St. Louis

Hey everybody! The project is in the middle of the 7th week which means in a week and a half i'll be home. WOOO! We've got a lot to do still, but i am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Last weekend the team went down to St. Louis for a couple days. The team visited Washington University at St. Louis, taking a tour of the facility and visiting with one of the engineering professors. We ate dinner along the cobble stone streets at a restaurant in Laclede's Landing.

After dinner we walked along the levee (Mississippi river) to a free Better Than Ezra concert under the Arch. The concert was great as well as the huge fireworks show afterwards. After the concert we waded our way through people back to the landing where we ended up in a comedy club. A nationally acclaimed comedian, Jim Wiggins, and a few other comedians entertained us for a good 2 hours. Wiggins, a burnt out hippie wore a hat that said "did you poop today?", picked on Blake and Tom like it was his job. I don't think i've laughed so hard in my life.

The next day the team went to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery tour. We took pictures with the Clydesdale horses, went through he amazing facility, and even sampled some 6 day old beer. After lunch at some Italian restaurant, we made our way back down to the landing to attempt to go on a tour of the Arch. By the time we reached the Arch, everyone was pretty tired of one another, cranky, sweaty, tired, you name it. The heat and the humidity were unbearable, the worst i've ever been in. So after ditching the girls at the Arch, not taking the tour, we drove home to our little air conditioned dorm rooms.

All in all, the weekend was great. We got to see a new place, see some historic buildings, hear a free concert, laugh at the expensive of your friends, and drink free beer... what more could you want? The best part was that because we made a graduate school visit to Washington university, NSF paid for the gas!

CRUNCH TIME!!!

So it's sunday night... at 11pm... and this is about the 6 hour in the office working on the same program that doesn't work because we're trying to do a simplified integration of a wall with fluctuating limits using microsoft excel that sucks for programming long strings of equations and i want to burn it down using a large bomb, preferably a 4000lb car bomb made of TNT the, the reference explosive material used to calculate bomb blasts at a standoff distance of only 5 feet so it's probably gonna be screwed just like anything else that is within 300 feet of a car bomb that big but that's ok because the notebook just started so now i get to listen to "Notebook" in the background while other people eat pizza and argue whether or not elephants live in the forest, but who really cares because my program doesn't work and i have 2 weeks to finish the program and write a 50 page paper and present to my client who probably wont read it even if it is published in a professional engineering journal which brings me back to the point of this sentence... I live in a giant bucket.

Cincinnati, OH

Yesterday a couple of the guys and I got up at 7:30 and left for Cincinnati, OH for my first professional baseball game. After getting jacked on our tickets (long story...) we got into the park, got our free Red's hats, and meandered through the thousands of people checking out the stadium, we made our way to our seats. Sadly we didn't bring a camera, but our seats were on upper deck left field. We got to enjoy a nice cold Budweiser while watching the Cincinnati reds, the oldest professional baseball team (or so they claim). We listened to the national anthem with thousands of other people, had a stealth fighter fly right over the stadium, and fireworks... how much more American can you get? The weather was great, but it was hot. I have the sunburn to prove it. There were some great plays, the Reds coach got thrown out, saw 5 home runs (2 of which were into our section), and I got to see Ken Griffey Jr. pinch hit the last and possibly tying run for the game. Yah, he struck out and the Reds lost, but it was still cool to see him, and a bunch of other great players play. After the game we went and drove over to Kentucky and ate dinner at Hofbrauhaus. We walk in and there is an authentic German band playing, people dancing on the tables, huge mugs of beer and cute girls dressed in short frilly corset things. The food was good, the beer was good, so good the other guys I came with had 2 Liters of 6% alcohol content beer... needless to say I drove the 2 hours home and they passed out in the car. We got home, took a much needed shower, and then slept for 10 hours. Glory. That is a good day.