No more teenagehood.

My twentieth birthday was yesterday. It was one of the busier days I’ve had in a while, but it was nice that a few people did something for me! First at the Math Table showing of Good Will Hunting, Prof. Sarah Spence brought some cupcakes and even some salsa and chips. Much appreciated! After that I retired to my room around 11:30 p.m. and discovered that my bed was covered with balloons. There was a jar of silly string sitting next to my bed, and no one to be found anywhere. I wandered down the hall and ran into Nicole and Kathleen realizing they had missed their chance to surprise me. They had been waiting in my room for over an hour and went to look for me. Dan had no idea and was in the other room.

I went bowling the other day at Lanes and Games. I have been improving considerably lately. The second of two games resulted in a tie of my personal record. With just 100 in the 8th frame, I hit a strike on the 9th, strike on the 10th, third strike to make perhaps my first turkey in my life, and then rounded it out with seven more to make 157. I didn’t get the Ms. Pac-Man high score, however.

My cohort project course has completed. I feel that we could have done better on our design, but we did find a good amount of success. Our crowning achievement is that we spent only 6.5% of our budget. One of our goals at the outset was to set an example for thriftiness.

Similarly, all my other classes are winding to a close. A week from Thursday I’ll be flying back to Oklahoma for a full month. Not a full-month flight, but a full-month vacation. I just realized that I used “winding down” to describe my classes in the last post. I’m not very creative lately after all!

I was perusing the Coudal Partners website the other day and wandered onto the Photoshop Tennis competitions. The idea is that two designers representing different design groups send Photoshop “volleys” back and forth (spending approx. 30 mins–2 hours per volley) and then editing what comes back. The evolution of these graphics is quite interesting and often unexpected. One of my favorites is the transition from this to this. Anyway, I’ve challenged Jesus Fernandez to a little sparring match. Watch for this sometime soon.

The other day I became very interested in abandoned subway tunnels, tracks, and stations in the Boston area. I have been learning about parts of the MBTA “T” subway system are no longer running, including an elevated train called the “El” that used to run near Washington Ave up until the 1980s. It is being replaced by the new Silver Line. Anyway it makes me want to go visit an abandoned train station, although that would probably be a very bad idea.