I can't think of a title, and a title isn't that important.

I went to a bonfire on the "physics ranch" which is really some land with trees by a swamp with a shed and a fire pit. It wasn't a graduate student event, just some people who decided to go and invited some people along. I'm glad I was invited, and I'm starting to feel like I'm more of a part of the group now. I've made a conscious effort to hang out with the physics people I know and try to develop some friendships. My first year here I was overly reclusive, and the only fruit of that was feeling lonely and unhappy. Sometimes it feels like I really am making friends, other times I feel like I won't connect with other people like I did in Oxford. Of course, I can make great friendships without the people being replicas of Brian Whims, Dan Wu, or any of a dozen other people I could name. I want to be wary of not being satisfied until my life is exactly like it was, but I don't want to get bogged down trying to force relationships with people I really won't connect with when I could spend time looking elsewhere instead. Still, even if I haven't connected as closely I'm feeling happier now that I come out of my dorm room more often.

Still, it was fun. We burned stuff in a fire and ate dinner. Some of the things I said were greeted with laughter, some with awkward silence. An example of the latter would've been when I said it would be really bad to get a charlie horse in one's anal sphincter while taking a dump. Back in Oxford, someone would've laughed at that. Although I still like my friends who wouldn't have.

Oh, post with your name if you've read this post. I'm trying to get a good idea of who reads my blog.

Kerosene + Used Charcoal + Dumpster = Bad

I was walking down the street this evening when I noticed that a dumpster next to the chemistry building was on fire. I ran inside and got someone to call 911, then pulled the fire alarm, then hunted down a fire extinguisher. Thankfully someone came on the scene who knew how to use the fire extinguisher I found. It wasn't sufficient to put it out though, only to keep it under control. It ran out of ammo surprisingly fast. After it ran out we each ran inside and grabbed another, but even two extinguishers at the same time weren't enough, and we had to wait for the firemen. The firemen put it out, and after some time they fished out a can of kerosene (Or some other type of cooking fuel). Some people had been holding a cookout earlier that day, so the current theory is they threw that away in the dumpster along with some used charcoal.

My Mouth vs. My Job

It seems sometimes that I'm often about to say something while I'm working that will get me in trouble. For example, the lab manuals for the students have check boxes, which I'm supposed to check when they complete a section of the lab. However, when a girl asks me to check her box, I have to fight down the temptation to blurt out "But I'm not a gynecologist!"

Sometimes I do say things I shouldn't. One time a student couldn't get an experiment to work right, where he had to give a cart a push up a ramp, then let it go as the motion detector took data. I came over and tried to do it, in order to see what was wrong, but when I did it the experiment worked. The student then claimed it only worked from the left side, and not the right side. As the experiment was symmetrical, I pushed it from the right side and it worked again. At which point I declared that "I have empirically proven that your theory is as incorrect as it sounds."

Look for a post in a couple of days with more serious stuff in it.