jack, Fuzz, Brian, and Neil. Glen

 took notes on everyone’s performance. It was hot and crowded, but an awesome session.

Friday was a pretty chill day… not as much planning for the class I’m teaching. The girls in the lab decided to throw a mini birthday party for our advisor. Everyone pitched in and we surprised him in another professor’s office.
Nate’s going away party at the pool in his apartment complex. So rad. We made a scene playing in the pool after dark with beer cans, a noodle, and a soccer ball. Before the party was completely broken up, Brian decided it was time to get Nate in the face with a pie. Somehow the pie was handed to me, and I planted it in Nate’s face, full force.
I enjoyed every second of it, but being the way I am, I apologized to Nate for it afterwards multiple times. He swore that he loved it. Even so, after that incident, we all made a swift exit to 29th Street Tavern. I left my camera in the car until Glen told me to go get.
Typical curse of a Friday night… I almost fell asleep at the bar and couldn’t finish my first beer. Oh well… soon it was off to bed. Weekend mission: packing up and moving out of Gunbarrel.

… and why I love weekends.

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Originally, I planned to close myself off from the world starting this weekend so that there could be a chance I would get some work done and survive the last two weeks of school. Nothing big, just 3 problem sets, a presentation with a final report, 2 final exams, and 10-page research paper. Ugh. I can’t wait to get through it… or can I? Even now I’m writing stories just to avoid getting anything done… and this past weekend was no different.

At the last minute, I decided to go riding at Copper Mountain on Saturday since my friend LP offered me a free ticket voucher. I knew I probably shouldn’t, but it was closing weekend, it would be free, and Copper would be my 7th mountain of the season. So, I woke up around 6am on Saturday to print out the free coupon and realized it was only good for Monday through Friday. There goes that plan…

So instead, I went on a class fieldtrip… which was awesome! We went to St. Malo, right by Mt. Meeker, where one of the students from our class lives. Our goal was to plan out a micro-hydro power thingy (I forget what it’s called – some engineer I am), although our teacher had already done most of the work. We just worked on determine velocity and flow rate at a few different locations. Besides that, we got some free lunch, got to check out some cool architecture on site from early 1900s, and got to hang out with one of coolest dogs ever! Here’s an arrange of photos from my nikon, my crackberry, and from one of my teachers:

In the end, I was so glad I came on the fieldtrip. Even with the rain and cold weather, it was really cool to get out in the mountains and see some classmates outside of school.

Once I got back to Boulder, I was supposed to do work. Of course. So what did I do? Went out, obviously! The night started with watching the Nuggets dominate at the Attic and ended with actually dancing (like crazy) at Round Midnight. Great times.

Now all my work was left for Sunday… but it was such an amazing day. So, instead I went skating. I met up with Jason, Neil, and Dave Fuller at the basketball ledges and moved on to the Boulder ditch…

Jason with a noseslide for the first photo of the day. I didn’t even got a test shot off, so I’m totally off on the lighting. Oops. I forgot he did a noseslide and felt a little bitter when I came across this photo since I tried to land a noseslide on this ledge for an hour with some miserable attempts. Another day….
Speaking of noseslides (and similar things), here’s Fuller with a nosestall to fakie.
Jason went for krooks a couple times and every single time, I cut his arm off. I think this was the 3rd time. I suck sometimes.
Neil with boardslide (the one and only trick I did land for the day)
Jason front board attempt. Can’t remember if he landed it…
And Jason yet again, back 50.
After skating, I stopped by Glen’s house to shoot some photos of null products and got a couple mug shots of him. This was my favorite (I think):
And then I splurged on the way home and got my first sub from half-fast sub (which was delicious) and pretended to do organic chem until it was time to go to bed. And with that, I had yet another awesome weekend, leaving me screwed for school… aah. And that is why I love weekends.