Blog o' Ryan

1. Its been a while, i know.
2. I think i should start blogging again because i'm in a foreign country again(germany this time)

So lets review whats happened in the last 6 months....lets see, I finished my career at Wesleyan(all 5 semesters) I never thought I would say it, but I think I will really miss Wes. I have some great memories from there...lacrosse, jazz band(s), playing frat gigs, beirut, the bag game, the nocturnal marching band, intramural sports, breaking my nose in softball, breaking Rob's nose boxing, breaking lots of things in the lab...Cesium!

So, on to the neyt chapter of my life...you know its strange, it really does seem like my life is going by in chapters, or for you math people you would say my life is a discontinous function, undefined in some regions.
Nexte haltestelle: Columbia University, starting fall 05, 2 years of engineering in Manhatten. Quite a change from Middletown, CT where campus wide emails are sent out warning the school of a 'suspicious person' seen on Lawn Ave. Well, I think it will be a nice change of pace, however drastic.

For now I am in Dortmund, Germany studying Solid state physics for the summer. Ya, i know, i'm such a nerd. but the real reason for coming to germany was to see Lara, the only constant in my life right now. My birthday present this year was a Eurail pass(for germany france spain and benelux) so i plan to do some more traveling in europe.
Ive discovered that traveling by traing with a big suitcase is not a good idea. If youve taken an overnight train in a 'couchette' then you know what im talking about.
Before coming to Germany I spent a week in Salamanca, Spain with Lara. she came with me back to madrid to say goodbye, and we had time to see the Prada museum. And by that, i mean we had 1 hour, hehe. I actually reccomend going to a museum for 1 hour, even better if you have a train to catch. Of course, I missed my train, mostly due to El Greco and Francisco de Goya, but also because of an incredibly slow taxi-driver.

I have a few more days of German class, and then I start the real classes next Monday.
Bis Spater!

"Hi Everybaady!"
"Hi, Dr.Nick!"

some highlights from the weekend:
Friday:
Bob, Smith, and I had 40 buffalo wings for dinner...oh, and some celery too! lots and lots of moist towelletes were used.
Saturday:
did a recording session for a senior film thesis early in the morning...i was sick and actually threw up in between recording track 1 and 2...but we got free lunch for our efforts. Ushered at a fancy Indian dinner that afternoon and got free Indian food! The dessert looked like moldy milk that had worms in it, but actually it tasted excellent. Then I ushered at a dance concert. this was some pretty weird stuff. the group, called Streb, would do weird things like fall off of high places, run around tied to eachother, and one of them even got harnessed into a "flying machine" ...i guess I just don't get modern dance. I mean falling off stuff is really fun, but watching other people do it isnt that entertaining.
Sunday:
Bob actually came to church with me later that afternoon to go to a going away party for a friend of mine, Eliza, who is moving to Virginia on Wednsesday. This sucks because her parents were the bassist and pianist for the worship band...now we need to find some new players.
oh, and we watched "the spanish apartment" , a really good foreign film about college students studying abroad...i had already seen it in Ireland, but it was worth seeing twice.

It seems like the lab group i'm working with spends more time planning on what we are going to do, what we need to do, and the advantages and disadvantages of any sort of plan of action, than actually doing anything. Like today, we discussed the possibility of contaminants in the oil for the diff pump for most of our meeting, while we could have changed the oil in that amount of time. well, we did get something done today: replaced some O-rings! woo hoo! sorry guys if I'm boring you with this stuff but, I couldn't afford any more noteboooks so i'm maybe this my lab notebook as well as my blog...hehe, just kidding..I figure, if naomi can talk about working in a LIBRARY, than I can talk about my job too.

oh, and today in the lab i got to replace some copper O-rings

some good news: #1 i heard there is a fencing club forming this year...hopefully I can get them to come out to the club.
#2 pastor says to me on sunday "so Ryan, I gave my cadillac to Marcel, and he's getting a new mini-van, so I bet he'll give you the cadillac"
so hopefully that works out...

nicht viele macht diese tagen...
well, i just got a big packet of stuff from Columbia today and I have to say, it looks pretty impressive...I mean they have the 3rd largest earthquake simulator in the world! Would it not be the coolest thing in the world to have a dance party on that thing?
It looks like I have a choice of any engineering major there, but the ones i'm looking at are either Computer engineering, or Applied Physics. Computer Engineering is where the money is at, but the A.P. dept has a tokamak fusion reactor. Plasma fusion, which is like the holy grail of energy physics, is something I have been interested in since high school.
Let me know what you guys think, Applied physics or computer engineering.
Since i'm on the subject of physics and school, this summer i'm hoping to get accepted to a summer internship at CERN labaoratory in Geneva. A summer in Switzerland doing high energy physics, and getting paid to do it!...it just doesn't get any better than that. I've got to be insanely well qualified to get accepted, so this year has to be big, as far as grades.

I picked up another mini-job for the president(of the university). I am now one of a few student drivers who get to drive the pres and his wife all around, but mostly to and from the airport...i'm kind of nervous, partly becuase of their expensive car, but mostly becuase i've never driven in CT. But don't worry, the car is 100% insured!


RIght now I am embarrased whenever someone comes over to our place because we have nothing on our walls except a poster of Hillary Duff's face...is that lame or what?

wo shou ni men ting!!

so many things to say, it's too bad i'm so bad at writing. Let's just say that I haven't posted in 2000 hours or so.
Quick update:
went to Ireland - fell in love, did physics, met some really cool people
came back - PA dynamic very awkward, finds refuge at home, the Y, and the golf course
back to school - falling back into the groove, hard classes, church going well, promoted to head bartender at Pres House, Three Amigos back at it, guitar player in mental institute - no band yet...west african drumming, intramural soccer, first fencing lesson at new club, learnin olympic lifting from Bob, busy life - actually bought a 'weekly planner' (are you proud naomi?)
oh, and still in love with a girl in another country - very inconvenient...but going to visit in October.

Funny story - the democrats came knocking at my door tonight...they wanted me to register to vote, and I said I was from WA and they said that it would be a tight race there. They had obsiously had never met a republican before, so they do the natural thing and assume that I'm am a democrat. So, they suggest I do the absentee ballot thing, and I wholeheardatly agree. So after a nice little conversation, I finally couldn't stand it anymore, so I told them that I was conservative, and they gave me the most surprised, hurt, look I have seen in a while. So that much ended the convseration and the story. I bet Emma has a similar story.

well, I bet i'm leaving out a ton of things about Ireland, this summer, and school here, so I may as well quit while i'm behind.
i hope everyone is enjoying themselves!

The original plan was or me just to have a blog for my Ireland trip, but somehow I have been convinced to keep posting. I've been back for about 2 weeks, and I haven't really done much. I have: visited Naomi in Seattle and did some fencing while I was there, played with the 4 kittens at my house, gone golfing, gone to the Y, spent 4 days in LA for my brother Tim's wedding, and that's about it.
The wedding was great, we ate lots of chinese food, REAL chinese food, like the stuff I had IN China, like Jellyfish, sharkfin soup, sanddollar innards, yummy...
I'm trying to get a job, but that probably won't happen, as I'll be in Seattle a lot fencing and i'm teaching drums again, and I want to golf a lot.
Apparently there is a cool new jazz club downtown that I'm going to check out tonight, maybe try to play...i hear Tom goes there.
cya

Don't worry people, i'm still alive.
I'm still in Dublin, trying to stay out of trouble until I head to London on Sunday morning. Things have been crazy lately, especially when they kicked us out of the DCU apartments and we had no where to stay...thank goodness Maurice was there to drive us around and look for places to stay...we ended up staying at a B&B for a night until finding a place to stay at an old ladies house, in a village south of Dublin, Templeaugue. I had a headache for all of last week, i'm not sure why, but i'm better now...
last weekend Sophie(french girl) rented a car and we(Jane, Alvaro, Lara, and I) headed up to Belfast and the northern coast for a few days...the trip was pretty amazing, especially the protestant/catholic issues, that we got to see first hand...we spent two days driving around the coast, stayed in hostels, got some wet socks hiking, climbed walls, fences, and had a fun time doing it...I've have discovered you really have to be pro-active and fearless in order to be a succesful tourist...it takes a lot of practice, but I think I almost have it mastered..
the only bad part of the trip was when the rental car was towed to the Dublin City Impound, when we parked it in a bus lane...hehe, i'm glad it's not on my credit card :)
I'm helping Lara find an apartment in the city center because she and Alvaro are staying in Dublin and working at the Hard Rock Cafe. so if anyone is going to Dublin, stop by the Hard Rock Cafe and say HOLA GUAPA CHICA to Lara for me :)

I just avoided a major disaster...I thought my Solid state final was on friday. Luckily I lost two sections of notes so I had to ask the teacher for another copy, so I went to her office, she gave me the notes, I said 'thanks' and then she said 'good luck tomorrow' ...then I thought, 'wait! the test is on friday, and tomorrow is Thursday. agggh!
It's a good thing I am disorganized, eh?

So I had my first final on Monday. It was for Nanotech/Surface Physics, and I actually made notecards for the first time since elementary school...The spanish girls helped me out by quizzing me over the weekend, so I think I did pretty well. The testing procedures here are very different than at home. The entire gym was filled with about 1,000 chairs, of which I was supposed to locate, by some stroke of luck, chair 303...I'm lucky that I showed up 10 minutes early.
I had quite a scare at first because they handed me the wrong test at first, I think it was for an advanced philisophy class...although it might have been fun to try. The one thing that really annoyed me is the fact that I wasn't allowed to use my Ti-86. Apparently they are afriad that you will program some equations into it, when actually it would be much easier to just write them on your hand. So I had to use a stupid scientific calculator, which made keeping order of operations almost impossible on some of the calculations. Get with the times people! EVERYONE has a graphing calculator; back me up here people...
If anyone wants to learn to fence this summer, let me know, because I need someone to practice with.
Arantza, Veronica, and Lucia, 3 of my best freinds here, are all leaving in 9 days so we are all in denial about that and try not to think about it.
I've been playing a lot of pool lately, mostly just to fill the time between studying and eating. The pool balls and pockets are much smaller, so when I come back to the states, I might actaully be good at pool. But, probably not..I never liked geometry. Ms. Sanderson! I wonder if she's still kickin it...and by 'it' I mean the garbage can.

I have Solid State exam on THURSDAY(edit), then Plasma physics next wednesday, and complex analysis on thursday. woo hoo!
I'm going to a greyhound race tonight...(edit)actually I should probably study.