Man, what an awesome day today was.
Lora invited me to join her Buffy the Vampire Slayer-watching group (which
consists mostly of friends from when they were all at Stanford). It turns out
they were in the middle of Season 5, which was not far from where I was in the
series. I agreed, and since I have a car and she doesn't, I volunteered to
drive.
The day held much more than just watching several episodes of one of the better
TV series of the late nineties and early noughts. Here's a summary of the day's
events:
- Woke up after 5 hours of sleep, since I stayed up too late hacking
together a new viewer application for libfreenect. Ate breakfast (two english
muffins with cream cheese and jam). Picked up Lora.
- Drove to the "secret Safeway" in Palo Alto to get food for the day. It's
pretty aptly named - I definitely didn't see the Safeway until we were already
in the parking lot. We got a variety of foods and snacks, including mango
sausages, carrots and hummus, and dutch crunch bread. Since asparagus is in
season and on sale, we got two bundles for fantastically cheap. Oh, the drive was
lovely - there was fog, and then right after we passed through a tunnel, the scenery turned
bright and sunny and warm and sparkling and wonderful.
- Went to an apartment in Palo Alto, where I met Lora's friends Bradford (the
apartment resident), Kat (who was visiting from UT Austin), and Ben. We had a
delicious lunch, with the sausages, dutch crunch bread, roasted asparagus with
minced garlic, and carrots and grapes. Our viewing took us through roughly the
middle third of Season 5 of Buffy. We noted that the TV made all the motions
look incredibly smooth, which was strangely unsettling. Maybe I just like
encoding artifacts, or low contrast, or something else ridiculous. Joss Whedon is
masterful with the use of silence as a sound effect. Around
4:30pm, Kat had to leave to pack her stuff and catch her flight, so we said our
goodbyes.
- Drove to Lora's parents' house, where we searched the attic for (and
successfully extracted) an electric keyboard. Backstory: the BiD lab is
putting together a rock band, and we needed to bring in an electronic keyboard,
since both Lora and I play piano (although we're both only classically
trained). Lora owns such a keyboard, but lacking a vehicle, had no easy way to
bring it to campus. We found the keyboard and stand, although we couldn't
find the power supply. Lora exchanged seeds with her parents (they all keep quite lovely gardens), and we picked a
bunch of oranges and clementines from the trees in the backyard. I plan to use
some of the oranges for juice. We also worked out that Lora's iPhone is on the
fritz, but that her SIM card is not, since the SIM worked in my N900. Oh yeah,
Lora had been calling her friends by looking the number up on her phone and
calling from mine all day. We gathered up all the stuff we had collected at
Lora's parents' house, and went...
- Not home (yet). We called up a couple more of Lora's Stanford friends, and
met up at Soja's flat in Mountain View. I recognized the complex that
Sukrit lived in last summer as we drove by,
and also noted the tasty Thai restaurant I'd visited with the MIT folk.
Soja is helping write a Bay Area puzzle hunt (in the Stanford style, not
the MIT style, but hey), which I got excited about. I love puzzle hunts!
We ate leftover quiche and hard cheese with quince jelly, and sat around
and chatted with the 8 or so people (most of whose names I've forgotten
>_<) until right about 8pm. Then, we...
- Drove back to campus to drop off the keyboard. My mom called me on Skype
to wish me a happy Valentine's Day while I was driving, so Lora answered my
phone and put it on speakerphone so we could all chat, and we talked briefly
over the 3G. We bet on who we'd find in the lab at 9pm on a Sunday, and we
both lost. Lab grandpa Andy and Kim were there, and Andy had lined up four of
the tables together and set a net across the middle, producing a rather nice
improvised ping-pong table surface. This was an EXCELLENT use of the lab
tables. I played a match against Andy and narrowly lost while Lora printed off
a copy of whatever notes she needed for Monday. We found an
appropriate-voltage power supply somewhere in the BiD filing drawers/cabinet,
and we verified that the keyboard was in working order.
- Finally, I dropped Lora off at her house with the rest of her stuff, and went home.
It was quite the fun several-destination trip, and I met tons of friendly people. Yay!