Despite being massively hosed, I ended up doing a lot of fun things this weekend!

On Thursday:

• I relished in not having to stay up late, because no 2.004 pset was due the next day!
• Went running, that’s always fun

On Friday:

• Went to SK’s Novemberfest
• Went ice skating with some friends in Johnson ice rink. I’m still pretty bad at ice skating though!
• Had an impromptu dance party in my wing, complete with disco-ball action and booming bass from my amp

On Saturday night:

• Went to the MIT Chorallaries concert in 10-250 – it was great! Makes me want to learn to sing, haha
• Hung out with some friends
• Went to an interesting party at Skullhouse (an MIT fraternity) with WS and some other friends

On Sunday:

• Helped my friend WS teach a beatboxing class for Splash. That was fun! The kids seemed to really enjoy it, too
• Got a free Chinese-food dinner for teaching! Quite tasty indeed

Cheers!

After a seeming black-hole of packing, unpacking, and reshuffling, I’m finally all moved back into MIT! It was quite a tiring day; I was exhausted by the time I was finished. But of course a little fatigue is no match for a short power-nap, which can do wonders. After a little while, I felt awake, energetic, and ready to go so I took a little walk around next house and the MIT campus. A little later that night, some good friends and I decided to go party hopping, as it being MIT’s rush week and all. We visited PBE, but left after waiting because the line to get to their rooftop party was too long, so then we stopped by No. 6 club and had some fun dancing there. A few of us decided we were hungry afterwards, so we decided to head to LaVerde’s, which was to our dismay closed. On the way back we found that PBE’s line had disappeared, and we got in with a minimal wait and danced a bit more on their roofdeck (great view).

It’s good to be back at MIT, but I’ll certainly sleep soundly tonight!

Now that finals are over, I have free time again! It’s really great to be around MIT and have absolutely nothing to do. That doesn’t happen very often! Coincidentally enough, there was also a massive snow storm on Friday, the day after my exams ended. We usually get less snow in Boston than in the more western parts of the state (such as my hometown), probably because Boston is so close to the ocean. However, we certainly did get our fair share of snow during this snow storm! Here is what Boston looked like the night before the snow started. This is what the Harvard Bridge/Prudential Center area usually looks like from my wing’s main lounge:

And here is what it looked like during the middle of the snowstorm on Friday:

We could hardly see across the river! In fact, visibility decreased even more after this picture was taken. And the Charles River began to freeze over.

Another view across the river, this time of part of BU’s campus.

Road conditions got considerably worse than this as the storm went on. I took these pictures earlier in the day.

So, with some intense snow outside, what is there to do but have a loud music/dancing/disco party in the main lounge? None of my friends and I could come up with any better ideas, so this is exactly what we decided to do! We got a hold of some ridiculously loud speakers, cranked them to full volume, and had a great time. Though there wasn’t really very much dancing, there was certainly a lot of loud music! Here are (some of) the culprit speakers (no, the hat doesn’t make any noise. Our speakers were just being festive, that’s all):

ALso, since I have a disco ball in my room (hooray!) …

… I decided to take it out to the main lounge to enhance the party experience :

It was a pretty good time! We could hear the music throughout at least half of the 5th floor, and it was audible as well a floor below us. I love loud speakers!

That night, some friends from my wing and I decided to go sledding, which was also a lot of fun! We found a great incline on campus, took our sleds, and had some fun. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera with me (didn’t want it to get wet!), so I don’t have any pictures of it.

The next day (Saturday) was when I was scheduled to leave MIT and go home for winter break, which necessitated some packing. Here are some of the bags that I packed in my room. To be quite honest, I’m not really sure why I bothered to take pictures of this; perhaps it was because I was bored. Or perhaps it was because I secretly feel guilty about not blogging enough in the past few weeks and so I’m subconsciously trying to compensate my blogging about everything, including the rather mundane details of packing. Or perhaps I just like taking pictures with my camera. I leave it up to the reader to decide:

While packing, I found my friend Keldin eating pasta in the main lounge. Here’s an intense action-shot:

Oh, and on an un-related side note, we’re going to set up a public Athena machine in our main lounge! How exciting. It’s not set up yet, but here is a picture of the beast-to-be, eagerly awaiting it’s Athena-ification:

This computer used to belong to a friend down the hall (me and some other friends got it for him off of Reuse as a birthday present last year!), but not that said friend has another computer, he doesn’t really need this one as much. It’s a Pentium III, but it does have a nice dedicated graphics card that is capable of smoothly running desktop-effects on Ubuntu. It will make a fantastic Athena machine.

So, that’s it for now! Right now I’m back at home, and it’s snowing again. I think we’re going to get around another 6 inches of snow, and judging from how hard it’s snowing right now, I’d certainly believe it. Cheers!