Creepy Stuff Happens in Nowhere

It must be Monday again. Mondays aren't too bad for me. I've got one class, and it goes from 9:05 to 9:55. Tuesdays are a little different. I have three classes and a lab. That's six and a half hours of sitting in a classroom. And Tuesday is our hardest workout day in XC. And it means I usually have a lot of work to do on Mondays, which is definitely true today.

I think I did the worst of it yesterday, though. I spent a total of five hours in the GIS lab, munching on two problems, both due tomorrow. I think I got both of them, but I can't be sure. GIS can be difficult, but when you get something — or think you get something — it's very satisfying.
My GIS professor is originally from New Jersey, but his dad worked for National Geographic so he got to travel all over as a kid. He went to undergrad at UC Santa Cruz and grad school at UC Santa Barbara, and in between the two (I think. Maybe after, though.) he lived and worked on the Channel Islands, doing stuff. He's also hiked a large section of the PCT. Very cool guy. He has an understated sense of humor, very soft, almost deadpan though.

My geology professor doesn't wear shoes to class. The first week, he didn't wear socks either, but now that it's getting coldish, he wears socks. He does wear shoes to lab, though. I have geology lab every Wednesday afternoon, and last week we walked around campus taking measurements on different rock things. Kinda cool, just slow.

On Saturday, we raced at Bard College in New York state, right on the Hudson. Very pretty campus. Very pretty drive, too. Good views of three mountains ranges: Greens, Adirondacks, and Catskills. 'Cause it's a long drive, we had to get up early, and the sunrise made it worthwhile.

Those be the Green Mountains. That thing just behind it be the sun.

Really not the best picture I could have taken, but the only one that I did take. We had much better views at different points.

The race itself was a lot of fun. We've never raced at Bard before, and it's kinda a stopgap for its weekend because of a wrinkle in the scheduling. The result is that we were racing a bunch of teams that were much, much slower than we were. It was strange, really. To think about how many colleges there are in which all of their runners are slower than the slowest Middlebury runner, and by no small amount. Encouraging, I guess, to think how easily I could be the Number One guy at so many colleges. More encouraging — in a this-is-good-for-other-people kind of way — to realize that, short of Stephen Hawking, anyone can run cross country in college if they want to.

I ran well, incidentally. 26:33 for 8k. Or at least they called it an 8k. Some people think it may have been shorter. But even if it was a little shorter, I still had a good race because my previous PR was 27:54.

But on to more important things.

I made a life-changing discovery on Thursday night.

Someone has put most, maybe even all, episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog on YouTube. This is a relatively recent development, because believe me I have looked before.

So I watched a couple episodes that night, a couple more on Friday, and just a few more on Saturday. I made Chuck sit through a couple. He doesn't appreciate the genius of John R. Dilworth. Perhaps it is a rare breed that does.