Finishing up

Today was my last day of classes at St. Olaf. The last couple of weeks have been crazy because there has been so much going on. Just for homework I had a software design project that I put in ~55 hours on in the last 3 weeks. I have also been hanging out a ton with the Junior physics majors because they have been building demonstrations for the E&M class. Remember how I built a rail gun last year? Well, I told some of them about it and they took it way further. I was using 7 camera flash capacitors to store charge. Bern used 390 of them wiring some in parallel and some in series, to get a higher voltage. He then hooked on some other big capacitors that he found lying around the department. He encased the flash capacitor bank in Plexiglas for protection if one explodes. However, as he put it, "If one capacitor explodes and shorts out, it's going to over load the other capacitors and the whole thing is going down. So let's be honest, the Plexiglas won't really do us much good."


This ended up with something that we routinely charged up to 2000 volts. When charged it stored as much energy as 12 defibrillators. So, the natural next step was to discharge the entire thing through a pickle, which causes the pickle to turn into plasma and explode.



Charlie, on the other hand, build a rail gun but improved significantly on my design. He had a lot less dangling wires, which made it significantly safer. He also found some Mercury switches, which fire a lot cleaner and don't waste as much energy. However, we are not sure the age or quality of the switches, so he encased them in casting plastic to prevent them from exploding and spraying Mercury around the room. Ironically, when we pulled out another one to show what they look like, it had a leak, and we spilled Mercury all over the floor. Now I feel like a real physicist because I had to clean up a Mercury spill.

In other news, a few weeks ago I started dating Cia. I'm not sure exactly how that happened because I'm about to graduate, but we've always been really good friends, so it just kinda made sense. In case you forgot what she looks like, or haven't met her, here's a picture of her throwing a knife at my head. (It was a fake knife, and a bunch of us were playing catch with it.)


Today was the last daily chapel of the school year. It was the first thing to end that I am really going to miss. It has been the most stable thing for me through St. Olaf. Friends come and go from year to year, but daily chapel has always been there and since Sophmore year, the same group of chapel buddies has always been there. It might be the thing about St. Olaf that I miss the most next year. It was an amazing service because the pastors realize what daily chapel means to some people, so they do a very special service. They have a great way of recalling the best parts, like the Sunday school style Christmas pageant. I laughed a lot, and managed to not cry.

There is so much else going on but I need to go now, because I still have a lot of stuff to sort out before camp and I have a cold, which is making it difficult to get stuff done because I'm tired.

Swing Club

So, I'm going to try out something. I've put a video on youtube and now am going to try to embed it in my blog.



This is a fairly accurate representation of my wednesday nights this year, except that the music is normally closer to big band, swing type stuff. The guy in the green shirt is Jamison; he is one of my JCs and is an amazing dancer, but we like to laugh at him while he dances. The two girls close up are April, one of the Hoyme residents, and her friend, Gracie. The short, stocky guy with the black shirt that say performer on it is Charlie, another one of my JCs. And finally, the girl with the black jacket and the white skirt is Katie Beth, who is an excellent dancer and pretty much the only reason that I know how to do a good swingout.

Last Thursday, we had an interesting power outage on campus. Normally, when the power goes out, the backup generators kick in with in about 30 seconds. On Thursday, however, there was a problem within the campus power grid and they had to shut down all the electricity to the campus for ~2 hours. It ended up happening over dinner and made for an interesting couple of hours. The cafeteria can't run without electricity, so it had to close and everybody was more or less left to their own means to find food. Every pizza delivery place in Northfield got flooded and were running a couple of hours for deliveries. Some of the JCs and I ended up having a picnic in the lounge with whatever food we could find in our rooms and in the office.

Not only was it hard to find food, it was really dark and rainy out, so there wasn't enough light to read, so nobody could do homework. About half of the dorm ended up going outside and playing in the mud, which there was a lot of because it was raining hard. These are some of my residents when they came in.


There was enough water around that Hoyme hill became really slippery and the residents actually wore a strip of grass off the hill sliding down it.


(In case you pay attention to details, the power had come back on by this point, which is why there are lights in the background of the pictures).

On Friday night, the Ellingson staff was having their staff retreat, so they needed substitute JCs. I though it would the be on duty in Ell, just for old times sakes, so I got Betsy to do it with me. It was really funny because we (without meaning too) both ended up wearing our Hoyme sweatshirts and jeans. It weirded out a lot of the Ell residents because we were walking around looking at everything and going in the office, but they didn't recognize it. We were also hanging out in one of the JC's rooms and his residents kept coming in and getting confuse because we were there instead of the normal JC. I also showed Betsy the toothmarks on the stairs.


The story behind these is that about 10 years ago there was someone trying to do a handstand on the railing above. Being how they were really drunk, they fell and landed teeth first. They ended up being ok after reconstructive surgery and replacement fake teeth, but they left teethmarks in the stair.

4:20 day

So, for a while, Beth and I have been planning to get cigars and go smoke out behind Thorson, because Beth wanted to try smoking, just to see what it's like. Because it was such a beautiful day, we thought it would be a good day. After the fact, we realized that it is 4:20 day (A day celebrated by pot heads where they smoke a lot of pot) so it probably looked sketchy to be smoking behind Thorson. The funny thing is, that we even ended up looking stoned when we took pictures.



For some reason Beth (in the middle) wouldn't let us take a picture of her with a cigar, so Cia and I decided to just surround her.




I also tried to teach Beth to blow smoke through her nose, but she wouldn't do it. So they took a picture of me doing it instead.



On Friday night, some friends and I went to a playground. Somehow, I ended up in a game of follower the leader with Chenoa, which is rarely a good idea (being how she used to be in the circus. Something about playground equipment must get her circus instincts going, because she starts climbing all over stuff and generally doing stuff of questionable safety. This includes sitting on my shoulders.



And at some point she ended up punching me in the nose. Again.


The next week will probably be busy because I have a lot of work that I didn't get done over this weekend. A have a project to due in Fourier Analysis, which should be pretty cool because most of the class has been really pure math and pretty much worthless for me. For the project, however, I'm research Fourier transforms, which are widely used in physics and (I'm assuming) mechanical engineering.

Grad school decision

Well, I've finally settled on a grad school. I've decided to go to U of M. So, that's exciting. The financial package is just too good of a deal to pass up. Plus, there is a lot of cool research going on there and the fellowship gives me a semester to look around and figure out what project I would really like to be on.

In other news, Saturday, was prez ball, which is kind of like prom for college. I really didn't feel like going but knew that people would try to get me to go because I go to swing club and know how to dance. So, I got myself on duty, which means I couldn't leave the building. Betsy was on duty with me, so we decided to have a "duty date" and dress up fancy for some of our rounds. We also implemented a great prank:

There is a bathroom in the office (because it used to be a dorm room with attached bathroom). There is kind of a ground rule on staff that you are not allowed to use that bathroom, because it is just weird. Furthermore, we use the bathroom for storage and there is a fair bit of food in there, so it would be gross to actually be using the toilet. Anyways, we made a dummy out of old clothes stuffed with newspaper and put it on the toilet. It worked out really well, because when you first walk into the office, you can only see the legs, which are the most convincing part.



Once you see the whole thing it is pretty clear that it is a dummy. It is still kind of creepy, however, because we used a jack o lantern for a head.


And of course, we took the incriminating picture of ourselves with our handiwork.


Now we have to wait and see what Julie's (our boss) reaction is when she comes in tomorrow morning. It's convincing looking enough that we startled ourselves when we came into the office later in the night.

So, it was a busy weekend and I played with my camera a lot. On Friday, I had a corridor event where we played in the mud with a girls corridor from Ellingson. It is kind of becoming a tradition for me, as this is the third year in a row that I have played in this mud pit. Thankfully, it didn't get any glass in it after the hailstorm 2 years ago.


Then Mom, Dad, and I went to the Contented Cow to see my friends bluegrass band play. That was a lot of fun. I tried taking some pictures but not many turned out well because it was so dark.

On Saturday night, we had our staff retreat and all of the JCs spent the night at Betsy's house. It was a lot of fun. We mostly just hung out, talked, played scrabble and watched a couple movies. I played around with my camera a lot. Specifically, I was experimenting with focusing on something in the foreground and the shooting somebody farther away.

This is Jamison behind some flowers. He is actually going to be the SHC in Hoyme next year.


This is Sarah H. during the scrabble game.


This is Ellie. I really like how this picture turned out. It was morning and the sun was coming in the window behind her.


And this one is Katie.


Well, now I need to catch up on homework, so this is all for now.

Starting up

So, I decided to start a blog. This is primarily a way to stay in touch with family, because I have been sending emails, but a blog would be easier, and it would let me put pictures directly into the body of the text (which I don't know how to do in email.)

To start, let's throw in a picture of my favorite Hoyme residents, just to see if I can figure out how to post a picture.




Don't they look sweet.