Chi-Town

Here's to my boss for sponsoring a pretty sweet trip to Chicago two weekends ago.  Grad school is really pretty sweet.  Most of the time we're living off of Ramen noodles, but every once and a while we get to take all-expenses-paid trips to random locations in order to give 20-minute powerpoint presentations.  And if the location happens to be a 3 hr road trip away, it's all the easier to convince people to let you go.

And of course, it just so happens that some of my bestest friends also work in chemical engineering and also like going to extremely fortuitous professional meetings.

AIChE Spring meeting 2011 + Josh + awesome friends = Amazing

To start the festivities, we all went out dancing at Sound Bar, which is a little bit crazier than the clubs in Champaign, as you can imagine.  I didn't know what to expect, but it was pretty cool.  Mainly because of the company.

I'll admit I like getting my dance on too, though.

We stayed out until 5AM, just enough time to squeeze in a shower and a restroom break.  Turns out that the hostel where we were staying didn't have any running water in the morning.  Construction evidently.  So that means no sinks, no toilets, and no showers.  How do you survive in a hostel without running water?  How do you let people reserve places at your hostel without mentioning that the water won't be there when you arrive?  Oh well.  I'll bet Panera across the street had a bunch more interesting visitors than usual that particular morning.  Most of our entourage, though, were too beat to be doing much of anything, much less showering.

So then we went to the conference hotel, which was the Hyatt.  Most expensive hotel I've stayed at probably ever in the States.  We basically spent most of our time outside of the conference eating.  That was definitely the highlight of the trip.  In all we visited Joy Yee Noodles (Chinese, with the best Bubble Tea's in Chicago), Sansoogabsan (awesome Korean BBQ), _________ (insert incredible South Indian food place here), and Red Apple (Polish buffet).  It was intense.  I've never had such a concentrated culinary adventure before.  I think the coworkers were happy.

I know I was.  I found a great shirt for the conference, and it was on sale.  I had great food.  And my gf came along too.  Can't ask for anything better.

Red Apple seemed to be the favorite overall.  I've never seen Matthew eat so much, but he destroyed all of us.  I think this is his third plate...and it came after two dessert plates.

Time to hit the gym.  Thank you taxpayers:)

Shenanigans

Alright.  Enough shenanigans.  And I'm pretty sure almost everyone knows anyways.  For all of you who don't: I am officially (finally) in a relationship.

And it's great.  I'm pretty sure it all started because both of us share a bunch of common interests.  Such as...

Also eating.  I love eating.  So does she.  Indian food, Korean food, Chipotle, you name it.  She likes chocolate a whole lot more than me though.  And it's not like I don't like chocolate.  Here's us at Jim Goulds.  

Along with my other love in life: Scallops!

Pretty looking girl.  Pretty looking food.  Life's good.

[Add on]

One more pic.  She reeeeaaaaalllllly wanted me to post it.  I'm not stoned, it's just my eyes are sensitive to intense flashes of light in dimly lit restaurants.  And I was sleepy.

Department of Offense

So a good buddy of mine, Fikile B., once came up with an amazing name for a nerdy grad student soccer team, and although he's not with us anymore (confound you MIT), the dream lives on.  Actually, it's no longer a dream.  Shiz just got real.  Currently 1-1, we won our first game of the indoor soccer intramurals last night, and this is our celebratory post.

So if you're a grad student looking to actually make some cash during your long hours of labor as a PhD-chasing peon, best thing to do is get straight A's throughout undergrad and publish a paper or three.  Then you might actually perhaps maybe potentially get past the first round of cuts to be considered for a federal grad student fellowship.  You'll make upwards of $10000 more than your fellow students, and you'll also get to boast about it for all eternity on your CV.  What makes this tricky is that (stereotypically), it's the non-Americans that are rocking the 4.0's.  Anyways, one of the funding agencies that gives out these auspicious fellowships is the Department of Defense, whose logo is displayed below:

But what's so great about defense?  In soccer, I've almost always played on defense, and although the level of talent required is less, the whole game the only thing you're trying to do is not mess up.  The only thing worse in my opinion is being goalie.  One proverbial saying states that "the best defense is offense", and we (tried) to take that to heart this year.  Since we're a bunch of grad students who all missed the cut for a Department of Defense fellowship, we've decided to make our own agency of weighty renown (soon): The Department of Offense:

There's supposed to be small parallels between the designs.  Of course, there's the eagle, but I think the one I ripped off google images is better.  Our eagle also isn't holding a bunch of stupid arrows.  Missiles, in my opinion, make a statement.  Also, we replaced leafy foliage with barbed wire, and although stars are always cool, stars AND grenades are cooler.  There's some jets because I love jets, and I put some soccer balls on the side since, after all, we are a soccer team.

Two more games to go then playoffs (maybe?...)

Slopes again

It's finally that time of year again when things start warming up a little bit and it rains instead of snows.  Perfect time to plan a ski trip...  Couple of friends and I decided to head up to Cascade again this past weekend to hit the slopes, and despite the fact that the weather was warmer than some would have liked, we had a great time.  A friend of ours graciously allowed us to crash at his place the night before, and also treated us to many a homemade meal.  Can't ask for better than that.

These days I've been trying to adhere to a better schedule where I go to bed early and wake up early.  In other words, I'm getting closer to 30, but it does have some advantages.  It means that I wake up earlier than most without an alarm and catch some great photo opportunities.  Hence, then following three pictures:

You might notice that the lighting is super bright in all of these, and yet they sleep on.  I was going to put a couple more early morning pictures up, but I'm sure the girl wrapped in pink would have killed me.  While waiting for others to revive, I chilled with "smelly cat".

I also played designated driver for most of the trip.  This is me showing my displeasure at something.  Perhaps the fact that we're listening to that godforsaken Brittney Spears song for the 10th time.  Either that or perhaps it's the pink seatbelt guard that's sucking away my masculinity.

Here's the crew that drove together in Ritika's car.  All from the same lab except Alecia, a fellow homeschooler like me.  

I was so pumped.  Ritika was so "are you serious?"

After arriving, we met up with the rest of the gang.  This picture makes Ritika look like she's the boss or something.  More people from the great Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois.

Ritika may have been the boss of the 1st-3rd year students from lab, but unfortunately she was not the boss of the slopes, despite her optimism.  I have to congratulate her though, because she continued to have fun throughout the entire day, whereas under similar circumstances, I definitely would have given up.

Notice how they give really short skis to really short people.

Getting to the top was no problem, it's just the coming down part that was a little tricky.  Well, coming down slowly and on your feet.  Fortunately, Ritika is a little more flexible than most.  This is the first attempt coming down the hill.

And the second.

On the third, she managed to stay standing by holding onto my arm, but the results were still a little iffy.

Oh well, we moved on to something that we both could enjoy.  Greasy food.

During lunch, a brief altercation erupted between two of my coworkers, and I think this is Matt giving a mean stare to Adam.  Don't worry, the altercation was about as fierce as Matt's look, as I remember it.

Matt had a much different face on the ride back home.  Worn out from the boredom of wimpy greens and disappointing black diamonds I suppose, since he's the best out of all of us by far.

He he.

At the end of the day, the entire Kenis lab crew caught a picture together.  Again Ritika is trying to look like she's boss.

And here's the complete group.

Thanks to everyone for a really awesome trip, especially Isaac who coordinated the whole thing, provided parents to cook for us, and also did an excellent job forecasting the weather, including the "frontal genesis event" that we had to drive through on the way back home.  Saturday: warm yet icy.  Sunday: Insane snow, getting the car stuck in the driveway, nearly dying in Wisconsin.  Sigh.

Muffler Melancholy

Those of you familiar with my current mode of transportation may have noticed the loud, rally-car type sound emitted from the back end.  You're also probably acutely aware that my car is definitely not a rally car.  The cause of the noise is a severe structural failure localized at the interface between the exhaust pipe and muffler.  While the noise may be somewhat embarrassing, I've also been petrified for the last month or so knowing that my muffler was hanging on to my car by a mere thread, just waiting to fly off and seriously impale the vehicle driving behind me.  It reminds me of having a loose tooth as a kid.  Only when you lose a tooth, you usually get a small amount of money instead of being sued for large amounts of money.

So the "good" news is that it finally flew off, but not on the expressway while driving 80 mph, and it didn't careen into any other person's car.  It just sort of plopped off in the middle of Neil St.

And I had a friend to document the walk of shame...

Not exactly a smiley moment, but I'm doing it anyways.

Me thinking, "This probably wasn't working great anyways."

Recent idea: buy a '95 accord with a working muffler for $1200...before anything else important falls off the civic.

Blizzard

There was a huge weather warning today.  Lot's of school closings, and even classes at the university were cancelled after 5pm.  I was expecting a near apocalypse the way people were describing it on the news.  Much to my dismay, it really wasn't that bad during the day.  I ended up staying at home when I really probably could have gotten some stuff done at school.  Well, maybe not a whole lot of dismay.  I did end up typing a little bit too.  It's still the way I remember it...extremely slow and painful.

These pictures aren't from today; rather, they're from a random warmish day this winter when it was raining liquid instead of painful frozen water.  Krannert center for the performing arts:

This is from today: a view of our front yard from my safe perch on the second floor around 3pm.

Same view, only 5:30.  Like I said, not too crazy, but the trash can took a tumble.  We'll see what tomorrow looks like.

Stalking

One of the biggest reasons why I decided to get off facebook years ago was because one day I spent over two hours in lab stalking friends when I had no less than 5 important things to do.  Now, things are a bit better, but sometimes I get a craving to peek in on other people's lives.  One of my friends, Richard, once posted a link to a blog by Lee F. who's living in Korea at the moment and pursuing a PhD at Seoul National University, the school where I did research over the summer.  I felt really bad for the guy because he basically had to start over again because some narcissistic postdoc started strangling him, but the prof wouldn't fire the perpetrator.  I was planning to try to meet up with him over the summer and give him sort of gift to express my condolences, but never got around to it.  But Lee, I feel for you.  I'm inspired how you keep on trucking.  I really enjoy reading your updates, and hopefully someday I'll get to meet up with you and thank you in person.  Keep it up, and all the best with your baby on the way!  

Lee is the reason that I have the globe in the right hand corner over there.  It puts down a dot every time someone stalks you.  My goal is to get all the continents.  But I feel I'm off to a pretty decent start.

One of my friends did a great job in lighting up all of the UK. 

In fact, here she is now.  Note how she's also lighting up all of lab with the inundation of pink accessories.

Props to Joseph for signing in once in Australia.

Also thanks to all the guys from India for being good sports.

And finally, I have to vent a little bit about the US.  Who the heck is this guy/girl from Owosso, Michigan?  It's seriously got to be a server or something, maybe the computer where the little globe thingy gets all it's information, because it's ALWAYS blinking, mostly when I'm on the computer, but also occasionally when I'm not.  WHO ARE YOU?  Drives me nuts.

I was about to head home, but realized that I haven't updated in over a week, so I stayed late just for this.  Now, time for a break.  

See you next time, Owosso.