Keir defended his thesis today.

The world's only corn palace.

and hello crazy commenter, vivek.  dude, slow down.  im not sure all my friends are up for the sheer ferocity of your commenting power.

where am i?  what are you doing?  simple questions, just not answered in a long time.  i think the last substantive post i made was in houston or before back in early feb or late jan.  yea, i could check, but im too lazy.  ahh, the life of the unemployed :)   well, im currently in champaign, illinois (go geebs!) hanging out with marisa zapata.  she's an old friend from rice.  its been a while getting here though.  i spent like 3 weeks with will and louren in houston, a week in birmingham, a week in atlanta, 3 or so very spread out weeks with trav and kerry in the holler, a few weeks in boston with the fundle, another week plus in new york, oh yea, and flew back to seattle for a few weeks in there to do taxes, see people, and, honestly, play in some games (snap and taz).  so, all told its been at least a few months with more than a few dozen states getting to where i am now.    and i quite like it actually.  i think mainly it is the life of the grad student that i enjoy.  its pretty relaxed and easy compared to most of my friends ive been staying with.  its also really fun to hang out with professors and grad students, most are pretty interesting.

terrible story for the week :  yesterday after the mexico game, we decided to set off some fireworks that we bought at target (yes, target sells fireworks here in illinois).  turns out that all of them were just smoking ones, no bangs.  a little disappointing for me since im a big fire and explosion fan, but fun for marisa's advisor's two kids, ema and emilio.  after a few sticks that let off different colored smoke, one of the kids asked if they could run around with one of the fireworks letting off smoke.  seemed harmless since all they did was put off smoke.  yea, except that last one.  after 20 minutes of going thru fireworks that only smoked, one of them decided to blow when it got to the end.  yea, while in ema's hand.  i thought i had blown it off.  the chemicals covered it in black, white, yellow, red.  it looked like her hand had been blow open and burned down to the bone.  thankfully, that wasnt the case, and after a lot of cleaning and rinsing in cool water, it turned out to be a relatively minor burn on one of her fingers.  holy cow was i shitting bricks though that i had fucked up this 9 yr old girl's hand.  things are still good between us though and she is in no pain today.  seems that sort of stuff is genetic, not the healing bit, but the millers shooting fireworks at people.  my dad shot our neighbour in the chest in florida with a bottle rocket and scarred her.  like father, like son.

good story for the week :  last friday, marisa's band, sandunga, played at a party.  they are very enjoyable. its afro-cuban and really perfect for sitting around late into the evening listening to.  anyway, one of the people was at the party was a local dj for some crappy lite rock station, and she offered to give marisa a shoutout on 97.5 at 11:22 the next morning.  so, faithfully the next morning, we managed to get ourselves in a car with the radio at 11:22, and listened to minutes of normal dj crap about the news, weather, sports, traffic, etc, all the while thinking that she had forgotten us.  and then it came, she told a story about how great the local music was in champaign, and she wanted to give a shoutout to marisa, the great flute player, and then bonus, her friend dave from seattle, currently travelling around the country.  it was super cool.  ema ( the burn victim), marisa and i were cheering away.  it was silly fun.

89 plymouth st in cambridge mass

Crossing the george washington bridge. Heading on to boston today.

Andrew eats his in-n-out burger protein style.