All righty, new post.

The tournament at Smith went well, despite horrendously bad management on the part of the Smith girls. They literally ran about 3 hours late the first day--rounds didn't get out until 1:00 in the morning. (We lost that round by an enormous margin... sleeptalking isn't pretty.) But me and my new temporary partner were the top-ranking novices in the tournament! Yay! We beat an opposition team arguing that in the song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", the fiddler Johnny shouldn't bet his soul against a golden fiddle in a fiddling contest with the devil. Yay eternal damnation!

The guild game on Sunday was disappointing, mainly because game mechanics caused me to spend an hour "unblocking tunnel caveins" by myself in random hallways, then spending another hacking into a computer system which, after all of my effort, didn't actually tell me what it did. I actually caused the asteroid base to be destroyed by using the computer to switch off an ancient defense system inadvertently. Oops. Most boring game ever, though, so I barely feel bad...

And now I have a cold, so I'm going to stop writing and go back to sleeping.

Very busy. Pset due today for 7.03. Test tomorrow for 18.01A. Pset due Friday for 5.112. Debate tournament at Smith on Friday and Saturday. Guild game based on Dr. Who on Sunday.

Sleep is good.

There was an entirely accidental and utterly anonymous kitchen fire on Sunday night. The building wasn't burning down--it was something on the scale of a pan on fire, which was immediately extinguished into oblivion. The major problem was that the sprinklers went off--and broke. The most immediate concern for the kitchen and everyone inside was that the water issuing therefrom was, in fact, a disconcerting shade of black. The second was that one of the sprinkler heads immediately broke off, starting to flood the kitchen and surrounding rooms. These two concerns might not have been disasterous in and of themselves, but the emergency response workers also had difficulty turning off the system. This entire flooding system ended up running for about 25 minutes.

Two sections of our hall were flooded, as well as parts of the halls beneath us. Walcott (my third of the building) was allowed to return to their rooms; everyone else had to find alternate housing for the night, because the fire workers were afraid of electrocution. Now, the entire kitchen is off-limits for serious cooking and (until last evening) was covered in a thin layer of sediment. The carpets smell like death. And the administrative authorities of East Campus are less than thrilled with us, despite the fact that most of the problems were caused by the failure of the sprinkler system.

I wasn't there, didn't see anything, don't know anything...

Well, this has been an exciting weekend. Let me describe...

The debate tournament was at Johns Hopkins, which is a pretty campus in a pretty sketchy area (as far as I could tell from the various armed robbery warnings posted around campus). The drive there was supposed to take about six hours--with traffic, however, we were in the car for nine hours. Starting at 6:30 in the morning. Which, for those not familiar for the college student's sleep cycle, is approximately equivalent to 3:30 in the morning for a normal person. However, people were in a relatively good mood, so the drive really wasn't that bad. AND the debate team funded our meals on the way there, so I got a free Cinnabon and coffee (score!).

The tournament itself was great. They didn't segregate varsity and novice debaters, so our first round was against a team with at least one member who had been debating for four years on that circuit. We lost, but not badly. My partner was (unfortunately) not any better than I was, despite a year of technically being a member of the debate team; I had to write all three of our cases, so she didn't really understand what points we had to make. We ended up with a record of 1 win and 4 losses--not embarassingly bad for my first tournament, but a record that I'd really like to improve on!

The guy whose room me and my partner stayed in was probably the most compelling proof I've ever seen against freshman-only dorms. He had apparently been going out and drinking heavily every night since his arrival on campus, and that night was no exception. Despite the fact that we had to be at breakfast before nine the next morning (and then debate!), he didn't come back to his room until about 2:30 in the morning, at which point he was vomiting all over. After cleaning up, he finally went to sleep, and we got to try to sleep on his floor--until he vomited in his sleep at 4:30 and then argued loudly with the RA about whether or not she needed to call in medical people. He lost. Finally, when the medical people actually arrived to examine him, somebody thought to offer us another place to sleep.
The moral of this story: FROSH ARE STUPID. Our sketchiest party dorm doesn't have kids doing that.

But despite the lack of sleep, our team as a whole did pretty well. Our fearless leaders, a senior girlfriend-boyfriend team, broke to semifinals and probably should have broken to finals. I apparently got the ninth highest novice speaking score, which (while not terribly impressive) at least gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. And we got to listen to They Might Be Giants and Les Mis on the way back. So all in all, the tournament was a tremendous success. I'm going again next weekend--yay Smith!

All right, in the interest of sharing the wild and crazy excitement that is my life with the world, here is a blog. It is a delicious blog filled with wit, creativity, and, most importantly, relevant and exciting graphics. So you MUST enjoy it, or I shall track you down. I know where you live.

News to date:
I'm leaving early early tomorrow (and skipping 3 lectures! yay!) for a debate tournament at Johns Hopkins. It should be exciting--I'm the only freshman going, because nobody else had really done debate before who was able to go. So I'm partnered with a sophomore, who unfortunately has very little experience as well. We're fraternizing with the enemy by picking up a Yale debater along the way and giving him a ride... the debate world is pretty tight-knit, methinks. Everyone seems to know all of the other debaters by name and reputation, even if they don't like them very much. Most importantly of all, though, I get to go on cool trips for free! Yay!

Food has been good. I've been cooking real food all the time--one person says that she's going to refer to me as the Brownie Frosh, because I've made two batches in as many weeks. Haymarket was incredible. You can buy pounds and pounds of fruit for a dollar; I ended up coming home with an entire backpack and both hands filled with bags of produce. But some is freezable and/or not very perishable, so not much should go to waste. Banana bread is a beautiful thing.

My room's still not painted. This will be remedied as soon as possible. In the meantime, a picture of the room when I first moved in and it was still cleanish:
Yay! Pretty.

Classes are interesting--I'm in a calculus class (18.01A), a chemistry class (5.112), a genetics class (7.03), and a Shakespeare class (I don't know the number and neither does anyone else). They're not wildly exciting so far, but the calc professor's a fantastic lecturer, so that class at least should be fun. And I got both of my problem sets finished with ample time this week thanks to my mad study skills. Go me. (Well, in one case "ample time" meant "finished the last problem 5 minutes before it needed to be in the box". But I had finished the rest of them by 11:00 the night before, so that one doesn't count.)

The Assassin's Guild had their first game, Flight of the Dauntless, set on a steam-powered airship in a Victorian-era game world. I got to be a female engineer, the former wife of the captain of the airship, whose goals were to reunite with her now 18-year-old daughter, her missing android "son", and sabotage the airship to shame her ex-husband, who had stolen credit for the ship's design. It was FANTASTIC. Half of the people were in costume, everyone acted completely in character, the plot took all sorts of strange unanticipated twists, and I think that everyone had a lovely time. Yay for live-action roleplaying!

And now, I shall finish off the entry with two more pictures: my bright red hair, and one of the hall cats smoking.