Tool Box Talk

In BCM 175 we had a toolbox talk. We were being introduced to personal protection equipment. Essentially, it was very boring. "This is a hardhat. These are gloves. These are earplugs...." Anyway, as he started talking about respirators, I couldn't help but think of one fellow laborer and what he said this past summer.

We were tearing out a room and throwing its contents out of a hole in the wall down into a dumptster. We were shoveling old plaster and grout, throwing lath, and various insulating materials. So basically, it was extremely dusty and we were naturally wearing dust masks.

As we paused to take a break, this fellow laborer pulled off his dust mask and took out a cigarette and lit it up. He walked toward the hole in the wall to the fresh air and took a drag on his cigarette. He looks back into the room with all the dust in the air. He looks at me and says, with cigarette in hand, "That's some nasty s&@+, you know it, Pat?"

All I could do was smile at the irony. He then took another drag on his cigarette.

I should be doing homework...

I'd highly recommend to anyone who enjoys bicycling to give the Hoosier Hills bike tour a try. It's 100k long, so it has enough length that you can feel you've accomplished something, and there are enough hills to provide adequate challenge without being overly burdensome.

I'll grant that it's burdensome enough that I had to give myself a moment to find a second wind, but not so much that I had to walk. It was definitely enough that my quads started talking to me somewhere around the halfway point.

I hate to be one to toot my own horn, but kudos to Bright and myself for finishing faster than this group of sorority girls presumably from IU with their fancy jerseys and uber-expensive Scott and high-end Specialized bikes. Even though it probably wasn't evenly matched between Bright and I and these girls, I still think we can definitively draw from it that Purdue is better than IU.

My birthday brought in all sorts of strange foods. Black olives, peanut butter, and pickles. The not-so-strange foods included 36 cupcakes that a classmate brought in to my physics lecture for me. Plus, I received Blazing Saddles, which is pretty much awesome.

And as for now, the week is going fast and I'm surviving my first battery of exams. This is good for two reasons: if I survive the exam, it means it didn't kill me, and classes typically slow down after exams--so less work!

But more importantly than exams and homework, swing dancing appears to be going relatively smoothly. At least, it's going a lot more smoothly than I anticipated it would! At the very least, the music is awesome. Of course, it's usually jazz, but they occasionally throw in a contemporary song. The best ones is when they put on a rap song. Hilarious.

sulk!

I should be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but instead, I think I'll sulk for a bit.

Kudos to anyone who ever put up with four years of this college garbage. I think I'd sooner join the army... or even *gasp* the French Legion. Or something. Man.