This past weekend, as most of us know, was a long one, the week that followed retained much of the festive atmosphere in the local area – at least to me. Not having team practice sessions and/or games (we struggled quite a bit to get the game reschedule with ME – that’s a whole different story. I am quite sure their manager is pretty low on PR/basic humane skills and wouldn’t last long in the real world if he continues with such an attitude) gave me some free time to catch up on certain things. Added to this, there was a scheduled power relocation in CEC, which meant our research machines (like any other) went down from Thursday evening till Friday late afternoon. So, what exactly did I catch up on or what all did I do in the past one week? That’s pretty much the content of subsequent paragraphs. Read on…

First off, I did something that I hadn’t done in the past four years – attend 4^th of July fireworks in the local area. This isn’t exactly true as I had been to Chassel once, but rain and cold weather had played spoil-sport then. Now that the transportation is no longer an issue, I was at Lake Linden on Monday night (after a musical dinner at Karen/Eli’s place). I kinda like the fact that different town(ship)s have fireworks on different days – it gives people an opportunity to have fun and travel a bit too. This was my first time shooting fireworks and the geography of Lake Linden provided near-perfect settings for it. I was just about the right distance so my neck didn’t pain trying to look up all the time. How did the pictures turn out, you ask? Lot better than my own expectation and I am pretty proud of my camera. I also drove upto Copper Harbor the next day (Tuesday) to see more fireworks. Not only did I make it well in time for both places (in spite of starting late), I also found a place to park pretty close to fireworks and a very good spot to watch them from. A family from Ann Arbor even shared their furniture in Copper Harbor – so I could sit down and shoot pictures. Guess I have been stocking up on my good luck for quite sometime, though I personally wouldn’t recommend starting late to any of these locations. It was quite the experience just driving up, following hundreds of other cars all the way and listen to the aahs, oohs and wows watching fireworks Couple of the pictures are below – for rest of them, check my photo-gallery.

Before I move onto some serious things, I should write about something I used to do a lot but haven’t been doing much of late – a walk along the Lake Shore Drive. It’s close to campus, at a walkable distance and goes from one end of Houghton to another (and some more). It did feel pretty good though I would have wished to have my 2X optical teleconverter by then. While walking along and enjoying the cool breeze, I shot some pics of butterflies and flowers, etc. Again, to keep this entry short and interesting, I have posted couple of them here and for rest, as usual, check my photo-gallery.

Like I promised, to more serious things now – Kathy Wollan (one of our Dept’s secretaries) invited some of us over to a cultural event in The Calumet Theatre. It was my first time being inside the theatre, though I have passed in front of it several times. The moment one steps in, feeling of being taken back in time, way back in time, starts to set in – I don’t have enough words in my vocabulary to explain the Shakespearean / Victorian setting of the interiors, and not to forget, the performances by the artists that followed… First, it was a Finnish comedy & musical called Nyt Naura by The Suomalainen Sisters. Though I didn’t understand much of it (it was in Finnish coated English), it was hilarious nevertheless. Next, it was a bunch of New Yorkers and couple of Finns, bound together in a group called Kaiku. Again, I didn’t understand the words (they were in Finnish and sometimes in English) but best thing about music is that one doesn’t have to know the language to appreciate it. Fortunately enough for me, non-flash photography was allowed and needless to mention, I did shoot some snaps – keeping this entry short, I am just posting three of them (one, the interior of The Calumet Theatre; two, Nyt Naura performers; and three, Kaiku performers).

By now, I am quite sure that you are wondering about the discrepancy between the title and contents of this entry. Well, I promise that you will notice that the discrepancy will gradually vanish from now on, at least I hope so. After the performance, I had the opportunity to interact with some of the performers and learnt a bit more about them. One of them, Carl Riehl, is a lawyer by profession and discussions with him spanned several subjects – my liking to this area, physics, clusters of computers, softball, etc. Another, poplulary known in the NY area as Cosmo D, even gave me his CD and I kinda liked listening to it. I couldn’t have believed that talking to one of the volunteers (Chris) at the event would help me the next day in Rozsa Center. This gentleman tried to convince the PMMF (Pine Mountain Music Festival) staff to let me shoot pictures but it didn’t really work out – as the only people who could shoot were from press. The concert, PMMF Symphony Orchestra, was unbelievably good and I knew few of the performers too. After the concert, I did speak to the artistic director of PMMF requesting him to let me shoot pictures at subsequent events. I have written to him and hopefully, I will hear something positive from him before the next one I attend. Here are rest of the pictures I shot during Kaiku (be sure to pick the right event).

Well, I thought I had interacted enough for the week with musicians and enjoyed a coffee-like beer at the KBC. Just when I was about to leave, I met Dave (Bezotte), Kathleen and few others – that meant I did my first successful bar-hopping. Not technically, since I didn’t drink anything at the Library. So, after spending about 30 mins, we were ready to hop once more and before we made it into the Doug House, we ran into three of the Symphony Orchestra performers (David Andai, Adam Liebert and Alicia Poot). After about another 40 mins worth of street-side discussions, one of them wondered if I knew how to cook. I didn’t need a second invite but they certainly did a few more and some recommendations for my cullinary skills by Dave (Bezotte). One of them passed up while rest were in my apartment around 2 am. Cooked some food (soup, rAjma and spinach parathas) till about 3 am and we (David Bezotte, David Andai, Adam and myself) had the not so spicy yet tasty sitting on the floor eating with bare hands dinner till about 4 am. This is definitely the latest party I have been part of but it was pretty much worth every minute of it. They had entertained me (and many others) for about couple hours earlier in the evening by enthralling music and I am glad I had the opportunity to entertain them for couple hours, by decent food

That’s how my weekend kinda ended, and if you were wondering how I got this free time, let me remind you again – it was partly my CPUs’ running time as well as its sleeping time…. Let me end this entry on a geeky note. Tech recently introduced a campus wide chat service (with Jabber protocol) — people are free to create their own chat rooms (bigger research groups, groups of friends, etc.) and we can stay in touch with others more easily, sometimes on a 24/7 basis. Guess this not only makes communication faster, but also reduces the number of silly mails flying across campus and getting stored on the server. I am pretty excited about it – if you run into me and I keep bragging about this service, you know whom to blame…