Monthly Archives: August 2015

Aug5

Hanging out in Davis (California, not Square) – Part 3

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Sunday, 14-June-2015

The whole “sleep cycle reset” held pretty well for me – Sunday saw me awake pretty early again. It was nice, and I got a chance to catch up on a few blog posts (Ed Note: Yeah yeah, I know. These things are getting posted… what, a month late? Hush. Editing takes a while. The sheer number of pictures that Ben took would blow you mind. BLOW. YOUR. MIND.)

But Mike did finally get mobile, which meant that chill time was over, and Serious Business Time was begun. Specifically, getting smoothies at the nearby grocery store.

The smoothies were brain food, since Mike had to get into the lab to finish up some work before he could run away for the next week of roadtrip adventure. I just relaxed. Maybe went through OKCupid a bit, checking out the landscape for Hood River. Maybe.

What I will admit to is that after everything was done, Mike gave me a tour of the lab – the main working area and the cleanroom. We couldn’t go into the cleanroom itself, but I did get to see some of the basic MEMS tech that he works on day to day. It was pretty awesome. I actually understood the basics of what he was describing, thanks to the internship that I had in a MEMS/Nanotech lab – but that doesn’t mean that I could have actually done any of the work… it’s sort of like how people can understand the basics of “planets orbit around the sun”, but can’t actually calculate out orbital trajectories.

Anyways, we hung out and did a tour and then went home. Stopped by the grocery again on the way back to grab some stuff for dinner, but that’s really it.

Then: more party! Allow me to, again, give a quick synopsis:

  • Pool party!
  • Cooking!
  • Grilling!
  • Huge pitchers of drinks!
  • Poor life decisions on my part, in regards to the number of drinks consumed!
  • Swimming!
  • Pulling my Cast Iron skillet out of the car, and grilling a set of obscenely delicious steaks!
  • Doing the above while making poor life decisions in regard to the number of drinks consumed!
  • Not hurting myself or anyone else during the two above bullet points, thankfully!
  • More partying!
  • Making good life decisions in regard to drinking lots of water, knocking back a few asprin, and going to sleep early!
  • Writing this list before falling asleep!
Aug4

Hanging out in Davis (California, not Square) – Part 2

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Saturday, 13-June-2015

The people who say “if you need to reset your internal clock, go camping for a week” are 100% correct.

I can say this, because I woke up early, of my own volition, without an alarm being set. I was mobile at something like 7:30, having woke up maybe half an hour earlier. It was amazing. I was astounded. So I walked out of bed, got a glass of water, and did some writing while waiting for Mike to rouse himself. We weren’t in any rush, so I felt no need to kick his door in anytime soon.

When Mike did finally wake up, it was to a dinosaur in the face.

See… his roommates are awesome, and they reminded me of an idealized version of a fraternity. Everyone dealt with stuff together; they’re all smart (PHDs and all sorts of other credentials), and they pull pranks on each other. The prank of the morning that day was putting a giant inflatable dinosaur in front of peoples rooms, so they’d open their doors directly into a jaws of prehistoric doom.

Mike didn’t squeal, unfortunately. He’d gotten used to it, I guess, and just swore, and proceeded to smack his roommate with a giant inflatable dinosaur.

So then, the rest of the day started up with the three of us heading to breakfast, followed by more dinosaurs – Jurassic World, which was excellent… even if it did leave me wanting to watch Guardians of the Galaxy again to see what Chris Pratt can do with a real script. Then relaxing at the house, and then…

Dinner with an Astronaut! A real, honest-to-goodness, “flew up into space on a pillar of explosions and then hung out in a floating pod for a few months”, astronaut. One of the engineering professors at UC Davis, who I was extremely excited to meet.

And when I did meet him… I completely froze, and couldn’t think of anything to say. No witty questions appeared in my thought bubbles. No intelligent repartee occurred. I just sort of got intimidated, and played with quad-copters an an Occulus Rift that his niece brought (since she works for Occulus). The food was awesome though, which helped me drown my sadness that I froze up 🙁

But it was okay, because we had a second BarBQ to go to! One without any astronauts, unfortunately… but one where I was a little more able to talk to everyone. Which… you know… was kind of nice. It was basically all folks our age, but from an impressively varied set of backgrounds: I met a few New Englanders, a few engineers, a whole group of theater kids, some singers, and even a few english nerds. Who, of course, got a whole massive game of bananagrams going. Because it doesn’t matter where we are – english majors always find a way to play bananagrams. Sort of like how I always end up climbing something.

Anyways, the bananagrams was Mike and my cue to leave. Mike did get to do a duet with one of the singers though – the guy was amazing, and the duet was pretty epic. But so was the game of GoldenEye (note the theme – Mike’s roommates have an N64 console in their house, so we were rocking the classics. Combine that with the awesome beer that’s native to Davis? You have one hell of an end to a day of chilling and partying.

Aug3

Hanging out in Davis (California, not Square) – Part 1

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Friday, 12-June-2015

I’d been noticing the fields as I drove out of Yosemite Valley and into the plains of California. The Midwest had been green; way greener than I’d expected. Dave and Jig’s hard reminded me that it was the end of the growing season, so that everything was in bloom.

California was not in bloom. The fields to either side of me were straw colored – not amber waves of grain, but the tan of dried grass being used as tinder to start a fire.

Wow. Why am I being so poetic? Meh. Sorry, but I’m not actually sorry.

I could tell that I was driving into Davis when the fields turned back to green; I saw irrigation systems working, and the air got a little more pleasant – not cool, but a little bit more tolerable than the scorching heat.

I got to Mike’s house maybe 10min earlier than he did, so I just relaxed creepily outside his house – I assumed that no one was home, so I didn’t bother knocking or anything. I was wrong, but his roommates were cool and just made a little fun of me when Mike arrived and let me in.

Then we were back on the road, heading into Davis itself to grab dinner – Mike, his girlfriend Liz, and myself.

Quick synopsis:

  • Dinner = Bistro 33 / City Hall ← A great restaurant, with good beers and delicious sandwiches for dinner. Fries were good too, but the meal… ohh man.
  • Liz had an early morning coming up, so Mike and I dropped her off at home, then headed back out for adventures on the town!
  • Beers = University of Beers, DeVires, G-Street Wonderbar. We hit them all, but didn’t stay at any one for any real amount of time. I don’t think we even got a beer at Wonderbar, since it was so crowded and full of people
    The other two were excellent – beer is one of the things I was excited about, in regards to living on the West coast. We do good beer in Boston… but they do excellent beer out in Northern California and Oregon.
  • The stock of bars burned through (yeah, we literally hit them all. Go us!) Mike and I headed back to his house. But it was still something resembling early, so we rocked some Mario Kart, beer, and shooting the shit before actually crashing.