Note to self : Never make plans to leave lab early on a weekday. Some calamity will inevitably take place 15 minutes before I have to leave resulting in said plans getting messed up.

With that out of the way, it has been a crazy weekend. And it feels like I've been sitting on a bike for ever and ever (I think that mostly had to with the fact that I had not been riding my bike for a while now, there are reasons for that also but this sentence is getting too long now so never mind). Since I signed up for a 55 mile bike tour for next weekend, I decided to finally haul myself outdoors and ended up on a 30 mile round trip on Sunday. And whatever muscle groups had been spared by the bike ride were promptly made sore by a 5 k road race in honor of Labor Day yesterday. And all this on the heels (literally) of a symposium on friday where I was running around most of the day in semi-formal garb topped off by a BBQ which had its share of keg stands (my time was 17 seconds), beer pong and what-have-you. I also got to operate the neatest corkscrew and other accessories ever during the course of my wine-pouring duties. This symposium was also the day when we officially turned into second-years. I guess it also brought the summer to a close. Compared to what is about to follow it seems like it was idyllic indeed. I have to teach a class, take a class (in the Physics Dept.), do some work in lab so that I don't look like a fool in my oral exams. A picnic indeed. With my customary knack for making my life more difficult than it already is, I also signed up for a glassblowing class. That's not the difficult part though. It starts at 9 am on Mondays. That's the tough part. An improvement on 8:30 am but then I'm also older and lazier (but not wiser, it would seem).

Time to run home...the craziness starts tomorrow :(