Alright! As of last week, I am finished with all my undergraduate course work! The only thing remaining is to spend this summer finishing up my senior thesis and then I am done! So close to being officially done with school. It feels amazing and scary all at once. The next immediate goal is to study for the GREs, do well enough on them and then apply to some awesome grad schools in the fall! In the meantime, I need to see if I can find a cool job that will pay the bills too.

I’m leaving tomorrow to head up to the Sierras with Dan. On Thursday and Friday, we’re going to attempt to climb Mount Whitney. There still seems to be a lot of snow up there, but we’ll see how it goes. We both have all the gear we’ll need though, so that’s good. Here’s to hoping it’s a successful trip!

Here is a picture I snapped of Whitney a year and a half ago on a geology trip:

Next week I’ll have a picture looking down. 😉

I really do have the craziest small world stories happen to me in this city.

Anyway, for the most part, this is going to be ripped straight out of an email I wrote to Meghan recently.

While riding my bus on the way to school the last few weeks, almost everytime I get on, I notice this quite fashionable, extraordinarily cute girl who apparently has a class at the same time I do. The bus is always super packed though and she’s usually at one end while I’m at the other.

So I’m really not sure how I notice her out of all the other people that are packed on the bus, but she continually catches my eye though. I’ve always wanted to say something to her, but I feel kind of strange being a random bus guy and saying something like, “HEY! YOU SMELL PUUURTY!”

Anyway!

So, two of my housemates are moving out at the end of this month! We post an ad on craigslist and get a load of responses. We setup some appointments for this past week. On one of the nights, a housemate left to go down the hill and pickup two ladies who were interested (their lease apparently expires soon and they are friends/roommates right now). They walk in the door and I look up.

One of the girls is the one I always see on the bus! I think my mouth hit the floor. Of course in my infinite smoothness, I said “WHOA! I TOTALLY RECOGNIZE YOU!” (Thankfully I stayed away from the “you smell pretty” line).

She said, “you do?” I thought it wasn’t a good idea to admit that I’m a bus stalker so I just said that she just looks really familiar for some reason.

So we showed them the house and they definitely seemed interested (price, proximity to school and the fact that they said the rooms were “good sized” – which we’ve never gotten before). We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks, but I’m sure I’ll probably see her on the bus again soon.

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In other news: I aquired the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album “Stadium Arcadium” through rather nefarious means awhile ago.. Anyway, I’ve finally had a chance to listen to it and I am really enjoying it! It’s especially interesting since I’ve never been all that hot on the RHCP. They have some good tunes in my opinion, but I never got all that into them. But this is definitely one of the best albums I’ve heard so far this year in my opinion! Definitely excellent.

Alright… a week of classes left and I am done! YES! Then I begin to contemplate what I’m going to do with my life. Yikes!

Woo! I love random trivia (especially trivia nights at bars too!). I’ve always been fairly good at it. However, I’ve never been good enough and neither I or any of the teams I have been on have won anything!

Until tonight.

I decide to go study and finish writing a geology paper (I got an extension!) at a local bar/coffee shop/art gallery called the Canvas Gallery. It’s an awesome little place about 5 blocks from my house and usually has these awesome events going on every night.

I checked the calendar tonight to see what would be going on and if it would interfere with my studying. Sure enough, it would! It turns out they were having an event called “Ask a Scientist” and tonight’s speaker was from the USGS! He would be talking about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (who’s anniversary is tomorrow morning at 5:12am). Even better, they were having a trivia night about earthquakes with prizes to the winners! AWESOME!

So it started in 10 minutes, I packed my bag and booked it down the hill, making it just in time to get a scorecard. The finally tally, I got 8 out of 10 questions right, the highest score there! (And one answer was originally right but I erased it!) Yes! I guess it was kind of cheating… since I’m a geologist. Ah hem. The questions WERE hard though.

Anyway, I ended up winning this awesome book, signed by the author himself! Pretty productive evening.

Well, I never did get to write any more to my paper unfortunately. I should do some of that now though. I have grand ambitions to be downtown at 4:30am to attend the memorial service and should probably get to bed early.

It’s pretty crazy to think about though, especially after walking around the streets tonight. 100 years ago was a night much like tonight. Crystal clear, calm, quiet. No one really knew of the impending doom that was about to be unleashed. And it can happen at any time too.

Of course I’ve already heard numerous people in the last few weeks say, “Wouldn’t that be crazy if it happened again, right on the 100th anniversary?” I suppose stranger things have happened up here of course. We’ll see what tomorrow brings! 🙂

I know I haven’t posted much since I’ve gotten back from New Zealand. School has really been tough this semester with the amount of work that I’ve had to do. Plus, life really hasn’t been all that exciting, leaving little to write about (excessive amounts of rain and excessive amounts of school work).

Anyway, I read this article today and was sad I didn’t know about this earlier. A tricycle race? I totally would have signed up to do that! The pictures in the news article are hilarious. I really do love my cooky city.

And here is another reason I love my crazy city, this news article is circa Valentines Day. And another reason. And even another… though that article is two years old, but they ran the race again this year. Also, the Bay to Breakers (WARNING: Pics of naked people on that page!) run is coming up in May as well and I’m definitely looking forward to that, as it’s always a good time. It’s basically an organized party. 🙂

In other news, Tuesday is the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. A memorial is planned downtown at 4:30am on Tuesday, and I’m going to try my best to attend.

Ugh. Just got a phone call that is not good news.

Two weeks ago, one of my closest friends in the geology program up here got into a horrid motorcycle crash one evening when a car swerved across 3 lanes of traffic to try and get to an exit they were about to miss. My friend Kurt happened to be exiting the freeway at the same time.

Fortunately, he saw the car coming and was able to try and react. Unfortunately, he was basically run off the road. He ended up in extraordinarily bad condition and considering his injuries, it’s amazing he even survived.

Last night was the first chance I’ve had to see him since the accident. Along with a few friends, we spent three hours at the hospital last night. His injuries are numerous. There was a compound fracture in the left leg, his right foot might be broken, ACL and MCL in both knees are ripped, his pelvis was basically broken in half, busted bladder and three broken vertebrate.

Anyway, my friend Peter, who has been spending a lot of time at the hospital, just called to inform me that the doctors are going to have to amputate his left leg, due to the amount of blood lost and muscle tissue that died as a result. Ugh. I feel sick and sad. All we can do at this point is be there for him and keep him in our thoughts and prayers.

The snow level is expected to drop down to 500ft tonight! My house is situated at a cozy 640ft! Will we get snow? Who knows! Especially since I am about to leave for a geology trip to Point Reyes in about 30 minutes. I don’t mind camping or doing geology work, but not if it’s raining.

Here’s to hoping!

Alright! So of course it’s been nearly a month since I last posted. Fear not, for I am still alive!I’ve been trying to keep up with school and stay afloat, after starting the semester off at a disadvantage thanks to gallivanting around far away lands for the first two weeks of the semester. So writing anything here has basically been at the bottom of my priority list.

Anyway, it’s nice to be back in the States, but I do miss New Zealand. Air New Zealand now has some crazy sale going on for another week where you can by a round trip ticket from San Francisco to New Zealand for $800… and they’ll throw in a free flight to Australia as well! Oh dear… how I want to take advantage of that! (Of course the offer is only valid for their winter months, but that might be an interesting time to go there)

As far as the rest of my life is going, there hasn’t been too much exciting going on other than school (which has taken up the majority of my time lately). Up until this last week, the weather had been absolutely beautiful and was a very nice thing to come back to. We even got to see some incredible sunsets from the house as well!

The Farallon Islands silouhetted off in the distance by the setting sun.

For our geologic mapping class, we went up to the Marin Headlands (north of San Francisco) yesterday and the previous Friday to begin some mapping exercises for our course. It’s quite hard to concentrate when you have this view behind you however…

I’ve also been working on my senior thesis lately as well, which involves looking at diatoms from a place near Death Valley called the Tecopa Basin. It’s basically a paleontology thesis where I’m trying to determine a paleoenvironment for this area about one million years ago. I haven’t done the field work for it yet (since I was in New Zealand), but a professor brought some samples back from when he was in the area in January. So I’ve really just been in the lab for the most part processing the sediment. I’m supposed to do my field work out there (and collect more samples) around the beginning of April.

Some samples sitting in baths of hydrochloric acid. Fun! (It looks like urine… I know.)

Here is a pic Michelle snapped of me when she stopped by the lab and wondered what sort of ridiculous outfit I was wearing. Hah. I’m trying to follow in my father’s footsteps and be a mad scientist!

Lastly, to leave you with a picture comparing where I was to where I am now. Here is a pic we took in New Zealand one night while playing with a fellow student’s digital SLR (those were soooooooo nice). It’s the constellation Orion (upside down compared to what we’re used to).

Constellation Orion viewed from New Zealand (upside down!)

Orion as viewed from San Francisco. It’s flipped the other way, but hard to tell since there’s so much ambient light in the picture that washes out the stars.

Back in the States and jumping right back into school.

Anyway, I went ahead and created a photo gallery with pics from our stay on the North Island. Check it out!

North Island Photos

Alright, it’s my last full day in New Zealand! How quickly the last 6 weeks have gone by. I’m quite sad to be leaving actually. Though at the same time, I’m anxious to get home, see my friends and share stories. We’re in Rotorua all day today and will be trying to catch the Super Bowl somewhere in town. My flight leaves here tomorrow at 7pm!

I arrive back in San Francisco on Tuesday at 10:15AM! (Interestingly enough, while I was having lunch on Mt. Ngauruhoe, another couple came by who were also from San Francisco. Small world!)

Anyway… internet use here is incredibly expensive! Time to go.

So long New Zealand.

About after about 9 and a half hours of hiking today, we completed the Tongiriro Crossing. It’s the best hike I’ve ever done. I took *200* pictures today and have no way to upload them. Grr!

Anyway, I am quite wiped out. It’s currently 10:43 PM and we got back about an hour ago. Time for bed.

(3 more days in New Zealand!!)