The first week has come and gone

In the past few days, I have done several interesting things.

1. I mountain biked on a trail in the woods, canoed on a small pond incorrectly titled "Shadow Lake," and did orienteering in the woods for an hour and a half in the pouring rain.
   
2. Conveniently, my sunburn was just beginning to peel in earnest, and the 90-minute soaking turned the peeling skin into a substance the consistency of wet paper, which I subsequently rolled off easily in the shower. This is much better than any other instance of peeling skin I have ever experienced.
   
3. I sustained a situp-related injury to my big toe. You may have thought this would not be possible, but you would be wrong.
   
4. I ran 400 meters in 83 seconds, which is much better than the first 400 I ran last summer, which, at full-out effort, was a struggling 100 seconds, and it took almost all summer to get down to around 83 seconds.
   
5. I got a red circle around a yellowish bite with two teeth marks in it on my arm. I feel about red circles just about the same as I feel about red lines: Get thyself to a doctor immediately. So that is what I did. But the circle, the yellow, the marks, and in fact all evidence of the bite disappeared within a few hours. The problem with never having any medical issues is that I end up being a hypochondriac.
   
6. I passed out from a combination of dehydration and thinking about the potential existence of a tick bite on my arm and Lyme disease in my body.
   
7. I was somewhat embarrassed, except that very few people actually noticed, because I have become quite skilled at passing out in public places over the years.
   
8. I became certified in CPR.
   
9. I became certified in driving a school van.
   
10. I learned that you have to be 21 to drive a school van.

In other news, I anticipate having five wicked awesome advisees, because I have read their files and they appear to be wicked awesome people. They are coming tomorrow, which is also, as you may have guessed, wicked awesome.

Now I have a job

After a month of unemployment, I now have a job. I remembered today that I am going to get paid for this job! I had not remembered to think about that yesterday. I think it will be fun.

The 229 students at the summer school will be over 50% international students, with many from Turkey, Greece, Korea, and other Asian and European countries. Today we heard interesting stories of cultural differences that students from very different countries have experienced at the summer school, which was interesting. For example, if an older Korean child asks a younger Korean child to do something for him, the younger child must do it, and so we have to watch out for young Korean children slaving away for older Korean children at the summer school. Interesting.

There are 35 interns, 7 of whom are alums of the school and 6 of whom are current or just-graduated Williams students (the director is a Williams graduate, and did a lot of recruiting and publicity on campus). There are a lot of athletic interns. Teams composed of interns will probably be very good. We played softball today, and I was not good at it at all, because I cannot hit a ball with a bat very often. However, I only struck out once.

The campus is in a really beautiful location, on the side of a mountain at the end of a half-mile driveway off of a wooded two-lane highway. There are trees and mountains everywhere you look, and the campus itself is brick buildings and grassy lawns. It's also quite hilly; I went running this morning and the flattest part of my run was the part on trails in the woods; running on the grounds of the campus requires going up and down a lot. I have raced on the cross country course twice, and on the track two or three times, so I have some familiarity with the area, but this will certainly increase significantly in the coming weeks.

Wicked awesome oars

Long-time readers of this blog, from back before it was hosted on blogger, back before it had an RSS feed, back before google/ig existed, back when it was text-only, will remember back to when I was working on my five-foot model of a crew boat, back two summers ago. After a summer of not working on it whatsoever, I am working on it again.

I had made oars, with beautiful hardwood blades seamlessly bonded to their dowel shafts, and I had painted the shafts black, leaving the handles the natural wood color. The blades, though, needed to be painted -- so sad to cover up their beautiful color and natural grain! -- and so that is what I did last week.

First, I took a whole sheet of newspaper, folded it in half, and wrapped the shaft of the oar in the newspaper with only the blade sticking out, and attached it with masking tape. Then I spray-painted the shaft this bright purple color. You can see it here (click for multiple sizes, including a very large one):



I had never used spray paint before. This was a special nontoxic paint made for painting children's toys -- because who else would want purple paint? -- so it smelled funny, because it was trying to be all special and nontoxic. (That was the only available purple paint in the store.) I prefer the smell of normal, toxic paint. Anyway, I had never used spray paint before, so I had to get used to it, the way it pools and bubbles if you spray too much in one area, and the way the tiny dots of paint get everywhere, on your hands and the newspaper and everything, and the way you have to spray, then set the object down and go somewhere else to breathe, then return to the spray paint as you exhale. I did two coats of that and let it dry. Here is what the oars looked like after that (the first picture cleverly includes our sailboat in the background):



Purists will note that Williams' blades are not actually the bright, normal "Williams purple" that I painted the oars. Williams' blades are actually more of a magenta color. I tried to achieve the magenta color by mixing purple and red, but found that while the red was oil-based, the purple spray paint, which gave no indication whatsoever on the container whether it was water-based or oil-based (no "use mineral spirits to clean up" or "use soap and water"), turned out to be water-based, so they did not mix. And I don't like magenta anyway, and I don't understand why Williams' blades were magenta in the first place, since the boat itself has purple trim, so I made them purple, because that makes more sense, anyway.

The next day, I added the stripes. Williams' blades have yellow stripes with white on each side, so that is what I did. I was originally planning to paint the stripes on, carefully placing the masking tape so as to have perfectly straight lines, but then I realized I could use electrical tape to achieve the same effect. So that is what I did. The edges are not perfect, but the flat parts look pretty nice. Here is a picture of them, because I am just that proud of my handiwork:



I also painted parts of the outriggers gray, so that now the boat itself is almost entirely painted. I just have to go back and touch up a few spots where I got a bit of paint where it wasn't supposed to be. Perhaps sometime I will photograph the whole boat.

It struck me when I was making the oars and painting the boat that I did an excellent job planning this whole thing from the beginning. At the very beginning, I got everything I would need: Every size of dowel under about 1/2", three colors of paint, two bags of different kinds of beads, two rolls of electrical tape, and a lot of planning. Each time I show the boat to interested people, they ask about the seats that go in the boat. I have the seats all made, and they are connected to the foot board things that the rowers push their feet off of, but I can't put those in the boat until I have made the people, because I drilled small holes in the seats to attach the people to the seats, and it will be much easier to attach the people if I leave the seats out of the boat. That kind of advanced planning, drilling tiny holes in the seats years in advance of when I will ever use them, if in fact I decide that I want people in my boat.

Observant people will notice that there are nine oars. "Why," you may ask, "are there nine oars? True, there are nine people in the boat, and an 'eight' is truly a 'nine' in some sense, but you need not take this to extremes." Did I miscount? Am I so coxswain-centric that I feel a ninth oar is necessary? I will let that be a mystery.

Pictures of flowers

Yesterday I took some awesome pictures of the flowers outside the Clark Geosciences building. What is the point of that? I don't know. I can put them as a very nice desktop background. I can put them here. But otherwise I will just kind of have them. I don't have any particular attachment to these flowers; I only took pictures of them because they were nice flowers, and purple and yellow.

Here, for example, is the nicest one, I think. I am using it as my background.


Here are some more that I think are particularly nice.

They are vertical, so I cannot use even them for a background; perhaps I can make them into a greeting card. I am sure my mother or grandmother would appreciate that.

The other day I was procrastinating, and it must have been some pretty serious procrastination, because I went over and looked at Rebecca's father's blog. It has to be pretty serious to look at someone else's father's blog. Anyway, he mentioned this bit about taking pictures even though he's not planning to do anything with them. That's what I do. Except mine are even less important, because they're of flowers, not even of people.