So... IAP is, in fact, the most wonderful time of the year. Here follows a brief description of my activities to date...

Calculus: Same prof as last semester, so... meh. I have to pass to get sophomore standing next semester, though, so I go to lecture and everything. Let's just move on...

Fencing: Yay whee fun fun! I get to poke things with swords. The mandatory chest protectors for the females, however, are some of the sillier things in the history of ridiculous objects. They look a bit like a cross between a Madonna bra and a hockey mask. We giggle every time we put them on.

Debate: Ye gods, Middlebury is the most fantastically terrible tournament I've ever been to. Not only is the judging completely arbitrary (I'm not JUST bitter, everyone recognizes it as such), but not even the members of their debate team know how a tournament is supposed to be run. They managed to break the tab program they were using, though, and Little Adam (my usual partner) swooped in to save the day with the program he wrote. For the rest of the tournament, he was Tab Director as well as one of the competitors. Not only did the tournament start running on time, but the MIT team and friends got information leaks for the rest of the rounds about how well we were doing. Yay! Little Adam and his partner also made it into semifinals, but unfortunately dropped on a terrible, terrible decision. Had they made it into the final round, Little Adam would have gotten a "qual" for Nats, entitling me (as his partner) to go as well. Pity... particularly because that tournament caused us to miss the beginning of...

Mystery Hunt! The theme this year was "How to Succeed In Life by Being Really, Really Evil", taught by M. S. Stopheles. Our team apparently did quite well until hitting a bit of a roadblock on a couple of the final puzzles... nobody finished one of the big metapuzzles more than 8 minutes ahead of our team until then. I arrived late Saturday night, only a few hours before the coin (the object of the Hunt) was finally located. However, I got to make one contribution with my vast intellectual powers--I correctly identified some words in a mysterious language, which people had spent hours pondering and trying to translate with web translators, as Furbish. That's correct, the language that Furbies speak. I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed... but you can see some of the puzzles, solutions, and data on teams at http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/07/ . Our team was Project Electric Mayhem.

And now... I prepare for the 10-day Assassin's Guild game, Centauri! It is a planetary constitutional convention, filled with high levels of awesome. There are four main races in the universe--post-humans, who are genetically-engineered and robotically-enhanced people; Rokanagi, which are giant rock-people obsessed with martial arts; Sestarials, who are basically psychic space elves; and the Bzzn, a bizarre insectoid race. I am the only character in the game who is none of these--I am a Serkash, a brightly-colored birdlike humanoid. TOP SECRET INFORMATION NOT TO BE REVEALED TO ANY OF THE OTHER PLAYERS IN THE GAME: I can fly. It's awesome. For more information about the Centauri game and world, visit http://centauri-city.mit.edu/index.html . My name is Lisa Helgeson--look for me in press releases or something. I don't know if I'll actually appear on the site at all, but anything's possible. And my costume is awesome. Pictures to follow when I find my camera charger.

Game begins at 6:00 tonight. I'm insanely excited. More information to follow in about 10 days!