July 2007 Archives

i read harry potter & the deathly hallows, obviously.

i signed up for group exercise with lauren so we can get some pe credit. yes, mit requires pe LOL. so far i've done one hour of cycling and one hour of "core/stability training." it involved one of those big exercise balls and a bunch of other equipment and it made me ever so sore. i think i will do power yoga today.

dugan, egg, and i went to the cape last weekend. bought snacks for the beach such as chips and grapes and sushi and chocolate bars [buy one get one free!]. we went swimming in the ocean, which was surprisingly pleasant in temperature. and we lay on the beach and napped in the sun. and we watched these three little boys chase seagulls. and i met dugan's mom.

what else...

rian FINALLY launched the facebook app he's been working on, so you should add it and make him feel good.

i've been trying to figure out who's writing in my honesty box.

i watched my summer of love, beavis and butthead do america, and darfur diaries.

snaaaaaaaaaape <333333333333333333333333

yesterday, after packing towels, sunglasses, assorted snacks and other beach supplies, ana, lauren, clacky, and i took the t to south station to catch a commuter train out to the beach.

but after dropping $13 a piece for our tickets, we learned that the train to the beach we had planned to visit left from north station, not south station, and in about 10 minutes. i.e., there was no way we could make it. the next train would be not for a while and taking into account that it's a 40 minute ride, we gave the beach trip up for lost.

disappointed, we were trudging out of the station when a man sitting at an information booth yelled out, "#7 bus to the beach!" number seven bus, you say? we stopped and he gave us a map and directions to a beach in south boston. it might not be as nice, but we were already dressed for the beach, so we decided to give it a chance, and hopped on the bus.

ten minutes later, there we were, at a tiny little beach, but a beach nonetheless. we laid out our towels, shed our outer layers of clothing, and flopped down on the ground to enjoy the partly cloudy weather. everytime the sun peeped out from behind the clouds, we cheered, only to start grumbling again five minutes later when it disappeared.

however, we made the best of it, eating our snacks, and reading sections of me talk pretty one day out loud to each other. lauren the photojournalist documented every second of it, from the shiny gold roof of a building we could see from the bus stop to us shivering in the cold on the cloudy beach to a tiny waterfall under a bridge that wasn't really interesting at all.

wandering through shelf after shelf of dusty old periodicals, i finally find an article pertinent to my research in the june 1985 volume of the journal of chemical education. i plop down on one of those little stools and pull out my laptop to type up the relevant bits. i decide the whole article might actually be a useful thing to have, and fortunately there are photocopiers in the basement. but instead of taking dimes, they take these "copy cards" that you have to put money on, so i leave the journal downstairs and go back upstairs to get a copy card. it says to recycle the used ones and save the world, so i take a used one from the top of the machine, put it in, put in my dollar bill, and oh it gives me a new card. and the old one back. uh, great?

so i go downstairs to copy my three-page article, and oh, hey. apparently they use dust instead of ink in these photocopy machines and i end up with smudgy fingers and a smudgy photocopy. it's tough work being a fume cupboard researcher.

my blog stopped working properly for a bit, so it's not really my fault. except i think it kind of is because i was probably responsible for fucking it up.

but anyway, now for some exciting happenings in the life of me!

we went down by the hatch shell and sat on the dock to listen to the boston pops play some music on july 3. it was quite romantic, with neon palm trees and police speeding around the water on waverunners and egg in ten years reading under a tree. also fried dough with powdered sugar, that classic culinary delight.

on july 4 we went up on the sr haus roof and watched some fireworks in the rain.

last friday, dugan, rian, and other assorted acquaintances performed in a miniconcert at 41w. dugan covering fergie's london bridge = prolly the best moment of my life.

two weekends ago i went to haymarket for the first time and bought some grapes, raspberries, strawberries, and plums. so cheap and juicy!

i've started going to the gym every day for half an hour and using the bikes or ellipticals. ana is leaving soon, so she paid half the cost to have my card activated and we've both been using it. i'd been planning to go to the gym this summer before that, but there's nothing so motivating as the gym having your $20 already.

we've been putting the projector to good use this summer: watching american idol season one; playing tetris attack on a huge scale; projecting a midsummer night's dream on the wall and doing a dramatic reading for all of the five minutes it took for everyone to get bored; watching sicko and eating out [eating out 2 arrived from netflix today!]; and projecting the excel sheet of our annual ranking of each other based on 15+ categories such as "entertainment value," "hygiene," and "not bossiness".

last night i of course saw harry potter and the order of the phoenix at midnight. christina was there dressed as a hufflepuff [love the hair!] and armed with embarrassing quotes from my la weekly interview. nonetheless, i managed to enjoy the movie. umbridge was terrifying, although whisper-down-the-lane during the movie delivered the message that that could be me if i don't curb my pink habit. the three heroes were true to form as awkward child actors, although now the boys have muscles, which was a little shocking. i did enjoy the brief teenage snape flashback, but i think my favorite part of the movies will always be just seeing the magical world brought to life. all the little things like the door that disappears into the wall and the moving pictures in the newspaper. dee-lightful.