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As I mentioned previously, my Peace Corps medical packet came to me in the mail after much anticipation. I flipped through it when it arrived, had my appointments set up, and then left it alone.

Yesterday I finally decided to see about getting my second HepA shot, since I got my first about 8 months ago. Since I new I would be doing some traveling, I figured this would be a good thing to do.

The first shot was done at the Student Care Center here, but now that I am a graduate I can no longer use them so I’ll have to get my second shot elsewhere. It will probably make the most sense to just tack this onto all the medical stuff I’ll be doing when I get home. Currently I’m scanning all of the documents so that I have backups and can send the extra info to my mother to pass on to the dentist/doctor/etc. Which is a bit of a pain.

I still have to figure out what to do about the tuberculin test. I have one from about 10 months ago, but I imagine they’ll want a fresher test. I’ll give my Medical Screening Assistant a call today and see if I can’t get this taken care of.

That’s all the news I have right now, except that I seem to have passed the legal check. So all that’s left is this medical stuff!

This week began the Two Week Singing Marathon. There are two concerts this weekend (Saturday night and Sunday afternoon) for UChorus, in which we will be singing Mahler’s 2nd ( I think) symphony. This of course means extra and longer rehearsals. We also have our final blow-out CMAC concert next Friday night, several CMAC gigs this and next week, and little octets and things to drum up interest in our performance. Along with voice lessons, this puts me singing every day this week except Friday and almost every day next week. Though I will be tired of it at the end, this will be a nice way to close out my college career.

In other CMAC news, I have now officially given up my position as Webmaster and the new guy has taken control. He’s already got our basic website up and running, which I imagine will be seeing many improvements in the near future and especially over the summer. Hopefully the transition to next year goes well for the group, especially with the loss of the majority of the Officers. I don’t think it’s sink-or-swim at this point, but we still we’re still new enough that our position is a bit precarious. I guess we’ll see.

I just got back from a nice little event on campus, where the Peace Corps director came to acknowledge the University of Chicago’s awesomeness in creating volunteers. There were a dozen students there who knew when and where they were going or, like me, recently nominated and still with no clue as to when and where. Some faculty and staff from the University were there as well, and were quite interesting to talk to about their Peace Corps experiences.

The Director, Ronald Tschetter, was a very nice guy. He asked me and the other volunteers a lot of questions about our studies, future plans, and the like. Apparently he and his staff just finished some sort of tour of 40-some countries where volunteers are stationed, and he told us tales of all of how happy the leaders of these countries are to have Volunteers. Indeed, many asked how they could get more!

Mr. Tschetter told us about how weird it was to get a letter written by the King of some country (I can’t remember which), expressing the King’s gratitude for what Peace Corps volunteers have done for communities in his country. Apparently there are another 20 countries who recently asked for volunteers, and handful of which may qualify to be safe enough for the Corps to send its people to. It was all deeply fascinating.

Lastly, the Director talked to us about his passion for the Peace Corps, and about the overwhelmingly positive experiences of volunteers, which was overall quite inspiring.

I got the gnome into the rocket! It ended up being fairly easy, with only a few difficult parts that made me want to punch something (like being chased by a helicopter in a vehicle that was not built to carry gnomes). I had mentioned this project in an earlier post, but I just decided to move it here with the remaining screen shots.

This is where I found him, underneath that shelf in the middle left of the picture.

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So this post is a bit delayed from the event (by a week), but I hadn’t gotten around to pulling the pictures off of my camera until today.

The Scav Hunt is a UofC tradition where a group of judges comes up with a ridiculous list of about 300 items the teams need to come up with. These can be anything, and many of them have to be found on a road trip. Teams have several days to decipher and accomplish the tasks, starting Wednesday at midnight and ending at judging the following Sunday. Browse their website for the current and past lists to get more information; the items are hilarious!

I only fully participated my first year here. It sucked up so much time and energy that, though wildly fun, it wasn’t worth falling behind in classes over. This year, of course, I don’t have any classes, but now I’m old and need my sleep

So I helped out one of my friends, Robert, on a project. This “help” mostly consisted of throwing out some advice, while all of the ideas and the vast majority of the work were his. Anyway, the task that he undertook was to create an edible item for a Bedouin wedding feast. It had to be inedible to as many major world religions as possible (so contain ham, etc).

More info and pictures after the jump.

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This was a trimph./ I’m making a note here, ‘huge success.’/ It’s hard to overstate my satsifaction!

- GLaDOS

After hours and hours of sweating over a hot stove, the companion cube cake (technically a giant brownie) has been completed!

Final ingredient tally:

• 7 boxes brownie mix
• 4 cups vegetable oil
• 22 eggs
• 3 and half giant cans white frosting
• some jello mix
• 5 chocolate chip cookies

So it’s some serious cake. The dimensions are 18 x 18 x 18 centimeters, excluding the giant corner pieces. If you want to follow the construction saga, read on!

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Since I’m a biology and amateur computer nerd, I like to name my hardware after biological parts. For example, my hard drive in my main laptop is named “Main Ganglion,” while my external hard drive is named “Accessory Ganglion.”

My pen drive, a beautiful gigabyte thing with a hard metal covering, I have named “Parasite” and carry with me everywhere. I’m prone to losing things, so it’s on a lanyard tied to my belt loop and then sitting in my left cheek pocket, and it hangs out there nearly every day. It has all kinds of software from PortableApps.com, so that I never have to worry about being able to do work, as long as I have access to a Windows machine.

Anyway, I was helping out a student with understanding signal transduction last Friday evening in the biology building, and we couldn’t get the lecture powerpoints to open in MS Office 2007 (because it sucks). Fortunately I had my trusty Parasite with OpenOffice on it, and used that to open them (which worked perfectly, save for the Mac-specific images). So we went through the powerpoint, and everything went well, and then I went home.

I woke up the next morning realizing that I left Parasite in the computer. This was a Saturday, and I figured no one would have grabbed it between 6pm Friday and when I got there on Saturday. But I was wrong. Parasite was gone!

I made a little flier on Monday saying “To Whomever found my USB drive in this computer and took it, Thank you for keeping someone from stealing it! I do miss it so, please email me at [my address],” which I stuck above the computer I left Parasite in. I just hoped whoever found it would read it and get it back to me.

Then I got an email tonight from one of the BSLC employees saying it had been put in lost and found by one of the security people! I am so excited (and surprised); I thought I’d never see the thing again…

[Edit: And it turns out I won't. It wasn't the right one, and my sign has been taken down. Ah well, it lasted a lot longer than most items I carry with me.]

Finally! I guess I spoke too soon yesterday, since it arrived a mere 12ish hours later. That material is basically the same as the stuff I got online, except there are some more details about reimbursement and more instructions. I did notice that I have to get another tuberculin test, which is kind of a problem since it takes multiple visits over two weeks, and I’ll only be in Grinnell for one day… I’ll have to call the Peace Corps to figure out what I’m allowed to do for that. Perhaps I can just do that part here and get a separate signature?

In other news, it’s the gf’s birthday tomorrow. I’m making her a Weighted Companion Cube cake. Several exist on the internet already, but I want mine to be absolutely amazing. So far I’ve taken measurements in pixels from a papercraft by Moony and then converted them to the scale of the brownies that come out of my new brownie pan (18.5cm square after cutting the edges straight). So far I’ve stacked 3, with a total height of 10cm, meaning I need about three more. That’s 6 damn pans of brownies just for the basic cube! After that I’ll have to trim another one to make all the ornamental parts that give the thing depth. There will be a long post on this process (documented with photos!) when it’s finished.

I decided last week that it was about time I played through the original Half-Life games again. I had finally gotten to play through Episodes 1 and 2 of Half-Life2 just a few short months ago, and wanted to see if the backstory still made sense and actually built up to the plots of the newer ones. I finished regular Half-Life this weekend, and followed that with Blue Shift (which is an impressively short game). So far, everything matches up and makes more sense after playing the new games, and it was a lot of fun going back to this piece of my history that I have always looked back at so fondly. I haven’t started Opposing Force yet, but likely will soon.

This got me onto a Valve kick, and so I revisited Portal and Episode 2 to see what Achievements I had yet to make. The Achievements are something new for TF2, Portal, and Episode 2, where you are given random little tasks to try to complete. For example, in Portal you can try to destroy every video camera in the game (I managed to find all but three), fall 30,000 feet (which I did by lining up one portal above me, one below, and then fell for 15 minutes while I read Ayn Rand), kill one turret with another, etc. You also get achievements for beating the Advanced levels, which I have yet to finish (they’re friggin’ hard).

One of the more challenging and bizarre Achievements is set forth in Episode 2: carry a garden gnome through the entire game and then stick him in the nose cone of a rocket (the task is called “Tiny rocket man” or something similar”). I decided to do it, and put the game on easy to make it take less time. I’m not done yet, but here are some screen shots (WARNING!! may contain spoilers!!):

[Edit: just finished the project and moved the pictures to a new post]

Apparently I got a little over-excited last week when I told of my mailed Peace Corps medical forms. The online thing they have that tells applicants the status of the various application components told me that they were mailed last Tuesday, and I figured that meant they’d get here a few days later. I didn’t realize that they were literally using snail mail…

Fortunately they made the forms available online this Tuesday so I could find out what needed to be done and get appointments set up. More fortunately yet, my mother is the queen of making things happen, so the moment she received the pdf files she had already lined up my dental, medical, and eye appointments two hours apart for one day in the middle of June. As soon as that stuff gets done and the filled forms sent off, I’ll be on my way to getting invited into a Peace Corps program! Of course, that could take 9 months. With good luck (and quick returns of information on my end) I may end up getting an earlier assignment, which will make transitioning from Peace Corps to grad/med/law school that much easier.

That’s all the updates I have on the Peace Corps process so far. And probably for a bit, since it is apparently a very slow process.