More pictures. . .

Finals have now officially started. I had quantum mechanics yesterday, I have mechanics on Monday and comp. sci. and atmospheric sci. on Tuesday. Right now I should be studying, but I'm not because I think I killed my brain studying for and then taking the quantum final. Here are the rest of the pictures I took at St. John the Divine a few weeks ago.

Assuming I can actually make myself sit still and think for long enough to study, I probably won't post anything until after the end of finals. And then I'll probably be busy with shopping and such things and won't post for another week. We'll see what happens.

Wow... that's better

Hot water was apparently restored yesterday so this morning I got to take a hot shower. Nice, considering that I was up freaking out about having a lab presentation and report to finish until 4:30am and was just waking up from my early morning nap at 7:30... a cold shower would have been adding insult to sleep deprivation induced injury. The hot water is back!!! Woohoo!

Send hot water

Yesterday I got up and took a shower in water that could not have been much more than 50 degrees. Today I took a shower that started out a little better than room temperature but ended up freezing when someone else turned on one of the other showers. The hot water on Monday was also closer to what I would call cold. I am not a happy camper.

So this evening I got back from dinner to find an email from housing and dining, subject: Wien Hall Hot Water Heaters. Great! thought poor unsuspecting me, this will mean they fixed the problem... but no, apparently the problem might not even become fixable for over a week. From the email:

We have experienced a malfunction of one of our two heating coils that provide hot water to the building.

While we do have hot water, during periods when many students are using the showers simultaneously there is a chance of experiencing shorter supplies or temporary outages due to the demand being placed on the one remaining coil. The coil is a commercial part which is not readily available, and therefore repairs can not be completed before December 15th.

Ok... I was using the precious lukewarm water supply at around 3:30pm. I suspect that this is not a peak showering period and yet the water temperature went from tolerable to freezing after three minutes when one other person turned on the water. WTF??? This doesn't strike me as chance of shorter supplies, temporary outages, blah... it seems like they're pretty much given.

We are exploring possible interim solutions such as renting a "temporary boiler" but at this point have not identified an effective alternative.

Please note that this is an inconvenient situation that could not be avoided (coils are contained within boilers and there is no way to predict when they will fail) but we will do our best to help minimize the impact of this problem between now and December 15th.

Unavoidable??? because they can't tell when they're going to fail??? I could understand if this were a private residence or something but CU is an institution... If you understand that a part might fail at any time, completely unpredictably you keep extra parts or a backup heater or something on hand. I could live with a day or two of cold water owing to random acts of the malevolent Wien Hot Water God but a week and a half is insane.

Ok, enough of this ranting. I will adopt a positive attitude: cold showers are awesome. I will now begin the countdown until I have the joy of taking another one: 14:00:00, 13:59:59 . . .

Holy snow pictures, Batman!

I have been doing schoolwork or work work all weekend (by which I mean Friday and Saturday). So, in honor of it being Sunday I'm taking a little break (to be followed by a larger break in which I go to juggling club for three hours). I braved not quite freezing temperatures and huge puddles of slush in my walk over to St. John the Divine to take pictures of the grounds. Here are two of them, I'll compress some of the others later and add them.


This first picture should be considered the second entry in my campaign for a hideously expensive camera. It contains an albino peacock. However, because my camera only has 3x zoom and the peacock was sitting about 40' up the side of the cathedral, I sincerely doubt anyone would notice it if I didn't specifically point it out (it's the white spot on top of the carved stone bit). And yes, it is actually a peacock. While I admit that I might find it amusing to employ a freakishly oversized pigeon in my pursuit of a fancier camera, I haven't yet reached that level of desperation.


This was taken in the the cathedral's garden. It does not contain any peacocks, albino or otherwise.

Wherein the protagonist does not spend Thursday night doing homework

. . . because I spent all day yesterday "finishing" it and handed it in.



And also because next Thursday I'm going to be dealing with end-of-the-semester craziness took a break and went to see Pride and Prejudice. I haven't read the book since Lit Hum (freshman year), but all the most amusing episodes were there, and a lot of the dialogue was essentially straight out of the book. Since the movie started and ended before midnight (unlike a certain other movie I've seen lately) I look forward to remembering the details in a week.

So last night when I was supposedly doing my homework I snuck out for a while to get dessert and take pictures of unruly protesters. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived (at the beginning of the protest I actually was doing my homework) the protesters, who were apparently not unruly, had left or gone into the auditorium to heckle John Ashcroft. All that remained was a sign directing people to the protest spot. *sigh* On my way back to Pupin, I took a few pictures.