The past few weeks have been extraordinarily busy. There is probably a lot to write about that I will forget. Regardless, some highlights… or lowlights, of the past few days:

I had midterms last Thursday that I describe as being disasterous. Namely, it was my midterm for mineralogy that caused problems. It was a timed test where we had about 6 rocks in a tray, and we had 13 minutes to identify all the minerals in each rock before passing the trays on. About halfway through the test, I reach over to my folder and knock over a bottle of hydrochloric acid! It spills all over my desk and smites some of my notes (which start to fizz!). I had to take a few minutes to clean that mess up and didn’t end up finishing that tray of minerals. Then when the test was nearly over, I was playing with my knife (which we use to test the hardness of certain minerals) and ended up slipping, slicing my middle finger right open! The thing proceeded to bleed for the next 35 minutes until I finally managed to get home.

Luckily, those days are past. I think it’s a testiment to my klutziness. Anyway, we have a field trip for mineralogy for the next 4 days. The itinerary is to hit up the Sierras and Owens Valley. Among the stops we will be doing are Bridgeport, Yosemite, Bishop, Lone Pine and an area near Death Valley. Most of this area is like my second home, since Dan (sometimes Nic too), go there quite a bit for hiking/camping expeditions. Not to mention the countless other geology field trips I’ve been to in the Owen’s Valley. I’m looking forward to this though, almost completely packed for it. Just need to buy some food for this weekend in a little bit.

I also went to REI and with the intention of picking up a few things… and ended up buying a massive amount of crap. That place is like a drug dealer. So much good stuff! If it wasn’t for that place and Guitar Center, I’d probably be pretty well off!

Speaking of Guitar Center…

I found this interesting device made by Line 6 called the GuitarPort. Basically, it hooks straight into your computer and simulates a large number of different amplifiers and effects pedals. I figured for $99, it wasn’t that bad, and if I didn’t like it I’d just bring it back.

After playing with it for the last week, I have to say that this thing is AWESOME. Since it plugs directly into the computer, it makes it extraordinarily easy to record as well. I put together a small mp3 to show it off. The following example is about 1 minute long (1mb download) and features 4 different guitar tracks mixed together. Enjoy!

Out of the Way Demo Download. (1 minute long. 1 mb download.)

Alright, time to do some final packing and then I’m off for a few days!

Back up in the Bay Area after the conference this weekend for the Southern California Earthquake Center. That was a pretty great experience. With all the free food and drinks, I think I’m definitely going to become a scientist for that reason alone! It was also great seeing many of these people again. My friend Brandee even got to meet my parents. The conversation with my mom afterwards went something like this:

Mom: “She is very pretty! And she’s so much nicer than your other girlfriends.”
Me: “Yeah, but she isn’t my girlfriend.”
Mom: “You know, you always go for the exotic looking ones!”
Me: “But I’m not going for her!”

I told Brandee and she got quite a kick out of that! Anyway, it was definitely a fun time, though I kinda tweaked my damn knee when we were playing volleyball. It is still sore. I still want to play volleyball tomorrow night over in Berkeley though. We’ll have to see how I feel.

Anyway, regarding the subject of this post, I bring you the following pictures. This one was taken last week while there were wild fires burning in Northern California.

And this second one, taken when I was flying home on Saturday evening.

It feels like every muscle in my body is sore, making today most unenjoyable. How did I reach this sorry state of affairs? It all begins with volleyball.

I haven’t played a serious game of volleyball since I left high school some 4 or so years ago. I’ve been yearning to play lately, especially after watching the olympic teams compete. The problem is, I’ve had no one to play with up here. Interestingly enough, Michelle recently found out about these open court volleyball sessions they have once a week at the Berkeley YMCA. She told me to check it out, so I went last night! After not playing for 4 years, I played for 3 hours last night!

It was completely fun, and I felt ecstatic afterwards. I am definitely going to go back and play next week. They play 6 vs. 6 and many of the players are just awesome! I got some pretty good advice yesterday and quickly fell back into the groove. David and Michelle watched me play for a bit and they were impressed. That made me feel great. It also helped that I nailed a kill within the first 30 seconds of the game! Hah, awesome!

Anyway, flying home tomorrow! Have to present a poster at SCEC meeting in Palm Springs on Sunday and Monday. A poster which isn’t completely finished yet! Ack! Quite a lot to due before then. I am also taking a writing proficiency test tomorrow for SFSU and am somewhat nervous. No reason why I should be, but regardless.

Anyway, off to packing stuff!

Oh yes, from the creator of the original “It’s raining people” comes a new sequel! This time, it involves geology students, cliffs and paragliders!

Eh. We had a geology field trip along the coast and beach today. This is an area near a place called Ft. Funston, where there are massive cliffs overlooking the ocean. People take advantage of this by para-gliding and hang-gliding off of them. Anyway, we were looking at sedimentary deposits down on the beach all day today.

About midway through the day, we’re sitting at the base of a cliff when I hear one of my fellow students exclaim, “Whoa, oh shit!” I look up in time to see a paraglider coming into the cliff’s above our head. If he was a few feet lower, he would have smacked right into the side of them. Fortunately, he was able to catch a ledge that was directly over our heads. However, by “catch a ledge,” I mean crash land into it and slide across the top of it, nearly falling 50 feet down off the other side.

A shower of cobbles, pebbles, dirt and dust came raining down on our heads and we bolted out of there, leaving some of our notebooks and things to get buried. We all just kind of looked up in stunned silence. After a few minutes, he finally got up, precariously close to the edge off the cliffs. Luckily, it appeared he was physically okay, besides being a little shaken up. Unfortunately, the ledge he landed on had no way to get down to the beach and no easy way to get back up to the top of the road. A few people yelled up to him and asked if he was okay or needed help, but he waved to us and declined. We resumed walking up the rest of the beach examining stuff for our class.

Still, that was an incredible sight, and I couldn’t believe I was seeing it.

Anyway, here is a pic I took afterwards to scale everything. He wrapped up his parachute and threw it over his back while he tried to scale the cliff back up to the road. Note how high these cliffs are, especially compared to him!

Here we go, there are 3 days left to see if Dr. K-B’s prediction for a M6.4 quake or greater to strike Southern California. Not sure how I feel about this myself. He has an interesting track record, and reading his paper, it looks like they tried to verify their method by applying it to quakes that had already happened. (A few test cases resulted in false positives though, predicting a quake where no quake happened) However, they still feel they only have a 50% chance of success.

Anyway, some interesting articles for my Southern California breathen:
http://www.dailytrojan.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=709259
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/science/story/10598421p-11517150c.html
http://www.hidesertstar.com/articles/2004/07/30/features/feature2.txt

With the Republican Convention happening this week, and Mother Nature throwing down a hurricane on the east coast, it will be interesting if she tries to wreck havoc by throwing a wrench into the west coast at the same time…

The first full week of school is winding down. Pretty good so far. My only complaint is that one of my G.E. classes has to rank as one of the most boring classes that I have ever taken. Normally, I probably would just ditch it, but it’s right between two other classes, so I figure since I’m already on campus, I might as well make myself useful.

Spent the last few afternoons down at Ocean Beach. I sat on a sand dune and did homework yesterday. That was a peaceful experience and I got quite a bit done. I went running along the beach today as well during sunset. There was hardly anyone out, I practically had the place to myself. That was just an awesome experience. My roommate Colin, might try and take me out surfing one of these upcoming weekends. I’m excited, though aprehensive at the same time. That whole “weird things I can’t see” in the water factor, scares me. Just running along the beach today, I counted 15 jelly fish washed up along a small stretch. Ack!

In some sad news, a student at SFSU died yesterday from injuries he suffered on a school field trip this weekend. He was a brand new incoming geosciences student, so I wonder if this will have some implications on our department. I didn’t know the student, but very sad stuff nonetheless. I wish his family and friends the best.

Alright, a few hands of Texas Hold ‘Em awaits with the roommates! This will be the fastest $20 I’ve ever lost. (I’ve yet to actually win a hand in this game.)

Alright, looks like everything is back in working order. The photo gallery has finally been restored, using the latest version available. Let’s see how long it lasts this time.

The past two days have been absolutely gorgeous up here. Not a single cloud in the sky, and not too hot either. I took a few pictures today from the small park across the street from my house. I ended up stitching together this (beware 1.4mb!) picture of San Francisco to create a neat little panorama view. Quite awesome I think!

Also, I applied the same method to take a picture of my room now that I’m finally moved back in. This didn’t come out as well as the San Francisco panorama though. All I really need to do in my room is hang some posters up on the wall and everything will be set! If one of the roommates upstairs moves out, then I’ll probably end up taking the room and I can finally get rid of that blasted loft bed. Anyway, pic of the room.

I also discovered an interesting thing while browsing through some random recording archives on my computer. This is an interesting (albeit simple) little chord progression, but I love the way it sounds. I might have to play with that a little more. Anyway, this mp3 is about 500kb. Check it out!

Going over to Berkeley tonight to hang out with my sister and David for a bit. I’ll have to write more about school later (as well as how I made a great fool of myself tumbling down the stairs).

Stay tuned! 🙂

After an enormously tedious 8 hour drive on Monday, I am finally back in San Francisco. I think that I would normally get depressed or saddened by foggy and gloomy days, but when I arrived to find my neighborhood enveloped in fog, it just felt so awesome! It was that perfect kind of weather that is just *perfect* for a fire. Granted, we don’t have any wood for our fireplace at the moment…

Everything is finally unpacked and organized. My room is kind of small for the amount of stuff that I have though. However, it still has a nice, small dorm type of feel to it. It actually looks lived in, especially compared to the baren and uninviting place it was before I left for my internship. One of our roommates upstairs may be moving out in about a month, and his room is a bit bigger, with an awesome view of the ocean too! I might try to snag that. It’s about $140 extra a month, which isn’t too bad in the scheme of things.

I was also able to land a job at school! I’ll be working on the outreach program for the geosciences department, helping high school students with various research projects. I’ll also be maintaining their webpage for them as well. That stuff is right up my alley and should be relatively simple to do.

First day of classes was today too. It’s going to be a brutal schedule. I’ll be on campus for nearly 8 hours a day for 3 days a week. Despite those huge hours, I still will be going to school the other two days as well! Yes! School every single day. This is going to be brutal. The schedule that seems to be set in stone at the moment is: Sedimentology & Stratigraphy, Structural Geology, Mineralogy and Violent Oceans & Atmosphere. I will be having an enormous amount of field trips to go on for these classes, so I’ll have relatively few free weekends this semester. We’ll just have to see how it pans out!

Dan and I went on a short camping trip to the Sierras this weekend. That was a blast. We did quite a bit of off roading in his newly aquired Jeep. We discovered some interesting things on these expeditions, such as the Inyo Craters. I’ll try to post some pictures soon, once I get my gallery back online.

It is the most wonderful feeling in the world to randomly be working on your website, only to realize some jackass has decided to take out his frustrations of being a socially inept computer nerd who will never talk to a girl in real life on your website. Ah yes. It has happened again! This time with the latest version of gallery. To whomever has done this, I wish nothing but death upon you. Finding out the IP address is a fairly simple task as well, so the webhost will be contacted.

In other news. I started putting up photos from Nic and Kristen’s wedding. You can check that stuff out here. More will hopefully be going up soon.

Hung out with some old friends from high school that I haven’t seen in over two years. Kellie and Matt. That was fun, catching up on old times, especially since Matt and I had first met around third grade! Completely crazy.

Dan and I depart tomorrow (tonight?) evening for the Sierras. What a nice way to relax and end the summer. I’m looking forward to it.

EDIT – 3:11 AM – After playing around with the gallery for that past 2 and a half hours and nothing seeming to work, I have disabled the gallery section. I really can’t do anything until I am on a decent internet connection. Unfortunately, that won’t be until next week when I am back up in San Francisco. Ugh. Screw these immature “hackers”.

I am now officially done with my internship. The past 13 or so weeks have been an amazing learning experience that absolutely flew by. Participating in actual research is tedious, but fun. I really can’t wait for grad school. Then again, we’ll see how I feel about it after two more years of college. 😉

Last week was just incredibly busy. It started off with a memorial service for Dr. Mehegan. There were quite a few students there that I remember in some of his classes over two years ago. It was obvious by the large number of people there that he had a huge impact on so many people’s lives.

The rest of the week was basically working all day and then hanging out with friend’s at night. Got to hang out with my newfound friend Brandee again! That was definitely fun and nice to finally get out of the apartment and actually do some stuff. On Thursday night we went to a bar in Hollywood. There have been a few posts where I explain how crazy San Francisco is and what a small world it is up there. I’m beginning to think it isn’t so much San Francisco as it is me!

Towards the end of the night I saw a girl walk by and thought she looked extremely familiar. I remembered from where… I used to work with her up in San Francisco! Now, 3 months later and 450 miles away, I see her in a bar randomly. That was the craziest thing ever.

On Friday, as I was about to leave work and go back to the apartment to pack up everything, Phil called. It turns out he is visiting California for a week (he currently has an internship in New York) and was driving through LA. We ended up hanging out and checking out the Getty Center, which is massive. There was quite a lot of neat art there though (and even some interesting geology stuff! All the stones there are made of travertine and taken from the same rock quarry that was used to build the Colliseum in Rome). I also got to meet his girlfriend Liz. She is quite a rad person as well. They ended up staying the night at my apartment before they continued their drive up the coast to San Francisco.

Moved back here on Saturday and have just been pretty much lazing around at the moment. It is quickly dawning on me that I have an disgusting amount of stuff to do before I leave. I need to repack most of my things, think about which things I want to leave behind and take, reserve a U-Haul truck to drive up north on Monday, drop off some keys and parking passes to UCLA, tear down a deck at our house, since I promised my dad I would do that and also pack for a camping trip Dan and I are going on this weekend. Ah! The camping trip to the Sierras will be a nice way to end the summer and is almost reminescent of last year where we left right before school started.