Monday June 25th to Friday June 29th, 2007.
Got in the lab at 9:00 as usual. It was raining since I woke up. The computer was compiling for 3 hours straight, and the System Monitor indicated that the CPU was being used 100% - 99% all the time.
Lunch hour. I’ve been eating cold turkey ham, Little Debbie pastries and granola bars every day for almost a month. Could that be healthy in any way?
It’s been raining all week. It’s really depressing and doesn’t get you in the mood to do anything.
On Thursday, like every week, I had a meeting with Ananth, Eric Gauthier and Dennis Vigil (the last two from Iowa State University), regarding the project. Some features I had to confirm and so far everything’s going great. Later on that day I had a meeting with José Florez. He tried to help me install and configure VTK with no success. Dr. Birmanns is out of town and won’t be back until next week.
During lunch I went to the Fine Arts Museum to meet Lydia Linke. We both lived together at the residence halls last year at Colorado State University. She’s from Houston and I was really excited to see her again. After we made plans to meet, I realized that I hadn’t brought a camera with me. There was no chance that I was going to see Lydia and not take any pictures, so I left the office, went back to Husky Village, grabbed the camera and traveled to the Museum. Yes, traveled. It’s really far away from home, but the fact that I had my camera with me and that I was about to see Lydia made the whole trip worth it. I arrived there and met her as planned. We all (her mother and cousin, too) walked through the museum. It was great. I was just hoping that Ananth didn’t call me at my mobile, so I turned it off (quite a solution). After that I returned back to the office to keep of working (or fighting with the simulation).
On Friday, Ananth came back to the office and I showed him what I had been doing the previous days while he was absent. He really liked the fact that I had moved on: I was developing a Front-end using something I’m really good at: Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash. He mentioned that we was about to tell me to go to the Apple Store and buy a Mac, but since I was able to move on, he liked the idea of me working on my own laptop with the language I was comfortable with. Imagine just how dumb I felt.
At night we went to see the Houston Astros vs. the Colorado Rockies baseball game. I was really excited. I left for Husky at around 4:30 in the afternoon. The game was at 7:00 pm. At six I was waiting for the bus outside of Husky. To my surprise, at 6:40 I was still waiting for the god dammed bus! I thought I was going to be very late for the game, but I actually got there during the second inning. When the game was about to end, Colorado was winning 8 to 7 and Houston had 2 outs, and a player on first base. To our disgrace, Houston connected a Home Run and won 9 to 8. I was cheering alright, I mean, Houston won. But I really wanted Colorado to win.
I still had a great time; I bought myself a huge hot dog and a huge beer (expensive ones). After the game they opened the stadium ceiling to reveal an awesome look at the downtown buildings. And then the fireworks started.
Gaby Ale, Morris, Silvia, Gisela and Paulina were expecting me at the Ginger Man Pub over at Rice Village, so I walked all by myself from the stadium to the METRORail station (around 11 blocks, because I walked one station south). There, I was all alone in downtown Houston until a really creepy-looking hobo sat right next to me. He was staring at the emptiness of the night, to occasionally laugh out loud. I was holding my camera and my breath, trying my best not to move or make visual contact. I wondered if I didn’t move, maybe he wasn’t able to see me.
Around half hour later, the train finally pulled into the station. I got off at Dryden and walked to Rice Village. It’s like a 20 minute walk. Around 1:00 am I was finally at the pub with everyone else.
At the Ginger Man Pub they have beers from all over the world. Oh how I wanted a New Belgium Beer. I opened the carte and saw that they had Skinny Dipping! The awesome (seasonal) beer from Fort Collins! I asked for one but to my disappointment they were out of them. Since I was open to new beer-related experiences, I ordered a beer from Canada which I’d never heard about: La Fin du Monde. What a waste of money. The beer tastes bittersweet, with a cherry flavor. Imagine drinking a whole bottle of cold medicine (but without the cool hallucinogen experience). Ça c’été “la fin du monde”, bien sur. After drinking maybe half of it, and about to puke, I ordered another beer. This time it was not that bad, but still really gross; I had to shotgun it to finish it completely.
Oh well, it had been a good day overall.
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