Spring in London

Well, it's getting close to being spring here in London. A lot of daffodils are in full bloom, it seems to rain every afternoon, and best of all, we're in the penultimate week of classes! Whoo!

Here are some updates since last time...
1. Hugh Laurie's letter is gone. The resident doctor in the house knocked on my door and asked if he could see it, and then the next thing we all knew he had "taken it back" to Hugh Laurie's house by himself. I'm not buying it. A lot of people in the house are very upset with him whether or not he took it back or kept it -- either way is just mean.

2. I went to a proper pub quiz by Liverpool Street. The rest of my team was way more knowledgeable than me, although I totally knocked out "What is the highest peak in North America," and "Which singer was backed by the band, 'The Heartbreakers?' " But what was the name of Elvis's twin brother? What is the name of a play when the blah blah bat blah in a game of cricket? haha. What is the longest word in the English language made up of entirely pairs of letters? That stuff was HARD! Our team was getting kind of competitive with the other young team next to us, but in the end we both tied with 31 / 70, while the top three teams that placed were octogenarians! SIGH they knew all the answers to rather prevalent antebellum era pop culture references...

3. I went to the Ig Nobel Prizes traveling presentation tonight! The Ig Nobels are a humorous alternative to the Nobel Prizes, and featured the research of many leading figures from scientific fields. I learned about a paper exploring the correlation between bladder control and control in other areas (such as gambling, food consumption, etc), which was actually quite interesting. I heard about a PhD dissertation mathematically mapping the activities of cows in fields (orientation, standing, eating, etc) and their milk produce. I also learned about a Japanese team who invented the first wasabi alarm clock, made after meticulous research into the minimum amount of airborne wasabi necessary to wake a sleeping person. It was a funny evening, and I got to go to Imperial College, which is another of the University of London colleges (and therefore one of UCL's sister schools). I went there straight after class, so I was running ahead of time and I got out a tube station early just to walk around. The first thing I noticed was that it was jam packed. I came out right by a massive Harrod's at rush hour, so that made sense. But then I saw the dozens of firetrucks, meters and meters of cordoned off police activity, ambulances, etc, and horses. Lots of horses! Everything smelled very strongly of gas, despite there being so much wind. Buses were stacking up and pedestrians were trapped and milling around in the streets between the big vehicles. I tried to get around the police block to find my way to Imperial, but I was having no luck. I tried going through Hyde Park but even that was closed off! So I ended up walking down to another station to use the underground to overshoot the disaster scene, and wound up about five minutes late to the show, although I should have been about a half hour early! I found out just now that it was a huge gas leak underneath the police stables, so they had to evacuate around 200 horses, which explains the unexpected abundance of them in the area and why the park was out of bounds!

4. The American Food Cook-Off!
I was challenged to a duel last weekend. A friend of mine here told me that Saturday was the American Food Cook-Off, and that he was inviting a bunch of his friends to compete and I was invited as well. I wasn't allowed to do chili or jambalaya, as apparently his friends had already called those, so I settled for corn bread, mac and cheese, and root beer floats to represent the midwest, haha. I also taught Serene and Lakshmi how to make Oreo truffles a few days ago, so they made those in the kitchen while I tried to create my masterpieces. Unfortunately, the only sauce pan that I have is pretty small, so I had to borrow a pan to boil noodles in while I was mixing the cornbread. I tripled the cornbread recipe, so it must have had six or seven cans of corn / creamed corn in it, and around 8 cups of corn flour! I had to pour it into a gigantic turkey broiling pan that I got for 2 quid at the beginning of the year (it has come in handy so many times)! The mac and cheese I poured into a mixture of bread tins, casserole pans, and other things I could scrounge up, because I tried to make a lot of that as well. Both of those items were very popular, but the root beer floats didn't go over so well. People seemed very confused about the idea of combining "ginger beer" (as Fiery Jamaican Ginger Soda was the closest I could find to Barq's, haha) and ice cream.
In the end, I supposedly lost to someone who made fajitas, but based on the buzz that I heard, I'm pretty sure my cornbread won the day! Humph!


As most of you know, my family is flying in next Friday! I say most of you because I'm pretty sure my parents are the only people reading this, haha. That will be fun; I'm going to make them eat a Sunday roast at a pub! Also, I've been saving the Imperial War Museum for their visit. Yay museums! The Tower of London, Bath, and other sites await as well, although I might pass on the British Museum. Four times in so many months is getting to be excessive!

And then I think two weeks later Brad flies in! We were originally going to try to go to Scotland, but it's too pricey. I bought a book at the store the other day (I had to buy it once I realized I'd been reading it for 30 minutes) that is a guide to day trips from London. It has a lot of interesting historical perspective on why you should visit places, which I quite liked. So per its excellent sounding advice, I convinced Brad to go to Canterbury and Cambridge. Canterbury is only £8 away, round trip, and I am quite excited about it. Everyone who goes to Cambridge raves about it, so I guess I'll give it a go, even though from what I hear they charge you admission at every single college in the university (of which there are several dozen, ugh).

I wrote my first algorithmically generated piece of music last night. I was trying to get the effect of water dripping into a metal bowl that increases in pitch as the level rises. My teacher said it was okay, but I need to make it as if there were several bowls and they empty into eachother when they get full, etc, etc so I have quite a bit of work ahead of me in the next few weeks, BESIDES the databases assignment that I'm coding like a mad person for at the moment. Ahhh. And then I start planning code for another of my classes! Meanwhile, the term is almost completely over and I still haven't heard about my grades from two classes last semester! :(

I got some grades back for a databases assignment that we digital humanities folks had to do in lieu of a test. We basically just were told in an open-ended fashion, to create a "glossary of terms related to the internet and databases." Well, as you can image that is basically everything ever, so my glossary ended up being about fifteen pages double-sided, small text, carefully cited, etc, and the only comment I got on the front (besides where they circled a spelling error, hahaha), was "Too long for a glossary, A-"
I'm okay with that though, because most people seemed to get Cs or Bs, so I'll settle for an A-, haha.

Anyway, I've got to go. In my free time (ha what is that?!) at the end of the term, I have been trying to finish a 1300 page book that I would like to send back to the States with my parents so that I don't have to lug it back in September. Only 400 more pages to go!

Also, everyone here is very excited about their Nebraska shirts! One week until the dorm is going to be sporting some seriously cool attire, haha.

My Neighbors

Exciting news in our humble abode! Serene was sorting the mail yesterday and found a letter addressed to "Hugh Laurie, Lancaster Grove." We don't know what to do with it. There is no number on it, and while the internet reveals that he most likely lives at #17, just about four houses over from us. I for one am not prepared to waltz up to a stranger's house in an attempt to deliver a letter, although I am guessing that ten or fifteen people in the house are already plotting attempts to steal the letter and frame it, so maybe it's not the worst decision. The post system here is not quite like in the US. Mail only goes OUT if you put it in a post box somewhere, as the mailpeople only deliver stuff to the houses, they don't take it away.

Meanwhile, I guess it's pretty cool that I live next to Dr. House?
I am pretty sure we took berries off of his bushes to give our snowman buttons, haha.

A couple of the other work placements are coming in. A couple people have been assigned to UCL, which is fine because they'll definitely be doing interesting stuff and they get paid for their time (that is the trade off: UCL = paid, non-UCL = cool resume). My friend Isabel, who studied Russian history, art, etc as an undergrad was surprised to find that she had been placed as a fluent Russian interpreter for an aviation company.....very surprising considering that she has only taken two years of Russian and did not put on her resume that she was a fluent Russian speaker, so she is hoping that her work placement can be switched up. :/

A couple weeks ago, Isabel, Holly, and I went to get burritos after class at a little Mexican place near campus. They stuck burro hats on us and took our photos on an old Polaroid. We went back today and found ourselves on the wall in the middle of the T of 'burritos.'

We are working hard on our databases projects. I have been putting a couple hours a day in coding, coding, coding. So today I felt like I was taking a break when I started making the website look cool (with other languages, like CSS, but hey, it was a change)! Here's our logo!
It's like a mixture of the UCL logo and teaching website, Moodle, which is why it's funny. It looks cooler when it has a background behind it, etc. I was originally going to make a little dog house for the logo to play on the little portico building in the UCL logo, but it always looked stupid no matter what I did. Unfortunately, now that the logo is done, it's back to coding for me! The whole project should wrap up during the week that you folks (my parents) get here, so if I am sleep-deprived that'll be why.

Time for bed! I'll let you know if I figure out where Chris Martin lives, haha.