Crufting, Working Full-Time, and Squatting

This summer, I’m working full-time in Concord with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I’m not the fondest of cubicles, but to be fair, the pay’s alright and I’m definitely happy (and lucky!) to have a job. It’s also not every day that you get to shake hands with a three-star general: The Chief of Engineers happened to visit the New England district two weeks ago.

Because the transit from Boston to Concord is a bear, I’m subleasing a house in Medford – with two housemates. One is my coworker, Cori; it’s rather convenient - she drives me to and from work. She is a rising junior at Duke studying biology. The other is a twenty-six year old Tufts grad student.

My housemate, Ramon, eating watermelon...

He’s going for a masters in biological engineering. Between the two of them, they keep me entertained just fine. This past weekend, we threw a World Cup watching party. We also had a taco potluck awhile back. Also, I think I have watched more movies with Cori  (21 Jumpstreet, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Italian Job, Clueless, Thelma and Louise, Dark Knight, 21 and Over, 13 Going on 30, Failure to Launch, Frozen) than in my entire life. I blame my forty-hour workweek for the movie/World Cup marathons; I’m completely exhausted by the time I get home. However, Cori and I have gone into Boston on various weekends – Harvard Square (crashed their alumni reunion coincidentally), Boston Commons, Newbury Street. We listened to street musicians and admired numerous weddings.

But then Electric Vehicle Team happened (Thanks, Jacob!). I’ve begun carpooling back to MIT for the weekends. Some of my co-workers are staying in MIT frats (not MIT students though), so I have been fortunate enough to catch a ride with them back on Friday evenings. Squatting at MIT has been a pleasurable experience, thanks to some phenomenal, generous friends. I have stayed with various friends in EC, including Luisa. Luisa and I even ran into Andrei at one of our Shaw’s grocery runs. We also went to the Cambridgeside Galleria two weekends ago.

Latest Project ^_^

I had my first ever Porsche car ride at EVT. I watched my first ever episode of anime on floorpi (3W of EC). I learned to harvest free food and amass cruft. As it turns out, one of my EC friend is rather skilled at the aforementioned two tasks. Here is a photo of the jumbo fan assembly I made the other day. They are fans from a desktop computer, wired in parallel. The fans run on 12V DC, and my friend was kind enough to lend me a 120V AC adaptor :D. It actually works remarkably well. The air it blows is surprisingly cold, not the hot air you would expect from a subpar hack. Unfortunately, there is no protective grating in front of the last fan, granted I don’t think it goes fast enough to take fingers off.  

The free food harvest

Anywho, I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer! I’m so happy so many prefrosh saw the light and chose LMF in the housing lottery. Long live la maison!