IHOP by where I crashed

 

maryville

Yesterday was fun. Callie woke me up at 9:30am by knocking on my door and telling me to get ready to leave in 10 minutes for ultimate frisbee. James drove Callie, Darrell and me to Maryville, where we 'competed' with a makeshift team at Maryville college (We ended up losing both our games, but it was still fun). We played till 2pm and then went to Ihop for lunch (my first time at ihop. I liked it). After that, we went to David's house and hung out for a while. We ate grilled chicken for dinner and saw "Ocean's 12" at his place. It was 10:30pm by the time we got back. Good times.

Campout at Frozen Head National Park

Well, I believe we already covered the story of the campout, but I have a little explaining to do. You see, we were getting ready to go on this little hike, and we had a big bag of PB & J sandwiches. Well, I can't remember who, but someone shoved them in their backpack and I made a big scene that the sandwiches would get squished. Well anyway I took them and tied them on my backpack. As I got ready to take a group picture of everyone, the unthinkable happened. The sandwiches slipped off my backpack and were smashed by the asphalt. In my great moment of silly-ism I snapped this shot as everyone laughed at me.

Rodeo Fun

The rodeo happened a little while ago. The rodeo was sweet and the crowning moment of the night was when Wreschnig got 'pinbulled.' In the picture are Tio, Mark, and Harris. The rodeo was awesome and hopefully someone will post their pictures of it.

Mark's LDS Mission Call

Friday evening I opened my mission call. I will be serving in the LDS Samara Russia mission from 14 Dec 2005 - Dec 2007.

Now some of you might be familiar with the 'Mormon' missionaries coming around and knocking on doors. Well, I'm told that is illegal in Russia, and so one of the main ways we talk to people is just trying to talk to them on public transportation (where they CAN'T run away quickly) or out on the streets (where they CAN run away quickly). Anyways, I have to learn russian really quick. One advantage of going to Russia will be the necessity to buy an awesome looking Russian Hat (Russian Hats rank right up their with cowboy hats).

Plus, what a great match. They dress conservatively, and politically I am a conservative. Also, they are very socialistic, and I am a very social guy.

Joy's weekend update

After a long Friday at work which included the ice cream break, I had a very relaxing evening. I walked around online browsing my daily quota of fodder. Dan Kauffman (link) and I had an interesting discussion about the historic control of internet by the US. And then I talked to Goms for a while till Rachel and Khush walked it and found me talking while lying on the couch. They just laughed at me. I went over to their apartment and hung for a bit. They are moving onto Phase II of the South Beach diet (no carb). They are trying to expunge toxins from their body while losing weight.

As usual, my Saturday started late as usual. James was supposed to have gone to the Cider Mill near Pigeonforge early morning. However he was still sleeping when I woke up. So, Callie joined us while we head to the Cider Mill to check it out. We bought some apple cider, apple butter, glazed apple sourdough bread and semi-sweet apple-raspberry red wine. I am particularly excited about the apple butter and wine. Next time we head out there, we might get other wines that I tasted. We had to get back early evening to go to a beat-the-bull bbq organized by one of the interns at a very nice park area near lab. Since no one had to get back home early, we decided to extend out stay longer by playing sand volleyball. It was riot! I could clearly see some people just couldn't play the game but it is understandable since most of them do not play any games/sports involving arm strength. I was extremely surprised to find few of the interns unable to clear the net, even by throwing. Oh well! After getting plenty of sand in my shoes, it was decided that we would reward ourselves for the physical exertion by eating ice cream. Soon after we left for home. I decided to hang out with the girls again and we ended up talking till pretty late in the night. Actually, it was another night that I got to bed post 3.30 am.

So, it ended up another weekend when I woke up late. I got up at 1 pm! After talking to Tara from Coe and studying for the GRE attempting to memorize more words, I got together with Jenn to do inorganic chem. I have all but two questions done. I ate dinner with Rachel, Khush and James at a Mexican restaurant and later shared a pina coloda with Rachel and it turned out to be pretty sweet. That cured by oh-so-frequent sweet urges.

And I write this weekend update after watching desperate housewives with james, jenn and the girls.

red moon, night picture 

red moon 

James, Callie, Jenn and I at the Ari Hest/Sister Hazel concert at Knoxville, TN. 

James, me, Jenn and Venkat at the balloon festival. 

This is a good picture. The picture was taken at the top of the 4 mile hike. From left: Irene, James, Dan W, Jenn, Mark, Joy(me), Dan H, Venkat. 

More pictures. This is the camping group! 

another week goes by @ the speed of light

i'm sad that I have to use the native blogger interface or Hello to post pictures on my blog. I would like to have batch file uploading capabilities.. It's extremely time consuming to post 100 or more pictures individually. My picture blog has over 600 pictures now. There are a lot more to come although it seems like the pace of taking pictures since the first few weeks at Oak Ridge has diminished. I haven't done as much recently. Hopefully that will change.

I have a lot of busy work like doing homework for the class, and studying for the GRE. I'm taking the GRE sometime around the end of October. I think Rachel might doing it sometime there too.

So far we don't have much planned for this weekend except for a bbq in honor of one of the Dans getting run over by a bull. Next weekend should be a ton of fun because my brother is coming to visit.

Today has been a productive day so far. I came in at 8.30 and ran AFM scans of the annealed samples that had been in the furnace overnight. And then I conducted a thin film run by myself without my mentor watching me for the first time! We have to run an X ray diffraction scan to check the quality of the thin film. Taking a early quick lunch, I had enough time to put in another sample that should be ready to taken out in half an hour. This should allow me to put a substrate in and create a vacuum in the chamber for Monday. My mentor will be gone all next week and he gave an outline of what he wishes for me to accomplish. He talked about his perception of the right amount of samples and characterization tests needed to write a decent paper worth publishing and it doesn't look like I'll meet the quota. That makes me sad but I can't do much about it because i lose almost 5 hours a week to stuff that I need to do for ORSS which includes the inorganic chem class and a seminar.

I did something fun today post lunch. I took my hour break at work with Jenn and we went to Baskin Robins to get some ice cream. I got a chocolate fudge single scoop cone for $1.50. It was sooo good. I might do that once a week. It reminds me of gelato from Italy. yummmmmmm..

Listening to: [R.E.M. - Try Not To Breathe]