Hump Day.

I know, I know, its been a while. Let me start by rattling out a few excuses, such as the fact I had midterms Tuesday and another one techinically today (Thursday morning as I write this, test not til 3:30pm), both of which I have to nail. I'm basically three quarters of the way through acing midterms, with one still to come. Thus far I've been quite proud of my performance, and the next one should prove no difficulty either.

So, the CalTech story. My friend is giving me a tour of the campus and we see a large group of about thirty "Techies" (as they call themselves) running around making strange noises, climbing the olive trees, shaking them, even throwing brooms or shovels at them. As we come closer we notice that several are carrying around cd's, and there appear to be more in the trees. We pull one of them aside and discover that the theme of the day is "lumberjacks." They've been enlisted by their group leader to "cut down" all the trees, and thus first have to save all the "owls" from their natural habitat, the one collecting the most wins. This is the kicker, the "owls" are the AOL cds. At first I had no clue, until the girl explained it like three times... (Owl, AAA-OL, get it?) And I thought my friend was wierd. These people make her look as normal as they come. This was just one of many strange practices I heard about while there, such as their interesting eating procedure... First the president of the school gets up and rings a gong at the designated time, and gives a speech, with pauses to allow all the students to pound on the tables to show their approval. Then comes the meal, which is brought to them by waiters. If they want another helping they just raise their glass or plate. In addition, if they ask the waiter for permission, they're allowed to throw their bread, or bread bowl (I'm not entirely sure which it was, maybe both) at someone else. However if they hit a waiter, or knock over someone's water glass, they get "floated." Being floated is apparently very common among freshman due to various offenses, and involves dumping a large bucket of ice water on the unlucky person's head.

Needless to say, its quite a strange place.

Tonight was Halloween, which at UCSB is the biggest party of the year. They expected twenty thousand people in IV tonight, most of which coming in costume, of some sort. I saw some incredibly creative ideas walking around the hall, and then of course the incredibly bizarre. Biggest eye popper on this floor went to the girl who had just painted a large hand over each of her breasts, and gone topless other than the body paint. That had some of the guys up here pretty googly. Some were really elaborate though, from a maid, to a chicken, to some random superhero, and enough guys in thongs to last me a lifetime. Unfortunately I'm not the gung ho lets go get wasted type, or I would have gone to join in the fun laughing at the antics on DP. I tend to enjoy the IVTV episode focusing on the weekend however, and get my fill of the antics of DP without ever having to actually go get groped by some guy myself.

I'm actually quite glad the math midterm is tomorrow, I'm going to get about ten hours of sleep, whereas most of the class probably will sleep through the test, and in the land of the curve, my good score will become perfect. :)

Watched the rest of Almost Famous today, it was okay, but not exactly the desperately wonderful movie everyone had made it out to be. I think that's my problem, I rely too much on other people's opinions, and by the time I finally get around to watching a movie six months later its just anticlimactic, not the fabulous movie I was expecting. Also downloaded Swordfish in great quality, still one of the coolest explosions to open a movie that I've seen. My list is growing more and more popular, just about everyone on the floor has come to borrow a movie at some point or another. I've had to cut a few people off though, I hate it when people abuse the privledge, and just start copying mass quantities of the movies, without making any effort to contribute to the collection in any way. Die freeloaders!

Wish me luck on the math midterm, I'll try to be a good boy and update daily now that all those are over. At least this post was long to make up for it. :)