Zizz in Florida

Greetings, dearests-of-dears,

I love you all and miss you bucketloads.  Today I'm writing from Orlando, Florida, where I am miraculously back in Eastern Time (nothing quite says "welcome" as specially as being in the same time zone as home).  I'm exhausted from the past couple of days and ready to hit the sack for the night before driving back to Huntsville tomorrow, which will be, as they say, a trek.

Atlantis on her way from the OPF to the VAB =)

On Wednesday of this week, we (the Robotics Academy & the NASA Leadership Academy) met outside the UAH dorm lobby at 5:30 AM to begin the long haul to Florida.  We took an 11-seat van, which proved conducive to passing time quickly.  Some ways in which I passed time were sleeping, reading (The Wings of the Dove - Henry James), playing Uno!, playing Mafia, Contact, and jamming out to random songs on Joaquin's iPod.  In the evening we arrived in Cocoa Beach, Florida.  We went out as a group for Thai, and after this we went for a midnight stroll around the beach, where we saw a number of constellations and a pair of crabs.

The Launch Control Center @ Kennedy.

Thursday was our beach day (initially planned to also include a viewing of the Delta-IV launch, but they delayed that), so I spent all day on the beach - swimming, bodysurfing, sandpile-building, and... getting my very first sunburn ever.  In the evening we went out to eat as a group at a seafood place, where I had fried alligator, and after that we went to Ron Jon's Surf Shop, where we confused a little marklar[girl] who asked her marklar[dad] what marklar[we] were talking about.

Hogwarts Hogwarts Hogwarts Hogwarts Hogwarts!

On Friday we got up early to view the launch, which unfortunately was delayed to the point that we had to leave the viewing location without seeing it - we had to get to Kennedy Space Center for our tour.  I've been to KSC once before, when I was about 10 years old, and it was pretty awesome to see it again... this time as an aerospace engineer (can you believe... actually, it really blows my mind that the last time I went to KSC was a time when I had not yet decided to be an aerospace engineer, or even had the slightest interest in science, math, or engineering...).   We got to see Atlantis and Endeavour pretty close up and this was very exciting.

After KSC we drove down to Orlando, where a bunch of us relaxed in the pool at the hotel before going out to dinner at Downtown Disney, where we wandered for a bit listening to live music and eating ice cream.  I must say I'm beginning to understand the definition of vacation.  I feel like the past five days might have been all I needed to recover from last semester...

have you seen me this happy?  I don't think I have....

which brings me to today, Saturday, which we spent at Universal Studios's Islands of Adventure, which consists of Seuss Landing, Marvel-land, the Lost Continent, and most importantly... The Wonderful Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

I won't waste too many words on descriptions.  I walked through Hogsmeade.  I had lunch at Three Broomsticks.  I drank a glass of pumpkin juice.  I had a mug of Butterbeer.  I bought a wand at Ollivander's.  I flew around the Hogwarts castle... twice.  I smiled so much my cheeks hurt.

Today was a magical day. <3
Love you lots and lots and lots,
Zizzbeth.

Zizz in Alabama

Salut all!  Zizz here.  Let me begin by pointing out that right now the 2014s are owning y'all at posting to this blog so y'all had better catch up.

When I stepped off the plane at HSV last Sunday, I felt as if I had walked into a steamcloud.  The first few days in Alabama were in the mid-90s, and walking outside was like being cloaked in a blanket of radiation and water vapor.  Thankfully it rained yesterday so it was a much cooler 75, and today promises to be a lovely sunny 77 for the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) family picnic, which all the interns will be going to.  They're making us all wear our red MSFC intern shirts, which say "FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION" on the back... *puzzlement*

MSFC "World's Flattest Floor"

This week was our first week, and we began with an informal orientation on Monday and then a formal one on Tuesday, which mostly involved going through packets of papers on safety and policy and how to get NASA badges and IT accounts (I have an @nasa.gov email for the summer!  except I forgot my password... so I need to call IT to reset it for me... whoops).  I was introduced to my project - I'll be working in the Flight Robotics Lab, home to the largest flat floor in the world.  The lab facility is really cool; the building used to be used for missile construction, so think large warehouse thing with all black walls and very little light.  About half the floor (13 m x 26 m) is the "flat floor" which apparently doesn't vary in height more than .025 mm.  The carts they put on the floor have things that look like hockey pucks on the legs, and they're sort like reverse-air hockey - air is pumped out through these legs to float the carts a little above the surface, allowing them to simulate a frictionless environment.  I found this picture of it online, which is a nice picture but has weird reflections going on on the floor.  We're not allowed to wear shoes on the floor. 

So by day I've been working 8 to 5 (and I have discovered that it is much more difficult to wake up after sleep from ten to six than from midnight to eight... sunlight works wonders on my ability to wake up).  After 5, sometimes we have speakers come in from industry or from NASA or UAH (Univ. AL - Huntsville).  So this week we had a speaker who recently won the Shaw prize in Astronomy give a talk, as well as an alum of our program working for a space contracting company.  We are being housed in the UAH dorm - I have my own room and two very awesome suitemates.  Here's a picture of my room.  I get a lot of light in the mornings, which makes me happy.

Sometimes in the evenings we've had program-wide fun events.  This week we had a spaghetti dinner one night, we went out to eat as a group last night, and there was a barbecue on Thursday.  So those things are fun.  Last night six of us hung out in my suite and played telephone pictionary, with mixed results.  My favorite was when "A carton of spoiled milk is shunned by all the other food in the fridge" turned into "An angry strawberry and pizza glare at a flaming flashlight."

It's 9:05 AM and I need to eat before meeting for the MSFC picnic (which goes from 10 to 3).  I echo Anna's plea that people post - reading this blog is how I deal with LMF-withdrawal over the summer.

Love,
Zizz

I always never am speaking English in the proper way any longer.

Salut salut salut!

The above sentence being about half of my French vocabulary at the moment, and this sentence a good representation of how screwy my English grammar has become, I conclude therefore that I have been in Germany for a very very long time. And then I must now admit that I am not, in fact, in Germany at the moment - rather, I'm in Italy, somewhere near the Mediterranean, although I never know exactly where I am when traveling with my family.

My last day of teaching was August 4th, and on the 5th I took a train to Geneve (la Suisse), where I met up with my family, as well as two really cool people named Alan and Laura that y'all might happen to know. There are pictures from this meeting, despite the weather being generally dreary, but they aren't on my camera, so I leave it to one or more of these super cool people to post them. hinthint. As for the weekend, it was spent walking around the streets of Geneve, touring CERN, and eating smuggled roquefort instead of sleeping.

In other news, like I said, my last day of teaching was last week, and I'm now on vacation. The last two weeks of my teaching program went very quickly and very nicely. The kids were the youngest we've had all summer, so I feel like I haven't gotten to know them quite as well, but they have been remarkable as students and pretty fun to teach. I had one particularly memorable student - if you've ever read Anne of Green Gables, this kid is my Paul Irving. He was just the most remarkable boy... and Alan, if you read this, I mean remarkable as in special, not remarkable as in able-to-be-remarked-upon.

I've also brought the llama song over to Germany, where the younger kids have loved it, as you can probably tell by the pictures I have sent out to the group. Here's another one for good measure (President Obama-Llama was their favorite). I have also taught them the PTERODACTYL game, which caught on more with the older kids. The thing with that game is that you have to be bad at it for it to be fun. Ah well. C'est la vie. (The previous sentence being the other half of my French vocabulary).

This summer has been super awesome. I've learned a lot/changed a lot, I think. On the serious side, my German is much much better, I have some clearer ideas of what I might want to do with my life, I've networked a bit, I've done a lot of teaching and a lot of learning, and I've met some really really amazing people. On the less serious side, I am approximately four orders of magnitude less mature than previously (I blame my team) and have embarrassed myself more times than I am able to name/count/whatevs. Ah well.

I return to Geneva in three days, FRA in four, BOS in five, and DTW in five and a half, or something like that. After that I sleep for a day, go counsel at orchestra camp for a week, relax for a week, and return to campus. I'm very excited to see everyone!

Love and mussels,
Zizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Cool people, Harry Potter, Berlin, and Darmstadt again.

So I left off on the tail-end of our visit to TU Darmstadt, and will continue from there:

The two students who were asked to show me around TUD were Felix and Jonas, two aerospace majors who work for Lufthansa (the ones I played tennis with) . Since they're fantastically awesome, they arranged a visit to the Lufthansa cargo base at the Frankfurt airport for us, which happened on Friday. That was really awesome - we got to explore a 747 and some A340s - including the cockpits! After this we all went out to dinner and stayed at the bar until midnight... but we gather that this is "typisch Deutsch" behavior. [picture = yin+michelle+me in front of A340 engine]

Speaking of "typisch Deutsch" behavior, we freshmen went to see Harry Potter und die Heiligtümer des Todes - Teil 2 at midnight on the 13th - our first night in Berlin, and about an hour into the movie, the movie cut out and a black screen that said "Pause" showed up. This was very disturbing, but is apparently not uncommon - altough not common either. We asked some very bemused Germans about it. In general, I think Germans are bemused by us - I'm fairly certain that everyone we meet here thinks that we are terrifically hilarious. A group of girls that laugh and smile all the time and speak English and try to speak German? What could be funnier?

We spent the following week (our free week) running around doing touristy things in Berlin. Schedule looked something like this:

• Tuesday: arrive, do laundry, go see Harry Potter at night (wednesday morning).
• Wednesday: Museumsinsel - Pergamonmuseum, Alte Nationalgalerie, & Neues Museum (nefertiti bust). [picture = me near the Alte Nationalgalerie]
  
• Thursday: Technikmuseum & Musikinstrumentenmuseum.
• Friday: Berlin Wall memorial, Holocaust memorial, shopping.
• Saturday: Meet up with Laura to run around Berlin. I think she has more pictures from this than I.

These last few weeks we're going to be running summer programs in cooperation with Deutsche Bahn. Last week we were in Berlin, and this week we're in Darmstadt, but since I'm staying in Frankfurt, I get to take a train to work. I find this very exciting but I'm about as easily amused as a four-year-old. Yeah, and since we're back in Darmstadt, we met up with Felix and Jonas again today. It was very nice to see some familiar faces.

The summer programs are a bit less hectic and more like normal life in that I get back to my hosts at a reasonable hour and have time to read or relax or just reflect, which I've been doing a lot of. This summer has afforded a very amazing experience for me thus far, in part because I have met a lot of very cool/amazing/inspiring people. A partial list (I'm a fan of lists):

• Torben, one of my first students. He confused me a lot in my first lecture but was still very nice about it. He wants to be a doctor, and from the five days I spent with him, I know he genuinely believes in saving lives. He also does sailing, sings, plays saxophone, tutors, and lifeguards.
• Niklas, another one of my students. He wants to study physics and he was one of the nicest people we met at his school. What I really admired about him was that I could tell he was struggling in my physics presentations, but he didn't give up and still liked it. I really admire people who can like things they're not good at. Like legitimately.
• Chris, another one of my students, who was just very welcoming and genuinely nice to us during our entire stay. He did his fair share of laughing at us, but that's what all Germans do, and he told me how to call a taxi, and helped me figure out classroom reservation issues, and also he wants to study aerospace so I just automatically like him. btw, if it sounds like I only teach boys, that's partially true - I'm the designated physics person on the team and my students are predominately male.
  
• Remi, my Berlin host's flatmate. He's French but his German's very good and he made crepes one night. I asked him for his recipe - it involves "ein halb kilo farine", 200 g sugar, 1 L of milk, rum, and some arbitrary number of eggs. I mean to try it when I get back to campus. Perhaps without the rum, unless Ben will fetch it for me in his liquor-mobile.
  
• Anna and Phillip, my Frankfurt hosts. They are possibly the cutest unmarried couple I have ever met, and they also don't thirdwheel me, which I think is a remarkable achievement considering I'm staying in their home for a week. They are really nice to me and also have very good tea.
• Felix & Jonas. They are kind of in a really big bromance that is sort of more like a marriage. It's very (incredibly) adorable. In any case, Felix is taking double the normal courseload of a typical German student, and Jonas is taking triple, but what really amazes me is their inside-out knowledge of the workings of Lufthansa. They can tell you what aircraft are used for specific flights and how many crew members are stationed at which airports... yeah. cool stuff.
  
• My team. Yin, Michelle, Sasha, & Jing. I honestly don't know what it's going to be like without them now that we've spent so much time together - I feel like I'm going to get home and be lost without my four team members around me. Also, I feel like I kind of need all four of them to tell my summer stories - we've told them so many times that I feel like my stories would be missing something without their reenactment. Also, bad jokes. Lots of them. And finally, "Trig identities are sexy." [picture = team]
  

Lastly, awkward-turtle-moment-of-the-day: we were waiting for the streetcar to take us back to the Darmstadt central station when we spot a guy wearing an MIT sweatshirt. After a few moments of intense deliberation we decide to accost him and ask if he goes to MIT. He says no, but he did a program there - some sort of study-abroad-work-abroad-Sloan-thing. We proceed to awkwardly explain that we go to MIT and then let him be on his way.

I have two weeks left of this program, one additional week in Geneva/Italy, and then I will be back in the states. It's only been 5 weeks but I feel like it's been like... longer. Love you and miss you all.

Brilliant students, Salzburg, and a virus.

Yay blogs! Everyone's adventures sound marvelously fantastic, and I eagerly await more updates from everyone. Also, I might just send out a cursory email to LMF because I think some members of the house have forgotten that the blog exists...

Anyhoww.. I last posted in Lübeck right before we left for Salem. We spent one week at Salem International College (an international boarding school). To avoid too much wordiness, I will bullet the events of this week:

• Sunday afternoon/evening: we dine in the dining hall and awkwardly sit with Salem students who have no idea who we are (it's the first day back for the students for their summer exam term).
• Wednesday: In the afternoon I go to Ueberlingen, the nearby town on the Bodensee. It's pretty. It also rains and I become soaked. I teach basics of E&M in the evening for day 2 of my workshop. Fun story: when I get to the Lorentz force, I ask them, "Have you guys done cross products? Can you tell me the direction of the resultant force for v x B?" One kid then replies: "OH YEAH! You use the left-hand rule!" ????? Sasha and I become very concerned. [picture: me + yin + jing + physics class]
  
• Thursday: In the afternoon I go to Ueberlingen again, and it doesn't rain. I do the derivation of the B field out of the E field viewed from a moving reference frame for the third day of my workshop. The kids don't follow as well as I wish they did which I think is because I did a bad job teaching it this time. But oh well.
• Friday: I get up at 5 to walk up the mountain to see the sunrise with Sasha. This school is absolutely gorgeous, btw. In the afternoon I teach part 2 of my gyroscopes presenation in the IB physics class. Again, the kids are bright. I love them. In the evening we go out to dinner with our school contact people and the physics teacher. That's fun. [picture = sunset]
  
• During the course of the week we stay in Westend, one of their dorms. We befriend the boys that live upstairs, who all come from very interesting and diverse backgrounds. Fun stories abound from this acquaintance, but I don't think they're as funny when typed out so I'll just tell y'all later.

On Saturday morning, I woke up at 5:30AM and got ready to leave. At 6:15 my taxi came (I called a taxi all by myself auf Deutsch!) and took me to the train station, where I then took three trains to Salzburg to meet up with Laura. I arrived around noon on Saturday and we stayed until 2PM on Sunday. In the 26 hours I was there, we did a lot of fun things:

• walked around seeing the filming locations from The Sound of Music. We splashed in the fountain that Maria splashes in, ventured into Nonnberg Abbey, skipped around the hills and meadows singing SoM songs, found these creepy dwarf statues that Maria and the kids skip around, walked down the Do-Re-Mi steps, and heard the bells - they sound exactly the same as they do in the movie.
• ate food. For lunch we picnicked in the Mirabel Gardens, and for dinner we had Indian food, and then we had ice cream - the two of us split a Mozartbecher (which we think means something like Mozart-beaker). On Sunday we had a nice German-style breakfast (which means bread and cheese/jam/butter/sausage) and for lunch we had salad and pizza bread. [picture: Laura + Mozartbecher]
  
• watched the Sound of Music in our hostel at 8PM on Saturday. It was fun to see the movie after going to all those places, and the alternative would have been to go clubbing...
• went up a mountain to see the city from high up. It's a nice view.
• went shopping. Salzburg is the most touristy place I've been thus far - everywhere we went there were asian tourists taking pictures. This means there are lots of little touristy shops; I got Mozart Kugeln (they're a specialty here; truffles with praline and almond and stuffs) and also something for my sister.

At 1:51PM Sunday afternoon, Laura and I boarded the EC 112 train together. She got off at Munich and I continued on to Darmstadt, where I am currently located. I am reunited with my team here for a visit to Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, which reminds me strongly of MIT in that they refer to building by number, have a strong research focus, and have a student culture which is similar to MIT's if less pronounced. TUD has a very exciting program planned for us, but I confess I have not been able to take advantage of it because I have been taken somewhat violently ill by a massively inconvenient virus. This happened on Tuesday. However, I recovered sufficiently on Wednesday to visit the TUD airfield and the European Space Agency satellite control center which was SO COOL YOU CAN'T COMPREHEND IT (and I almost cried), and then to play tennis with some aerospace students who were nice enough to invite me to play with them. I like nice people.

That is all from me, and I know it's a long post, but I had 1.5 weeks to cover, and that's a lifetime (for some insects). Also because a lot happens in a week on this program; we only have a little bit of time in each place. Looking forward to more blogs from you guys! Love love love :)

Zizz loves Deutschland

Hi everyone! I have now been in Germany for approximately one week and would like to update you all on this. If you have not been blogging lately, great shame upon your dynasty. You should do this, so I am less of a blog-hog.

Quick summary of the program I'm doing: I go around to different high schools/summer camp programs with four other people (Sasha, Yin, Michelle, & Jing) and teach supplementary class-modules.

I arrived in Frankfurt on June 17 in the morning on the same flight as Sasha. Yin flew in the day before, and we all met up around noon and then waited several hours for our train to the Netherlands (trip to visit Michelle's au pair). Once at the platform, a nice German man who overheard us talking told us our train had been cancelled, and that there was a train to Köln coming in two minutes, so we made a decision to take a train to Köln, which was in the right direction (we figured we could transfer later). Another nice german man looked up an alternate route for us on his phone, which we wrote on Sasha's hand (picture). Once we got to Köln, we saw our original train (which was not cancelled). across the platform, so we switched and everything was fantastic. On our last train (we made a few transfers), we met a sketchy Dutch boy. I say this because he bought alcohol at every stop the train made and smoked at every stop. Also because he asked the four of us where our boyfriends were and fondled my knee. I then glared at him and he said sorry, and fondled my knee some more. And then we got off the train.

We stayed in Rodin, the Netherlands, from Friday evening to Sunday morning with Michelle's au pair. On Saturday we went into Groningen, the nearest large city, and climbed up a tall church tower and also bought Dutch cookies called Stroopwafels and ate them. It's my current facebook profile picture. I would post it here but it's Michelle's picture.

On Sunday we returned to Germany, in Lübeck, the first city in our program. It's in northern Germany, is known for having 7 towers, has 3 Nobel prize winners (natives), and was a big trading city back in the day of ships and stuff. During this week we stayed with host families - my host family is awesome. They have an absolutely beautiful house with wonderful gardens (by which I mean, the garden has two cherry trees with different species of cherry grafted on to the same tree, and lots of berry bushes - wild strawberries are the bomb, by the way). They are also extremely friendly, and very cool. My host parents own a pub. My host brother plays drums and piano and wants to study medicine (which is a much more streamlined process here than in the USA). My host sister has a "Sport-Profil" and spent the last week in Austria on a school trip jumping off of cliffs, climbing mountains, jumping off of bridges, white-water rafting in storms, and other cool things like that. She might study law.

I really have a lot a lot a lot to say, but I will summarize the rest of the week:

Daytime: we split our time this week between two schools; one that my host student attends (OZD) and one about a half-hour away (OGT). Both are Gymnasiums (the college-prep track in the German education system). This week, I taught modules on Special Relativity, Gyroscopes, RLC circuits, and Physics of Flight (applications to course 16). I think all of it generally went well, although I did a lot of adjusting - language is a big obstacle, because students simply find it harder to ask questions in English (we teach in English). I think my favorite module this week was Special Relativity; it really went extraordinarily well, and the students were fantastic. A few came up to me after class to tell me that they felt that they really understood the ideas I was trying to convey if not the detailed math, which is exactly what I was going for. One girl said "I may not be able to recreate everything you just did, but I feel like I have a vision of how it works, so thank you so much." Best compliment ever. [Picture: we taught our hosts the awkward turtle.]

I spent most of my time at OZD with the Science-profile kids (picture), and so did the rest of us, so we got to know them decently well. They taught us a card game called "Schummeln" which in means "Cheating" but they translate it to mean "Screw over your neighbor" (they used a stronger word). I'm really going to miss these guys a lot; they were absolutely fantastic as students and super friendly (and also most of them are older than me).

Evenings: The schools planned some events for us. On Tuesday we had a BBQ at a teacher's house, and on Wednesday we went to Hamburg to go to DESY (the German accelerator thing; they don't actually have an operating particle accelerator anymore but they have an electron laser and a CMS control room). On Thursday we had a boat cruise around the city (the inner city is an island) and on Friday we went to Kiel, a town one hour away for a sailing festival. This was a ridiculous amount of fun and I got to eat good seafood (picture is me and Torben, Yin's host student, with fish sandwiches) and have fun with the team and it was great. We got back around 1AM after dancing for an hour to loud English music that all the Germans knew the words to (but we had never heard the songs before). Ah well.

Other quick notes:

• Germans think you can survive on bread and cheese/butter/margarine/sausage.
• the German terms for a lot of physics things are very different from the English ones. This was a source of confusion in some of my lessons.
  
• I learned quickly that I had been (unintentionally) assuming that the students' high school background = my high school background. False. I quickly adjusted to simplifying things from what I had initially planned. For example, most seniors do not have multivariable, and technically, high school physics is not = to AP.
• We have a knack for meeting very friendly (not necessarily sketchy but maybe borderline) strangers. And old man we met today was amazed at my German accent, spent a good 15 minutes explaining to me that this meant that I had started German before going through puberty, and kept grabbing my elbow. But he was old, so it was like... acceptable.
  
• I loved my first week and will miss this place. We leave for Salem tomorrow evening (a new school.)
  

That's all. Hope to see more blog posts from all y'all soon!

Abundant adventures in Ann Arbor

Hey y'all! I've been back in Ann Arbor for three weeks now, which has proved to be enough time to make me feel completely at home - ie, I went through the crazy motions of seeing everyone I needed to the first week, and have been able to rofl about and do nothing for the last two weeks. This is only partially true, however, as I have been doing some manner of things...

Two weekends ago I went down to Chicago to visit two friends of mine at UChicago, which was a blast. I will add my testimony to the beauty of its campus to that of countless others - it's gorgeous, although I'm told it's only this pretty in the spring/summer. Ah well. We went out for food on that Friday, where I had the most delicious thing called tartare, which y'all have probably heard of, but I hadn't. I totally didn't know that raw beef was a thing, but it's delicious.

In my time at home, I spent a good week or so watching Doctor Who almost continuously. For the first couple of days I took breaks every now and then, and for the last couple of days, I gave up on the breaks idea and just watched episodes. So now I am all caught up and madly in love with the series. I also feel that Doctor Who has re-awakened the part of me that loves little-kid things - I spent last night re-reading all the kid lit in my small bookshelf in my room (The Secret Garden is one of the best books ever). Oh, and whenever I watch an episode I'm able to shift my speech patterns slightly British which drives my sister crazy and makes my mother look at me somewhat askance. Fun stuff.

I have also spent a good amount of time wandering around the UMich campus. When I say that three weeks has been enough time for me to feel at home again, I really mean that I finally have time to hang out on campus again (I kind of grew up on campus, so...). It's made difficult by the filming crews that are not supposed to be everywhere, but have been everywhere I've tried to go... they're filming some rom-com involving Jason Segel and Emily Blunt around here. When I saw the fake snow lying around I was confused, and when I saw the Psychology Building sign moved to the front of the graduate library I was perturbed. Also, there's always a bunch of people watching the film crew, which is a little bit like running into a band of tourists in the Infinite in that I really want to tell them to get out of the way but really shouldn't do that... so I don't. Thankfully they haven't invaded the math department, so I have consumed an inordinate number of bubble teas in the Math Common Area, which is my favorite place to get work done.

Because yes, I have work. Specifically, I've been trying to prepare for Germany. We were told not to do too much preparation until the schools got back to us and okay'ed our proposed modules, but the schools just got back to us last week. So now I am going to develop 5 modules in the next week. But that'll be fine. :) I have had several skype-meetings with my Germany team, which are usually pretty long because we get distracted. For example, the other day we started talking about aliens, and then aliens who speak Chinese...

Anyway... can anyone help me think of ways to make my modules fun? I'm teaching RLC circuits, Gyroscopic motion with applications, basics of relativity (like Lorentz transformations), aerospace applications of mechanics, and genetics. Personally I always have fun taking notes with an enthusiastic lecturer, but I'm under the impression that my students this summer will want something more interactive... any suggestions would be welcome.

Adrienne told me I had to be the first one to post twice, which I have now accomplished. In other news, I will be back in Boston on Tuesday, and I will fly out from Boston on Thursday. I'm very excited to see the summer residents, which I believe will be Shaun, Juan, Ben, Sophie, Daniel, and Anna at that point in time. :) Things I need to do before then include finishing my packing, cleaning my room (it got messy again), finding my passport, and playing tennis.

Hatbox!

Salut tout le monde! C'est moi, Zizz.

This is the 2011 LMF summer blog. The point? To have a place where we can all update each other on our un-hosed and care-free lives. I really hope y'all post whenever you feel like it. No need to wait until y'all have 'important' updates. I, at the very least, want to hear everything you guys have to say.

How it works? The blog is attached to the google account I created for this purpose. If you have your own Blogger account (google account works too), email me and I'll add you. If you don't, you can log in here using the email address lavachefolle.lmf@gmail.com and the password that's the same as the one we use for other things. If you've forgotten, email me. If you're using the LMF account, please start your post by saying who you are! I mean, we could guess, and maybe we would be able to tell if you didn't say, but it'd be embarrassing for us to guess wrong, right?
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And now that I've finished the logistics stuff, I'll write an actual post:

There's not that much to say on my end so I'll just keep it short. On Friday, since I was at the airport really early because I shared a cab with Adrienne, I decided to standby for the earlier flight home and got on it, so I got home around 7 rather than around 9 as planned, which was nice. I mostly spent that evening talking to my parents and my sister (my sister and I had the fun discovery that we can now share clothes, which is pretty exciting).

Yesterday I spent most of the day cleaning my room and doing laundry and things; I kind of left a mess after spring break. I went to my friend Jenny's graduation party in the afternoon, so I went to Borders to get a gift for her, and also just to go buy books. It's really hard for me to resist going to Borders now that I have free access to a car and all. So I bought myself volume 1 of Isaac Asimov's complete short stories. I'm excited to read them.

In other news, my orchestra teacher officially offered me the job for counseling at orchestra camp this summer, so I believe this is what I will be doing. I get to go up to Interlochen for a week in August, coach chamber music, teach music theory, and chill with orchestra people. It's exciting.

That's all I have to say. Looking forward to reading posts by all of you!