First Weekend
Aug. 26th, 2007 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_songsmithThis was going to be email, but this is easier. It is, however, long.
Ok, well... everyone I'm planning to send this to has already seen or will see my apartment in person, except Dad... but who knows, maybe he will. However, it seems like a kinda tradition to write out a description of where I'm living. (Shades of First Annual Everything!) Not too much to be comical about here; it's rather a nice place. No salmon-pink walls or showers too tiny to crouch in.
Anyway, I live on the 3rd and top floor of the complex. (Actually, I guess it's the 4th floor, American-style – it's L, 1, 2, 3.) When you get off the elevators, you walk down a short corridor to the first intersection, and I have the room on the corner in front of you and to your left. It's kinda nice, because as I realized last night, I only have 1 neighbor to worry about annoying me, and only 2 neighbors to have to worry about annoying myself (since I figure I have to be nice to the people under me, too).
There's not a lot to see in the apartment, really. It's a medium-sized white box. White walls, white ceiling, white appliances, white cabinets, white blinds, white ceiling fan… off-white carpet. Immediately on your right as you enter is the bathroom – after you've closed the front door, anyway, and can see it. There's a vanity and mirrored wall on the right, and a cabinet on the left. I'm not sure what the designers of that cabinet were thinking – it's ridiculously deep, even for linens, and has very few shelves. But it's at least spacious. Under the vanity are two deep but very narrow drawers (and by narrow, I mean I can only put my hand flat on the bottom if I fold my thumb under) and an under-sink cabinet. Next to the vanity is the toilet, and beyond that the tub. I actually do have a tub, although they've dripped enough white paint into it that I'm not actually certain I'd want to use it as such… but no worries, because there's no way to stopper the drain at the moment, anyway. The shower has good pressure and – wonder of wonders, around here – is tall enough for me to stand under comfortably! It took a bit of fiddling to figure out the temperature adjustments; there's enough of a time delay between turning the knob and the temperature changing that for a while there I was starting to think they'd hooked up the taps backwards!
Back out to the main apartment. On the left of the front door is a walk-in closet bigger than some NYC kitchens. One side has 2 top shelves and a bar at head-height, the other has 1 shelf and two bars, one a little above my head, the other about waist level. What few clothes I hang up normally are positively dwarfed in there. I plan to put a dresser in, and possibly a set of shelves or some kind of storage bins, because if I hung up everything I owned including underthings, I'd still have space left!
The main room is L-shaped, wrapping around the kitchen which shares a wall with the bathroom. As you step past the bathroom, there's a pass-through to the kitchen about 2.5x2 ft, with a little shelf sticking out. Currently the shelf is holding a couple small stuffed animals – two beanie babies and a tribble. I put my keys there when I come in, because I haven't gotten a hook for them yet, and the vibration is enough to turn the tribble's motion-sensor on, so I get greeted by a purring tribble every day when I get home. It's almost as nice as a dog, and not as slobbery.
That leg of the L is occupied by three chairs in various stages of completion and some instructions from IKEA, and the table and chair that are actually completed. (Thanks, Mom!) I can't find the table most of the time, since – lacking any other flat surface that is not the floor – I have most of my papers and books piled all over it. The only clear space is near the bed, which occupies the corner of the L. That end of the table has my alarm clock, box of tissues, charging phone, and housewarming flowering plant. (Thanks, Mom!) I put together my lamp last night, and bought lightbulbs this afternoon, so that I would actually have light near the bed. Getting into bed with a flashlight was irritating, and I kept wondering if the people across the courtyard would think there was a burglar in my room.
So, then there's the bed. It's a very simple double bed, very attractive, though it doesn't match the table. The bed is a warm dark brown, not a mahogany but heading in that color direction. The table and chairs are a medium brown, like cardboard, or a walnut shell. We found some lovely navy blue linens and a multi-shade blue striped comforter for it, and it looks quite luxurious. It's very comfy, too, although I'm still getting used to being below table level after years of high- and medium-lofted beds. Needs more pillows – I'm a stomach sleeper and usually like to be flat, but I've had a cold and was wishing I could sit up more.
The far wall of the apartment is completely covered by windows, except for a little patch of wall that has the air conditioner in it. Said A/C is quite the fancy-dancy unit; it comes with a remote control, and I had to break out the user's manual to operate it. It has a timer, which is nice – I've been shutting it off before I leave and setting it to turn back on about 15-30 minutes before I expect to be home, so that the apartment will be cool when I return without running the A/C all day for noone's benefit. I like being on the top floor, because I have a nice view of the sky when I lie on my bed, rather than the upstairs apartments. I can, however, clearly see into the neighbors' across the courtyard, so I've been quite paranoid about making certain my blinds are closed properly before I change!
The other leg of the L has the ceiling fan and light fixture. I bought bulbs for that fixture too, only to discover that they were waaaaay too long for the fixture. I got the energy-saver fluorescents, and I knew they were longer than incandescents, but I figured they'd only stick out a little bit, like the one I had at home. Nope. Apparently even incandescents stick out of this fixture a little bit. I stuck the CFBs in anyway, because the apartment was so goddamn dark with only 1 bulb in that fixture and the entry light. I will have to change them, though, because they're too bright to look at sticking out like that. I have a dimmer, smaller bulb that I got for my bedside lamp's second fixture, which didn't fit. (The package just said "50 watt", so I got the equivalent CFB. Who knew the screw part came in different sizes, too?) Hopefully that will fit properly in the fan fixture – it's shorter than an incandescent. If it does, I'll probably get more of those. Dunno what I'll do with the big CFBs. I'd say "keep them as spares" but the whole point of them is that they don't burn out for friggin' years…
Currently that section is home to my suitcases, lying open on the floor in lieu of dressers. Eventually the table and chairs will move over there, and the entry leg will become a study/reading/sitting area, with comfy chair(s) and shelves and decorative rug.
Finally, the kitchen. There's about… maybe 8 square feet of floor space (2x4) surrounded by a U of counter and appliances. Immediately in front of you is the sink. On the left of that is a bit of counter in the corner, then the oven/stove, then closest to the living area a set of cabinets. On the right of the sink is a bent counter running past the pass-through, then the fridge. There are cabinets running all along the top, too – short ones over stove, sink, fridge, and pass-through, tall ones in each corner. No lack of storage space in this apartment, really. But, again, they're all sort of oddly designed; I need racks and dividers for them to make them really useful. There are drawers under the pass-through, and a cabinet under the sink. The fridge is also a good size, and works well – though the freezer smells a bit odd. Not in a bad way, precisely – nothing died in there. It's just sort of musty-chemical-y. Would putting a box of baking soda in there help?
And that's my apartment so far.
As for my program, I'm inclined to say stats is the devil, but that's not really fair. Stats at 9 am and for 8 hours a day on the first weekend of school when I'm still trying to move in is the devil. There's a period after lunch and before my butt starts hurting from sitting for 8 hours that I actually rather enjoy stats itself. The professor is very nice, but I would very much like to take him aside and gently explain that in a review session, which this purports to be, it would be best to gloss over the basic definitions of things and explain the more complex procedures in depth, not spend 40 minutes explaining what a mean is and then condense a 15-step process in the brand-new software we're learning into 2 instructions. He also has a way of talking around things without ever getting to something that feels like a solid point that's rather annoying. When you think back on it, he did actually make the point; it just got lost in the circling. Saturday morning, I understood how to find the z-index of numbers. He started explaining them to the class, and by lunchtime, I didn't know how to do it anymore. I had to Google it and unconfuse myself. Just before lunch he walked us through something in Excel, having us fill in columns, and he only explained D and E, which were complicated. I got those just fine. *I* was stuck back on C, going, "Wait – why did we multiply everything by 0.1?!?" Apparently he was doing mean using summation of value*frequency, only he didn't TELL us that…
Fortunately I wasn't the only one. At the table it came out that no one had any clue what the hell C was about, so we put in a collective request to back up and go over that one. Things made MUCH more sense after that. The worksheets he has us doing can be interesting. More than once we've had to stop and get the TAs to explain what the question is asking. They keep saying stuff like, "Oh, damn, I thought we'd fixed that…" It seems he has a reputation for being a bit poor with directions. On the other hand, he's very willing to keep talking until the lights do go on. And he's been ragging on us for not asking enough questions. He says "the variance between the looks on your faces and the number of questions you're asking is statistically significant at every level." Bad math humor, what can I say? Frankly, I think he's asking a bit much of people at 9 am on a Saturday… We're here, we're doing the work – you want us to be able to frame a coherent question, too?
Still, I'm doing rather well. I think. Haven't gotten anything back yet, but I understand everything (with a little help from Google) and I think I'm generating the correct results. If I'm not, there are going to be people who are annoyed at me, because I've got 2-4 people in the class turning to me for help when their projects go wonky. (We're encouraged to work in pairs or groups, even though we all have to turn in separate results.) One thing that's actually bugging me is that it isn't really math-focused enough. He's talked a lot about what the basic concepts are, and a lot about how to perform certain procedures, but he often doesn't talk about why we use those procedures, or how they work. Like he had us calculate a 95% confidence interval using the formula x-bar +/- 1.96 * s/N^0.5, and never said word one about where 1.96 came from until I piped up and asked. And the symbols in the worksheet were kinda messed up. At one point I was staring at instructions to calculate something using the formula "quantity x-bar minus mu-subscript-x over sigma-subscript-x", which went on to explain that this could be done in Excel by entering "=(G1-4.5)/(1.23/5^.5)" This confused the hell out of me, such that I had to get a TA over to explain it to me. She, after realizing that I was asking a "why" and not a "how" question, read it, reread it, frowned, reread it, hemmed, hawed, and called over the professor. He cheerfully explained that the subscript should have been x-bar, at which point it kinda sorta made more sense than it had before, but after he'd fussed at us all day yesterday over understanding the difference between a population and a sample, I was having trouble getting why we were using population notation to run numbers on a sample. I still don't get it, really, but my worksheet came out ok. *shrug*
The why vs how thing – that's my big thing. We're getting a lot of how, and not a whole lot of why. A lot of "understand what this concept is" but not much in the way of "and this is why it actually works." Given how many people are confused even at that level – even those who've had stats before – I guess I can understand it. But personally, I've always found that understanding the reasoning made the process a whole lot easier to follow, use, and remember… even if I did hate being forced to derive all the trig identities before being allowed to use them.
Hey, Mom? Couple of things in the category of "I would not ask this in class if you paid me" for you. First – in class on Saturday, we did a histogram of the sample means, and then we did the conversion to z's and mapped it to a normal distribution. I kept being reminded of calculus, because it felt a lot like taking 1st and 2nd derivatives. And with all the discussion about the probabilities and the area under the curve, of course integrals were on my mind (although the word never came up. Actually, he keeps saying stuff like "there's a 5% chance that your result will be lower than.. ." or "the probability is 60% that… " rather than stuff like "75% of the data occurs between", which is more how I think of it… how screwed am I about to be?). In any event, what kind of relationship, if any, exists between stats and calc? And the other question is, Chris (the prof) has been talking a lot about how we usually use the 95% confidence interval, and he keeps saying he'll "explain later" why, but he shows no signs of getting into it. I keep coming back to standard deviation – isn't 95% of the data within 2 standard deviations of the mean? Is that why 95% is the most common confidence interval to use? (We haven't talked a lot about standard deviation – what it is or why we use it. We've calculated it, and used it in computation, but for example, instead of saying "the standard score z is how many standard deviations an event is from the mean" which is what I have in my notes and what made perfect sense when I first learned it, his explanation went into distance and norming curves and never mentioned the standard deviation at all. I find this odd.)
After class today, nine of us went to a little Mexican place near campus that some of the group knew about – we have 3 people in our (ever-expanding) group that did their undergrad at USC, so they've become our native guides. None of them are straight out of undergrad, though – I haven't really polled, but I think the core group (11, today. Yesterday it was 8. Thursday it was 5. We're going to start having trouble putting tables together at lunch soon) ranges from '03-'05. We might have an '02, but I don't think we have any '06s… yet. We had drinks, and got two appetizer sampler plates to share. We've decided that statistics would be much improved by the addition of alcohol… but there are few things that aren't. Which reminds me, at lunch (pizza) over garlic butter dipping sauce, we decided that there are few things that cannot be improved by the addition of garlic… and all of those can be improved by the addition of chocolate. The first point had unanimous consensus, but there's one girl in the group who doesn't like chocolate. It was even her "something unique" at our icebreakers on Thursday.
One of the girls in the group lives north of me, a little ways down the 110, so she gave me a lift home. And we all swapped phone numbers this afternoon. We also agreed that we would reserve a computer room in the library and do our Quant homework as a group. And we talked about some MPP group events we could do – like a wine & cheese evening, or a weekend beach trip. We can either organize them ourselves, or go through GPAC (Graduate Policy Administration Community – basically a combination of SARLO and Student Council for grad students in SPPD). The advantage of going through GPAC is that there's a possibility of getting some funding for it. The disadvantage is that it may have to be opened to the other majors; we're not sure if we can do an MPP-only thing.
More later, I'm sure. I'm currently riding a weak signal from somewhere in the complex, which is intermittent. I get my own 'net on Saturday.
Ok, well... everyone I'm planning to send this to has already seen or will see my apartment in person, except Dad... but who knows, maybe he will. However, it seems like a kinda tradition to write out a description of where I'm living. (Shades of First Annual Everything!) Not too much to be comical about here; it's rather a nice place. No salmon-pink walls or showers too tiny to crouch in.
Anyway, I live on the 3rd and top floor of the complex. (Actually, I guess it's the 4th floor, American-style – it's L, 1, 2, 3.) When you get off the elevators, you walk down a short corridor to the first intersection, and I have the room on the corner in front of you and to your left. It's kinda nice, because as I realized last night, I only have 1 neighbor to worry about annoying me, and only 2 neighbors to have to worry about annoying myself (since I figure I have to be nice to the people under me, too).
There's not a lot to see in the apartment, really. It's a medium-sized white box. White walls, white ceiling, white appliances, white cabinets, white blinds, white ceiling fan… off-white carpet. Immediately on your right as you enter is the bathroom – after you've closed the front door, anyway, and can see it. There's a vanity and mirrored wall on the right, and a cabinet on the left. I'm not sure what the designers of that cabinet were thinking – it's ridiculously deep, even for linens, and has very few shelves. But it's at least spacious. Under the vanity are two deep but very narrow drawers (and by narrow, I mean I can only put my hand flat on the bottom if I fold my thumb under) and an under-sink cabinet. Next to the vanity is the toilet, and beyond that the tub. I actually do have a tub, although they've dripped enough white paint into it that I'm not actually certain I'd want to use it as such… but no worries, because there's no way to stopper the drain at the moment, anyway. The shower has good pressure and – wonder of wonders, around here – is tall enough for me to stand under comfortably! It took a bit of fiddling to figure out the temperature adjustments; there's enough of a time delay between turning the knob and the temperature changing that for a while there I was starting to think they'd hooked up the taps backwards!
Back out to the main apartment. On the left of the front door is a walk-in closet bigger than some NYC kitchens. One side has 2 top shelves and a bar at head-height, the other has 1 shelf and two bars, one a little above my head, the other about waist level. What few clothes I hang up normally are positively dwarfed in there. I plan to put a dresser in, and possibly a set of shelves or some kind of storage bins, because if I hung up everything I owned including underthings, I'd still have space left!
The main room is L-shaped, wrapping around the kitchen which shares a wall with the bathroom. As you step past the bathroom, there's a pass-through to the kitchen about 2.5x2 ft, with a little shelf sticking out. Currently the shelf is holding a couple small stuffed animals – two beanie babies and a tribble. I put my keys there when I come in, because I haven't gotten a hook for them yet, and the vibration is enough to turn the tribble's motion-sensor on, so I get greeted by a purring tribble every day when I get home. It's almost as nice as a dog, and not as slobbery.
That leg of the L is occupied by three chairs in various stages of completion and some instructions from IKEA, and the table and chair that are actually completed. (Thanks, Mom!) I can't find the table most of the time, since – lacking any other flat surface that is not the floor – I have most of my papers and books piled all over it. The only clear space is near the bed, which occupies the corner of the L. That end of the table has my alarm clock, box of tissues, charging phone, and housewarming flowering plant. (Thanks, Mom!) I put together my lamp last night, and bought lightbulbs this afternoon, so that I would actually have light near the bed. Getting into bed with a flashlight was irritating, and I kept wondering if the people across the courtyard would think there was a burglar in my room.
So, then there's the bed. It's a very simple double bed, very attractive, though it doesn't match the table. The bed is a warm dark brown, not a mahogany but heading in that color direction. The table and chairs are a medium brown, like cardboard, or a walnut shell. We found some lovely navy blue linens and a multi-shade blue striped comforter for it, and it looks quite luxurious. It's very comfy, too, although I'm still getting used to being below table level after years of high- and medium-lofted beds. Needs more pillows – I'm a stomach sleeper and usually like to be flat, but I've had a cold and was wishing I could sit up more.
The far wall of the apartment is completely covered by windows, except for a little patch of wall that has the air conditioner in it. Said A/C is quite the fancy-dancy unit; it comes with a remote control, and I had to break out the user's manual to operate it. It has a timer, which is nice – I've been shutting it off before I leave and setting it to turn back on about 15-30 minutes before I expect to be home, so that the apartment will be cool when I return without running the A/C all day for noone's benefit. I like being on the top floor, because I have a nice view of the sky when I lie on my bed, rather than the upstairs apartments. I can, however, clearly see into the neighbors' across the courtyard, so I've been quite paranoid about making certain my blinds are closed properly before I change!
The other leg of the L has the ceiling fan and light fixture. I bought bulbs for that fixture too, only to discover that they were waaaaay too long for the fixture. I got the energy-saver fluorescents, and I knew they were longer than incandescents, but I figured they'd only stick out a little bit, like the one I had at home. Nope. Apparently even incandescents stick out of this fixture a little bit. I stuck the CFBs in anyway, because the apartment was so goddamn dark with only 1 bulb in that fixture and the entry light. I will have to change them, though, because they're too bright to look at sticking out like that. I have a dimmer, smaller bulb that I got for my bedside lamp's second fixture, which didn't fit. (The package just said "50 watt", so I got the equivalent CFB. Who knew the screw part came in different sizes, too?) Hopefully that will fit properly in the fan fixture – it's shorter than an incandescent. If it does, I'll probably get more of those. Dunno what I'll do with the big CFBs. I'd say "keep them as spares" but the whole point of them is that they don't burn out for friggin' years…
Currently that section is home to my suitcases, lying open on the floor in lieu of dressers. Eventually the table and chairs will move over there, and the entry leg will become a study/reading/sitting area, with comfy chair(s) and shelves and decorative rug.
Finally, the kitchen. There's about… maybe 8 square feet of floor space (2x4) surrounded by a U of counter and appliances. Immediately in front of you is the sink. On the left of that is a bit of counter in the corner, then the oven/stove, then closest to the living area a set of cabinets. On the right of the sink is a bent counter running past the pass-through, then the fridge. There are cabinets running all along the top, too – short ones over stove, sink, fridge, and pass-through, tall ones in each corner. No lack of storage space in this apartment, really. But, again, they're all sort of oddly designed; I need racks and dividers for them to make them really useful. There are drawers under the pass-through, and a cabinet under the sink. The fridge is also a good size, and works well – though the freezer smells a bit odd. Not in a bad way, precisely – nothing died in there. It's just sort of musty-chemical-y. Would putting a box of baking soda in there help?
And that's my apartment so far.
As for my program, I'm inclined to say stats is the devil, but that's not really fair. Stats at 9 am and for 8 hours a day on the first weekend of school when I'm still trying to move in is the devil. There's a period after lunch and before my butt starts hurting from sitting for 8 hours that I actually rather enjoy stats itself. The professor is very nice, but I would very much like to take him aside and gently explain that in a review session, which this purports to be, it would be best to gloss over the basic definitions of things and explain the more complex procedures in depth, not spend 40 minutes explaining what a mean is and then condense a 15-step process in the brand-new software we're learning into 2 instructions. He also has a way of talking around things without ever getting to something that feels like a solid point that's rather annoying. When you think back on it, he did actually make the point; it just got lost in the circling. Saturday morning, I understood how to find the z-index of numbers. He started explaining them to the class, and by lunchtime, I didn't know how to do it anymore. I had to Google it and unconfuse myself. Just before lunch he walked us through something in Excel, having us fill in columns, and he only explained D and E, which were complicated. I got those just fine. *I* was stuck back on C, going, "Wait – why did we multiply everything by 0.1?!?" Apparently he was doing mean using summation of value*frequency, only he didn't TELL us that…
Fortunately I wasn't the only one. At the table it came out that no one had any clue what the hell C was about, so we put in a collective request to back up and go over that one. Things made MUCH more sense after that. The worksheets he has us doing can be interesting. More than once we've had to stop and get the TAs to explain what the question is asking. They keep saying stuff like, "Oh, damn, I thought we'd fixed that…" It seems he has a reputation for being a bit poor with directions. On the other hand, he's very willing to keep talking until the lights do go on. And he's been ragging on us for not asking enough questions. He says "the variance between the looks on your faces and the number of questions you're asking is statistically significant at every level." Bad math humor, what can I say? Frankly, I think he's asking a bit much of people at 9 am on a Saturday… We're here, we're doing the work – you want us to be able to frame a coherent question, too?
Still, I'm doing rather well. I think. Haven't gotten anything back yet, but I understand everything (with a little help from Google) and I think I'm generating the correct results. If I'm not, there are going to be people who are annoyed at me, because I've got 2-4 people in the class turning to me for help when their projects go wonky. (We're encouraged to work in pairs or groups, even though we all have to turn in separate results.) One thing that's actually bugging me is that it isn't really math-focused enough. He's talked a lot about what the basic concepts are, and a lot about how to perform certain procedures, but he often doesn't talk about why we use those procedures, or how they work. Like he had us calculate a 95% confidence interval using the formula x-bar +/- 1.96 * s/N^0.5, and never said word one about where 1.96 came from until I piped up and asked. And the symbols in the worksheet were kinda messed up. At one point I was staring at instructions to calculate something using the formula "quantity x-bar minus mu-subscript-x over sigma-subscript-x", which went on to explain that this could be done in Excel by entering "=(G1-4.5)/(1.23/5^.5)" This confused the hell out of me, such that I had to get a TA over to explain it to me. She, after realizing that I was asking a "why" and not a "how" question, read it, reread it, frowned, reread it, hemmed, hawed, and called over the professor. He cheerfully explained that the subscript should have been x-bar, at which point it kinda sorta made more sense than it had before, but after he'd fussed at us all day yesterday over understanding the difference between a population and a sample, I was having trouble getting why we were using population notation to run numbers on a sample. I still don't get it, really, but my worksheet came out ok. *shrug*
The why vs how thing – that's my big thing. We're getting a lot of how, and not a whole lot of why. A lot of "understand what this concept is" but not much in the way of "and this is why it actually works." Given how many people are confused even at that level – even those who've had stats before – I guess I can understand it. But personally, I've always found that understanding the reasoning made the process a whole lot easier to follow, use, and remember… even if I did hate being forced to derive all the trig identities before being allowed to use them.
Hey, Mom? Couple of things in the category of "I would not ask this in class if you paid me" for you. First – in class on Saturday, we did a histogram of the sample means, and then we did the conversion to z's and mapped it to a normal distribution. I kept being reminded of calculus, because it felt a lot like taking 1st and 2nd derivatives. And with all the discussion about the probabilities and the area under the curve, of course integrals were on my mind (although the word never came up. Actually, he keeps saying stuff like "there's a 5% chance that your result will be lower than.. ." or "the probability is 60% that… " rather than stuff like "75% of the data occurs between", which is more how I think of it… how screwed am I about to be?). In any event, what kind of relationship, if any, exists between stats and calc? And the other question is, Chris (the prof) has been talking a lot about how we usually use the 95% confidence interval, and he keeps saying he'll "explain later" why, but he shows no signs of getting into it. I keep coming back to standard deviation – isn't 95% of the data within 2 standard deviations of the mean? Is that why 95% is the most common confidence interval to use? (We haven't talked a lot about standard deviation – what it is or why we use it. We've calculated it, and used it in computation, but for example, instead of saying "the standard score z is how many standard deviations an event is from the mean" which is what I have in my notes and what made perfect sense when I first learned it, his explanation went into distance and norming curves and never mentioned the standard deviation at all. I find this odd.)
After class today, nine of us went to a little Mexican place near campus that some of the group knew about – we have 3 people in our (ever-expanding) group that did their undergrad at USC, so they've become our native guides. None of them are straight out of undergrad, though – I haven't really polled, but I think the core group (11, today. Yesterday it was 8. Thursday it was 5. We're going to start having trouble putting tables together at lunch soon) ranges from '03-'05. We might have an '02, but I don't think we have any '06s… yet. We had drinks, and got two appetizer sampler plates to share. We've decided that statistics would be much improved by the addition of alcohol… but there are few things that aren't. Which reminds me, at lunch (pizza) over garlic butter dipping sauce, we decided that there are few things that cannot be improved by the addition of garlic… and all of those can be improved by the addition of chocolate. The first point had unanimous consensus, but there's one girl in the group who doesn't like chocolate. It was even her "something unique" at our icebreakers on Thursday.
One of the girls in the group lives north of me, a little ways down the 110, so she gave me a lift home. And we all swapped phone numbers this afternoon. We also agreed that we would reserve a computer room in the library and do our Quant homework as a group. And we talked about some MPP group events we could do – like a wine & cheese evening, or a weekend beach trip. We can either organize them ourselves, or go through GPAC (Graduate Policy Administration Community – basically a combination of SARLO and Student Council for grad students in SPPD). The advantage of going through GPAC is that there's a possibility of getting some funding for it. The disadvantage is that it may have to be opened to the other majors; we're not sure if we can do an MPP-only thing.
More later, I'm sure. I'm currently riding a weak signal from somewhere in the complex, which is intermittent. I get my own 'net on Saturday.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-27 08:58 pm (UTC)you might want to give cormac a call at this point we have a couple of flat surfaces we are trying to figure out what to do with. WE certainly want to see your apartment and commiserate on moving in the middle of a humidity wave (it sucks) and you are invited to ours too.
One of these days we will have been in the new apartment long enough that we will only call it the apartment or the flat which I like better.
Hang in there, we are all gonna make it through this.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-28 02:25 am (UTC)I would love to have you over as soon as I have someplace for y'all to sit. :) (The East Coast resident says: this is a humidity wave? *blinkblink*)
I like flat better myself, particularly in terms of discussing someone who shares your residence -- "roommate" is something you have in college or a euphemism for someone sharing your bed, in my book, and "apartment-mate" sounds really dumb, but "flatmate" rolls right off the tongue.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-30 04:32 pm (UTC)