I have internet!

It's been an exhausting week, and here's a rundown of the highlights for all who may be interested (and a few supplemental photos, if all goes according to plan):

Classes start Monday, and this entire week was "Orientation". That meant math placement exams on Monday (I passed both calculus AND algebra -- hooray!) followed by a delightful two-hour cruise on Lake Michigan featuring all the free wine, beer, and hors d'ouevres we could consume.

Pictured here to the right are Angie, Joh, Meg, me and Leslie on the cruise. And below (I think) are me, James, Clement, John, Christine, Leslie and Meredith.

Tuesday and Wednesday featured a lot of really boring, but required, lectures about things like not cheating and not harassing members of minority groups or the opposite sex. We kept ourselves going by staying out incredibly too late socializing with each other and playing cards. Here you see John, Julie, Nikolas and Christine playing cards in Christine's apartment. No one but John knew how to play Euchre -- can you believe it?

Then Thursday and Friday we were split into groups of thirty for the Dean's Challenge. Each group had to come up with a proposal for how to use the plot of land slated for the Olympic Village in the city's 2016 Olympic bid (assuming we lost out on the Olympics), with particular regard to the public and affordable housing shortages. Twenty-four hours is not really enough time to do something like this at all, particularly with 30 people to work with, but we managed to pull something quite impressive together by Friday afternoon. Then, we lost. But only because the faculty judges' rubric was completely (and erroneously) out of sync with our conception.

To make up for giving up huge amounts of work we could not possible know how to do, Thursday evening we were treated to the taping of Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! at the Chase Auditorium in downtown Chicago. I was sore afterwards for laughing so hard. I got my photo with Carl Kasell and Peter Sagal afterwards, too. If you have no idea what I'm talking about it's because you don't listen to NPR enough.

Like I said, the week was exhausting, but a whole lot of fun, too. I'm hoping to feel a little less stressed out when classes begin, just because I'll have more discretion with my time than I have had so far. Speaking of which, I'll be taking microeconomics, advanced statistical methods and political economy. In other words, lots of problem sets. So, maybe not on the less stress idea. But one can hope.

I'm glad to see everyone down in Bloomington living it up, and wish I could make it down sometime.

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My apartment:

Some random other shots of friends, school and the city:

from Promontory Point

Harper Library

John and me from the Aquarium downtown

David (Jersey Dave, or JD for short), John, Nikolas and Zi Chaing at the Renegade Art Fair.