Well, I was alone in lab until about 9:20. I mention it mainly because I’m typically the last person to arrive in lab during the day, and therefore the last person to leave. This week, though, the trend will probably be reversed.

I was originally going to take this week off to focus solely on rush stuff, but since I missed about 3 weeks worth of work over the course of the summer, I decided to work 20 hours this week. My plan is to work from 9am-1pm, which is convenient because we have a few scans in the morning this week. Once I get out of work, I’ll be able to go home, have lunch, and then everyone else will be getting out of bed to start building. Forcing myself to wake up at 8:15am every morning was something that I tried to do during the summer, but failed miserably. Now that term is around the corner, and I know I have morning classes, it is time to start getting used to waking up early again.

Hopefully my grand plan will not be thrown off as rush stuff really gets started, although according to a few upperclassmen, it probably will be. I’m not one to miss sleep though, no matter the cost, so I guess we will see.

Speaking of rush stuff, progress is already being made. We moved all the wood on Saturday, which proved to be a bit more of a bitch than expected. Home Depot brought a forklift to help move the lumber, but couldn’t comfortably get it into the courtyard, and refused to move the rest of the order anywhere near. So we got out whatever we could and hauled/drove the rest of the wood over near Talbot.

Yesterday, the tour guide cage was built, and Vlad made a pogo stick again. Raphael, Vinayak, Anthony and I set up the speakers and the courtyard got its supply of AC/DC, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queen, Cake, and Dropkick Murphys. Hopefully we’ll get some Flogging Molly going later today. Two bigger projects also started building. For the Hamster wheel vehicle (James O.’s baby), both wheels are finished, and preliminary testing of the differential drive system have been conducted. Moving the two wheels together proved really difficult, but playing around with them individually was actually really fun. Olga’s rotating seesaw project also made a reasonable amount of progress. There was a significant bottleneck due to the fact that she needed to dig a 3-foot deep hole in rocky soil with nothing but two mediocre shovels and a crowbar. After that was done, the supports for the seesaw were installed, and there was lots of dancing and photos taken on top of the main beam.

It’s almost time for scanning, but I’ll post more in the upcoming days about rush including links to pictures if there are any. People probably won’t post any pictures until the end of rush, though. Vinayak and I are going to Ozzfest later today (lolz), so I will comment on that, too.