Victory Tastes Better Than Ice Cream

Josh (the human) and Drew (the alpaca)

Yesterday was a very full, busy day, so I didn't have enough time to both blog and sleep (and you can probably realize which one I chose). One item of note was that Josh brought an alpaca to class. His name is Drew and apparently he's now the seventeenth member of our class. He usually stands next to Josh's desk. Since yesterday was a Friday, it was the last day of Arete, so it was the showcase performance. My Arete class demonstrated a few improv games, and then watched the other classes perform. Some of the poems from the Spoken Word class were so incredibly amazing and emotional and just beyond words.

This picture accurately conveys my disdain for the hot chocolate

It was also Coff-V House, which I had really been looking forward to. However, the hot chocolate did not live up to my expectations. It didn't even come close, really. For one thing, it was cold at first (they did realize that and fix it later). Nonetheless, the Open Mic on the first floor was amazing. There were performances of original pieces of music, poetry, skits, and readings, to name a few. Several people sang. One boy solved three Rubix cubes (including a 4x4x4 which took him literally three and a half minutes).

They also finally announced the results of the scavenger hunt from the first Monday, and my proctor group won. It was probably in part because we were moving the whole time, whereas we knew that some proctor groups had stopped for a break to get ice cream. (Victory tastes better than ice cream...)

The clue for the egg yesterday turned out to be "It's by something green." Consider that not only is everything outside green, but the color scheme of Hank and Commons is green, so the chairs, walls, and floors are also green. (I did not find the egg.)

I promise I got higher than that, though!

This morning when we walked into class Johanna was not there, and instead there were instructions written on the board. We were supposed to decode a scrambled and encrypted message using the braid encryption techniques we've been learning the last two days, which would tell us where our teacher was. We had until 10:50, about an hour. It was a fun exercise, and I finally determined the message (W130--Wyatt room 130, the computer lab) with ten minutes to spare. We found her in the computer lab playing with the Knot Plot program (hours of fun!).

In the TA session, Jeff had planned for us to play a bunch of logic games, like iterated Prisoners' Dilemma. I thought this was really interesting, but unfortunately a significant portion of the class didn't really care, and they were playing randomly. Eventually, Jeff kind of gave up, and we played Mafia for the rest of class.

This evening, the activity I chose was rock climbing. We all piled into a bus and went to Climb Nashville. We arrived at around 7:15 and stayed for two hours. Rock climbing is much harder than it looks (especially those tiny little fingerholds that only have room for our fingertips) and I have much more respect for the abilities of friends of mine who do rock climbing. It was really fun though, and I'm glad I chose it. (Tomorrow my arms and fingers and wrists will be so upset, though...)