apprentice, and other such fun

today was a bizarre day.

i had my morning class, but the french man that eric and i took out to eat on tuesday was an unannounced guest speaker, which was fine.

in my reading class, i had no new results to share, but zeilberger didn't know if the project he gave me to do even had a chance at being successful anyhow, so he wasn't upset. instead he had vince lecture to me about some new research directions to go in from where i am now, so that was fine.

i had my reading class early because my friend sarah had her oral qualifying exam (which i get to do my own of in the fall) and dr. z. was on her committee. since my class was moved up so dr. z. could get to sarah's orals on time, i had an hour to kill and went to eric's to play pool. he beat me the first game because i scratched when hitting in the 8-ball but i beat him fair and square the 2nd game, and went nuts over it :-P i beat him for the first time ever the last time we played, so this was only the 2nd time ever i'd beaten him and i was pretty excited :-)

after i got back to campus, sarah had *just* gotten out of her orals and was waiting on the verdict... 15 minutes of listening to her, we headed into the stairwell, me headed upstairs and her headed downstairs when she ran into her advisor, and i heard diane (her advisor) congratulate her, so from 2 floors up i yelled "woohoo sarah!!!!" and clapped... diane took a minute to figure out who was doing that and was amused :-P

after experimental math seminar, dr. z. assumed i was coming to dinner and invited sarah to come and she agreed... after that she wanted to go get a drink or two to celebrate her passing her test, but it was 8ish and still light out, so none of the bars looked that appealing since happy hour was over and they were all moderately dead... i offered my vanilla vodka, which i still have a *little* of, so sarah and i went by riteaid to get coke to mix it with, and she invited aek, (3rd year student from thailand) to come along... not only did he come, he brought teddy (one of dr. z.'s former students who's generally around on thursdays for seminar and dinner) with him... leigh showed up with ben not much after, and the 6 of us sat down to vodka and cokes and watched apprentice... it was entertaining.

i was sorry to see alex go. tana is fantastic in many ways but when she doesn't preform quite up to par i feel like she's rather plastic, and it irritates me. she doesn't take credit for mistakes and just blames them on others. i was hoping trump would go with george and carolyn's votes and fire her, but no such luck... so long as kendra's still in it, i'm happy :-)

post apprentice was a very strange conversation. aek is an interesting character to start, just in that he has some different perspectives on things that i would never think of, and in that he seems to struggle a lot with american culture and more specifically with american social interaction. this is hard to explain properly, but for example... the post-apprentice conversation was aek asking how to properly give a hug without seeming like he didn't know how to give hugs. as you might imagine, this led to some strange conversation, just based on aek's comments, and based on people demonstrating hugs for aek :-P

anyhow.... that's my math people.... they're lots of fun as always.

only 2 more days of class..... AND hitchiker's guide comes out tomorrow! i can't wait!

night y'all :-P