Trivia - November 16, 2008 -
The word trivia was originally used to describe grammar, rhetoric, and logic. One could argue that these are the basis of the humanities, so when a mathematician describes something as trivial he is taking an etymological dig at the humanities. But here are the questions, note the presidential candidate theme (and answers):
Round 1: Barack Obama
(1) Obama may have bombed in Appalacia, but America still has the world’s
largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Where were the fissible materials in the
first atomic bombs manufactured?
Oak Ridge, TN
(2) Barack made his early career in Chicago, but what NFL team, other than the
Bears, was originally from Chicago?
Arizona Cardinals
(3) Obama was frequently tied to Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground, whose
members called themselves the weathermen. Any good weatherman should be able to
name at least 2 types of clouds. Do it.
Cumulus, Nimbus, Cirrus
(4) The world’s first African American Billionaire, Oprah Winfrey, endorsed
Barack Obama. But that’s not the only thing she was first at. In which City was
she one of the youngest news anchors?
Nashville, TN
(5) Barack n’ Roll baybee! Although his election wasn’t plagued with scandals,
in 2007the Rock n’Roll hall of Fame’s was. On what lake is the Rock n’Roll
hall of fame located?
Lake Eerie
Round 2: John McCain
(1) Many left-wingers called McCain McCainasaurus, mocking his age. Name me a
dinosaur that lived in the water. (Hint: CHARLIEEEEE)
Liopleurodon, Elasmosaurus, Kronosaurus, Mosasaurus, Opthalmosaurus, Archelon,
Ichthyosaur, Pliosaur
(2) While his running mate may have been a hockey mom, his Arizona hockey team
certainly isn’t native! What are they called?
Phoenix Coyotes
(3) Much of McCain’s rhetoric focused on Joe the Plumber. I like a different
kind of plumbers, specifically the Mario Brothers. What is the name of
the Raccoon suit Mario uses to fly in Super Mario Bros. 3?
Tanuki
(4) The Maverick. That’s what he called himself. What’s the difference between a
Maverick and some other kind of cattle?
No Brand
(5) He’s somewhat renowned for singing ‘Bomb Iran,’ but see if you can name this
tune or the group that made it:
He drinks a Whiskey drink, he drinks a Vodka drink
He drinks a Lager drink, he drinks a Cider drink
He sings the songs that remind him of the good times
He sings the songs that remind him of the better times
Tubthumping — Chumbawamba
Round 3: Joe Biden
(1) Lot’s of people know Joe Biden for talking a lot. But not as much as this
man, who holds the senate record for filibuster at 24 hours and 18 minutes!
Strom Thurmond
(2) Some people like ‘Biden’ their time. Like this Broncos coach, who likes to
wait until the last minute to ice a kicker.
Mike Shanahan
(3) Biden is from Delaware. Which begs the question, what did Dela Ware to the
ball? No seriously, what are those shoes called? She looks absolutely `sharp?’
Stillettos
(4) Start your your day with a cup of joe. Who holds the trademarks to the
Maxwell House name?
Kraft (Altria Group or Phillip Morris also accepted)
(5) Joe Biden serves on the foreign relations committee. If you’re such a smarty
pants about foreign relations, who is the current Secretary General of the UN?
Ban Ki-Moon
Round 4: Sara Palin
(1) Larry Flynt has done some incredible things: survived an assassination
attempt, been in some incredible court cases, and made a skin flick parodying
Sara Palin in less than 4 weeks! What other right wing nut-job did he mock,
backfiring into one of the most momentous court cases of his career?
Jerry Falwell
(2) Obligatory sports question: Even though she prefers hockey, she probably
knows the name of the baseball player whose name indicates the disease that
Steven Hawking has?
Lou Gherig
(3) Although she probably didn’t see Putin from Alaska, she certainly didn’t see
him at the 2006 G8 summit. What city was that in again?
St. Petersburg
(4) Scary thought: Palin could have been the first woman president. Who was the
first woman president of India?
Not Ghandi (the international students from India corrected my ignorance), but Pratibha Patil
(5) She was (allegedly) once part of the Alaska secessionist movement. This
man, who shot Alexander Hamilton, was rumored to have wanted to secede from the
union not 20 years into our Nations history.
Aaron Burr
Bonus Round: Ron Paul
(1) Much like Ron Paul, Ayn Rand is well know for her libertarian lilt. What is
Rand’s shortest book, the only one available on that commie project Gutenburg
site?
Anthem
(2) Ron Paul was an internet phenomenon. So was the “Numa Numa” dance. What
language was the “Numa Numa” song sung in?
Moldovian (Romanian)
(3) Ron Paul is from Texas. So are the Houston Texans. But the Houston Texans
weren’t the first pro football team there, this other team was. Boy weren’t they
slick?
The Houston Oilers
(4) Obligatory computer science question: Which text editor is better vi or
emacs? JUST KIDDING! VIM BAYBEE Which one of the founding fathers of computer
science was a notorious jokester and fan of GAMES?
von Neumann
(5) Obligatory freebie question: What can GRACS do to make your life better next
year?
I feel like I can get away without posting for a while so long as I quote someone famous in my title.
Well, not really.
As we discovered in my Wireless Networks class, I am part of a minority. This minority makes up only 16% if the population, and are crippled by new technology. We are privacy fundamentalists. Now, you may be wondering: if you are a privacy fundamentalist, why have a blog in the first place? Well, I feel like if our president is going to start doing weekly addresses via youtube then I might as well do my best to jump on the bandwagon. Or at least drive slowly behind. At a safe distance.
My classes are going pretty well. I have taken my only exam in both, and have a project to complete for each. I think that both projects are shaping up pretty nicely, though I am starting to feel the pressure of a 3 week deadline.
I just finished applying for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program. Thankfully, I had applied before, so I had a (slightly) better sense of what the reviewers were expecting of my application. But the application itself was not the most interesting thing that tumbled out of the process this time. Part of the NSF application is a ‘Proposed Plan of Research,’ and I wrote mine on BAR-tolerant protocols for delay tolerant networks. Before you try and grok that let me explain what each piece is.
Any distributed system worth its salt must be able to handle faults. Now most of these faults are of the garden variety: some hardware fails, the basement with half of the machines flood, or the janitor trips over the power cord. However, this isn’t really enough to describe what bad things can happen in a system. What if someone hacks into some fraction of your machines and is maliciously trying to stop your computation? What happens if some of the software is of an old version, or is misconfigured? The list goes on. To deal with this infinite possibility computer scientists developed the abstraction of a Byzantine node (its the B in BAR). A Byzantine node is a node that can behave arbitrarily in a system. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, the problem is most Byzantine fault tolerant protocols only support a small number of Byzantine nodes. The problem is we are seeing more cooperative service being offered across different administrative domains, meaning that no one has absolute control over all of the machines, or even a large number of machines. In this scenario some people may try to game the system to get more work out than they put in. This behavior is covered under the Byzantine abstraction, but in practice it is more widespread than Byzantine fault tolerance can handle. In order to deal with this a new model was built, BAR. BAR Stands for Byzantine-Altruistic-Rational. In such a system you have Byzantine (arbitrary, potentially malicious), Altruistic (follows the protocol), and Rational (self-interested) nodes. Protocols like BitTorrent attempt to account for this behavior, though they are not strictly BAR tolerant. (You can free ride in BitTorrent at little to no penalty if you know what you are doing).
The best example of a delay tolerant network is the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ project. Because remote villages in Africa don’t have Internet access, the laptops form an ad-hoc network to opportunistically access the internet. These laptops leverage cooperation amongst themselves and mobility to achieve slow Internet access. The problem is most of the protocols designed for these networks aren’t built with either Byzantine or Rational nodes in mind.
My proposal was to attempt to take BAR work and apply it to delay tolerant networks. While I was writing this proposal not 15 feet away from me was LA, writing a proposal on refining BAR techniques that contained my proposal. Pretty cool to find out the proposal you wrote to the NSF as a grad student shares some similarities to the proposal a professor wrote to the NSF. So on Tuesday I am giving a ‘talk’ to his group about my ideas on the problem, and my perspective as an outsider to the BAR group. I’m pretty excited because this is a big project, and is something that is really cool.
I’m also part of the student government for the first time in my life. I serve as one of five representatives on GRACS (Graduate Representative Association of Computer Science). GRACS is a pun on grackle, which are rampant on campus, and in my opinion the most sinister looking birds ever. Well, GRACS has a budget and we run events. We recently ran a trivia night, whose questions and answers I will put in another post. Part of that trivia was cheesy survey, and we found out that graduate students really like free beer. Now, because of funding policies GRACS money cannot be used to buy alcohol, but ‘anonymous’ faculty donations and corporate donations are possible. We brought this up with the administration, and are drafting an alcohol policy for GRACS. The current GRACS may be the first GRACS to bring alcohol to our events. Exciting times.
Anyway, that is enough for now.
So we start our fifth week of classes tomorrow. At Chicago, that would represent the beginning of the end. Here in Austin, I know we still have 11 weeks left. Which is like an entire Chicago quarter. Pretty crazy!
Things have been getting a lot busier. I found out I get to go to OSDI on MW’s travel account. I’m pretty excited, I’ll be going to one of the top conferences in operating systems BEFORE I take my first operating systems class. The conference is in San Diego and may conflict with one of my Austin Singers’ rehearsals, but I think the 3 months of warning should lend me some forgiveness.
My project with MW is panning out pretty nicely, I should start running experiments sometime this week. Since I typed that without knocking on wood I’m sure it won’t happen without a hitch. We want to submit a paper to HotOS ‘09, which is a refereed workshop on operating systems. When I found out the workshop would be in Switzerland, my motivation for doing well shot up. My project in Wireless class has become a little more frustrating. We are attempting to solve a problem with bad wireless routers intruding on a wired network. My partner (AK) and I wanted to build a monitor that would check for suspicious activity in real-time. I spent about 3 hours today trying to detect anything other than a Beacon packet on my home network, with no luck. My Security project is going even more frustratingly, since its topic is non-existent. I’m working with AK in that class, too, but we are having difficulty finding an appropriate topic.
I just got done grading my portion of 240 tests, so I am pretty beat. Hopefully I’ll update with something more interesting soon…
So, instead of starting off by describing my life, I am going to start off by explaining one of the coolest concepts ever, the Zero Knowledge proof. And to explain it I will use an example I found via Wikipedia: Where’s Waldo.
So imagine we have two lovable children: Peggy (the prover) and Victor (the verifier). They are both playing Where’s Waldo? when Peggy suddenly exclaims “Ah-ha!” I know where Waldo is. Victor being ever skeptical would like to know whether or not Peggy is telling the truth. Peggy wants to convince Victor she knows where Waldo is, but she doesn’t want Victor to know. What Peggy wants is a Zero-Knowledge proof that she knows where Waldo is.
Give yourself a second to ponder how Peggy can do this. The solution to this one is very clever, Victor makes a copy of the Where’s Waldo puzzle. He then signs the back of the page with a regular, unique signature (imagine a checkerboard that no one could reproduce). He then gives his ’signed’ copy of the puzzle to Peggy along with a pair of scissors and a matchbook and leaves the room. Peggy then cuts out Waldo and sets the remaining paper on fire. Victor comes in and sees Waldo, verifies his ’signature’ on the back of the paper, and concludes that Peggy did indeed know where Waldo was.
This example is a little bit misleading as to how Zero Knowledge proofs generally work. Most of the time they are Probabilistic proofs. For this example we will imagine that Peggy knows of a facial tic that Victor has when he plays Rock-Paper-Scissors that lets her know what he’s going to throw. She doesn’t want to tell Victor his tic, but she does want to convince him that she will always win the call for shotgun. Victor and Peggy play Rock-Paper-Scissors. Victor knows that the probability of Peggy beating him in any single round is 1/3, so the probability of Peggy beating him in n rounds is (1/3)^n. Victor has some threshold that he is willing to say is too improbable to be chance (1 in a million lets say). Then Peggy only has to beat him 12 rounds in a row to convince him that she has knowledge of how to beat him.
Yesterday I had my first lesson with my new voice teacher. Unlike Bruce he is a tenor, which I think will be beneficial (since I am a tenor). He’s a little more expensive than Bruce, but he seems to think I have a good deal of potential left. After I left I realized I had forgotten my helmet (I was biking and suddenly thought ‘I feel unsafe, I wonder why?’) so I had to go back and get it. As a result I was pretty tired of biking yesterday. On the plus-side, my mother’s birthday cookies and card arrived so I had a quick pick me up.
After that I and my roommate went out to visit the Asian Market (I want to learn to make Gyu Don), but they were baffled by the ingredients I was asking for. And gave me a larger bottle of sake for a cheaper price. On our way home from this journey we decided to stop at the taco stand. The place does not have a name (or health department certification as far as I can tell), but it does have cheap delicious tacos. I’m probably going to start going there pretty regularly.
Unfortunately, my voice lesson had forced me to miss out on an expedition to see Burn After Reading, the new Coen Brothers movie. So instead we went to a later showing at the Alamo Drafthouse. The Alamo Drafthouse is a movie theater/restaurant combination that is very popular in Austin. I had already eaten (tacos…) but I did get a Hoegarden there. The movie itself was one of the Coen Brother’s better comedies (in my opinion). However, you need to have a pretty dark sense of humor to find the second half even remotely funny. I did, but two of the people I was with seemed deeply disturbed.
Tonight is poker, so I hope to win me some money!
Much to my surprise classes began last Wednesday. I was under the impression that they began on the 29th, and then I was told otherwise. I am currently taking 3 classes: Theory and Practice of Secure Systems (TPSS), Wireless Networks (WN), and 398T. This is much different from my original plan, and mostly at the suggestion of MW. TPSS seems like it will be a very interesting class, the professor, VS, is very enthusiastic. He has a very Russian sense of humor, and is extremely knowledgeable about the subject. WN is taught by LQ who used to work for Microsoft research. 398T is our intro into how to be an academic. It has TA training, Talk training, Writing training and research group presentations (For us, not by us). Our first day was mostly spent discussing how plagiarism was bad. So far I’ve only been to TPSS twice, and the other classes once. Except for Mondays I only have one class per day.
In our department, the last Friday of every month is a TGIF day. TGIF is where GRACS, the association of CS grad students, hosts a “light appetizer” and a professor gives an “anonymous donation” for some beer. After TGIF we went to a party at the Australian’s house. I got there late, and a number of people had already left. I saw an arm wrestling contest and a very odd Japanese movie. Saturday I stayed low key and watched a couple of movies I had seen before with the roommates. Sunday we went to the Russian’s house for a pre-Labor Day pool party/cook-out. I made my signature Salt n’ Garlic burgers. After it got dark we went inside and watched Tremors, and Tremors II: Aftershock. Both of which were ridiculous movies.
I spent Labor Day cleaning and drafting for Fantasy Football. I threw everyone off by drafting Brady instead of Peterson, but we’ll see how that works out this season. Other than that my team is riddled with people who are good, but questionable for week one. So I got a lot of good deals… if my risk:reward ratio pays off.
Other than that I haven’t been up to very much. Perhaps later I will post Armstrong’s Exercise 2. Also, I am starting to rethink my whole policy on Functional Programming Languages. It took me an hour and a half to do something that would take me at least 4 hours in C. And this was in a language I didn’t really know.
Mondays are going to be HECTIC. Last week I met with DS, a voice teacher/choral conductor in Austin, who agreed to take me on as a pupil and pointed me towards Austin Singers as a choral group. Except for that, I lazed around a whole bunch until Friday. On Friday new TAs had to be educated about our new Health Benefits and why it is FUN to be a TA. I got in earlier than I expected (the bike ride is getting easier every time I do it), and walked around for a bit. I ate lunch in the cafeteria on the first floor of my building. To my surprise it was pretty good and pretty cheap.
After the TA session I used Skype to talk to MW about a research project. The long and short of it is: I get to learn Erlang and Emulab as well as theorize about DHTs and other distributed systems, and in return I get chance to (maybe) go to a workshop in the Spring (and turn this into a much bigger project). Once I got home I didn’t do much (hey, I know its Austin but I don’t have a lot of money!)
The rest of the weekend was pretty uneventful, but Monday. Things began to happen. Monday was move-in day for graduate students, so I went to campus, found my new cubicle ‘moved in’ and started doing work. At first I was a little miffed because I didn’t have a computer. I mean, its a computer science department, I need one to do work! I wasn’t miffed too long because a guy came around and installed a ‘new’ computer. I’m very pleased with the hostname (salmon). I had a meeting with the professor for the class I am going to TA, there are some pros and cons to TAing this class. The pro’s are that I don’t have to grade homework, and it doesn’t look like it will take much more than 10 hrs a week on average, and I get to learn Python! The cons are that I have to show up to class and grade exams (there are 200+ students in the class for 3 people to grade the exams). Some neutral points are the office hours.
After my meeting I biked home and prepared for my audition with Austin singers. I was quite nervous. I have a pretty good voice, but not so good musicality. I was pleased to find out that there were 4 (to maybe 7) other tenors in the group (about 50 people) so even my “weak” (words of the conductor) tonal memory and sight singing meant I had a place in the group. We had our first rehearsal (7-9:30) and I’m pretty excited about some of the songs. I’m not excited about having to buy a Tuxedo and pay dues, but they seem like a good group, so I’ll stick with the installment plan on the dues while I figure out if its the place for me.
I loaded up my car Wednesday with nearly all of my personal belongings, and surprisingly they all fit. After a delicious breakfast from my Mother, I hit the road on the long drive to Austin. I drove for the first day with a moderately annoying and astonishing drive. It was annoying because of the fact that I was moving my bike, and astonishing because my car was getting 41 MPG. (Wind resistance would push my bike around on the rack, so I had to stop more often than I would have liked in order to adjust it). I had decided earlier that Texarkana was too big of a city to leave my worldly belongings in an unattended car while I slept, so I decided to stop in Hope, Arkansas. However, I had only been on the road for about 7 hours when I hit Hope and decided to stop at the next cheap looking place (Read Super 8 or Motel 6) after Texarkana. That place ended up being Mt. Pleasant Texas. I tucked myself into bed that night having driven 600 miles, and according to MapQuest having only 210 to go.
I woke up at 6:30 Friday morning, had breakfast, and got into my car. The moment I got into my car it began POURING rain, which made me stop to check my bike EVEN more. But that wasn’t the only delay I faced. Texas interstates seem to have frequent stops for no reason. I parked my car on the interstate for about 10 minutes during one of these stop (I mean I turned off the engine and grabbed reading material). When it was time to go again I could see no reason for the stop, no accident, no reduction in lanes, no ridiculously over-sized traffic light. So I didn’t roll into Austin until about 2:30, at around 280 miles. I drove at an average of 40 miles per hour on the interstate.
When I finally arrived at my new house in Austin I was disappointed to discover that no one was there. Well I was about an hour later than the latest I had said I would be, but I kind of expected a note or a phone call. So I called my landlord/roommate Julian, who had forgotten what day it was and had gone shopping. He had forgotten due to arriving late from a flight the night before (same morning actually). He came back and helped me move in. I needed stuff for my bathroom so we went on a Target run, and later had dinner with his friends Igor (the Russian) and Michael (the Australian).
Saturday we went to Ikea where I purchased Two bookshelves, two trash bins, and 32 hangers for the price of $65. Amazing. After the Ikea run we went to Rudy’s for dinner (again with his friends). Rudy’s is a Texas Bar-B-Que place that serves no pulled pork (gasp!). If you are there for your first time, they offer you a sample of literally everything. They sell their meat by the pound (no kidding!) and their sides by the Styrofoam cup. I had a long discussion with the cashier as she fed me samples about the difference between Texas BBQ and Tennessee BBQ, we agreed that it was a question of the meat not the quality (Gawd, these people sure are friendly!). We then watched the X-Files Movie. I had never seen the X-files, so the only reason I was able to follow it was because I got to ask a bunch of questions.
Sunday I unpacked, tidied up, and went shopping. I visited H.E.B. for my groceries. Right now I’m not too sure whether everything is bigger in Texas, but the grocery stores certainly are. The H.E.B. and the Whole Foods that I have visited in Austin are the two larges grocery stores I have ever been to.
Monday (today) I woke up and went to campus to take care of that new school administrative silliness. Campus is 4.2 miles away, so it looks like I will be biking 8.4 miles everyday. I’m not sure if I still need to do a specific cardiovascular routine when I work out, because biking will take at least 40 minutes. When I got home, I took advantage of our premium cable package and watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I cannot understand how the experiences described in that movie could encourage ANYONE to ever take drugs on a regular basis. It was insane, Hunter S. Thomson was on Mescaline, LSD, Ether, and Marijuana simultaneously!
Well, I close with this, a link to my Flickr account with pictures of my new room!
Wow. So I am about to write this and I realize I have done almost nothing this week. I mean, I’ve worked out pretty much everyday, done all of my reading, worked on configuring my computer, and played Xbox 360. But I mean, that’s it.
I saw the movie Standard Operating Procedure which was about the Abu Gharib incidents, which it politely described as a “charlie foxtrot.” It was a really interesting case study in group psychology, but it still didn’t give a complete picture of the incidents. I also saw Persepolis, which was the story of Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian girl who grew up in Iran during a lot of their political crisis. Her picture of Iran was much different from the picture I had imagined.
So yeah, busy life…
So this is two weeks because I was in the middle of graduating last week, and things got a bit hectic.
On Friday, the 6th, we had our 2nd annual CMAC QED concert. The concert was probably our best performed concert so far. It was a little less well attended than I would have liked, but we still had really good attendance. After the concert we had an after party that featured very good beer brewed by our president and very bad beer purchased by our social chair. The home-brew confirmed in me a desire to make my own someday, because it was really freakin’ good. At 12:30 AM we had the traditional CMAC sing, and at 1:15 were told by the cops to shut up. After ‘the bust,’ I hung out for a bit, and then took the shuttle home. At 8:45 I woke up to sing for Alumni Convocation.
Sunday we had the last college beer night ever, and unfortunately I had to leave early because I had work the next day. We had begun to play Starfarers of Katan, but I left early. It was raining and everyone told me to stay until it stopped raining. However I’m stubborn, so I left. I was outside for 5 seconds before I realized being stubborn was probably stupid in this particular situation. Unfortunately, I was outside for 5 seconds before I was completely soaked, so changing my mind would have been unproductive. I just walked home, changed and went to bed.
My senior week was incredibly lame, the only event I went to was the free movie. I spent the rest of the week packing and attempting to sell my stuff. I was pretty successful, except for my desk which disintegrated the moment I tried to move it. On Friday the check for my car finally cleared and I became the proud owner of a 2003 Toyota Echo.
Saturday was graduation, I got up early and stood in line for an hour, to walk to an assigned seat and sit for about 2 hours while I waited my turn to get my diploma. I really liked a couple of things about the ceremony: one, the convocation speaker accurately represented the nerdiness of the UofC when compared with other Universities, and two, the fact that the President is required by the board of trustees to give us our diploma’s personally. After graduation, I packed up my car and drove out of Chicago to Matteson. I got a little sad and freaked out on the drive out realizing I would never be in college again. After I got to the hotel I took a nap, and then we went to Harry Carry’s for my graduation dinner.
On Sunday we drove home. I’ve spent the beginning of the week sorting through my stuff and (hopefully) reducing the amount I have to take to Austin. I picked up my graduation present from my father, a shiny new laptop (which is fast as all get out) and used the graduation gift from my grandparents to purchase an Xbox 360. I also learned a lesson about sales tax when I went to register my car and was unpleasantly surprised by another $500 dollar cost.
Currently, I am relaxing into my last summer of freedom before I head to Austin and become a graduate student.
Well, seems like weekly means every 9 days, but that is close enough for me.
Finished up ninth week of my last quarter with a lot of singing. In addition to CMAC rehearsal, on Thursday we had to sing for the College Honors Awards ceremony (where I got an award!). After that we had rehearsal. As usual I had voice lessons on Friday, sadly one of my last with Bruce. Friday night I hung out with Robert, Dan, and Adam. We played a variety of games including Rock Band and a German board game called Carcassone. I enjoyed the game a little bit, but the music was making me feel like I was going insane. Saturday I went to work, where I finished up my LRS paper and started on my Video Games paper. After work I took a nap and went to sing Mahler’s 2nd symphony. And by sing I mean warm-up, sit for approximately an hour and a half, and then sing. After the symphony I went to the Pub with the CMAC guys in UChorus/Motet and then to the ScavHunt party. I got home pretty late, and went to bed. In the morning I got up, worked a bit on my Video Games paper and then went to sing the Mahler again. After that I went home and relaxed a bit.
I spent most of Monday finishing up my Video Games paper and doing a demo with RealFlow. I decided I probably cannot be an animator for a CGI film studio, since my waterdrop ended up looking terrible no matter how many times I tried. I woke up Tuesday, added some finishing touches to my paper turned it in and went to CMAC rehearsal.
After CMAC rehearsal, I hosted the 1st annual (this is our 3rd year in existence) CMAC Senior Sendoff. I had a good old fashioned cook out. The most exciting part was when I nearly set myself on fire! The first fire I had started had gone out so I was using lighter fluid to restart the coals. I used maybe a little too much, and when I lit the grill there was a nice explosion, singing the hair off of my right arm. It took a couple of minutes for the fire to die down, but we had some nice coals by that time. It was a successful cook out, and surprisingly all of the seniors were able to attend.
(sorry this was late, I forgot to hit publish…)
