A Return to the Eagles, and the Subsequent Battering

I'd told more than seven people I'd be at Tuesday's dance, so it became pretty necessary to follow through and show up. I'd only told three that I'd be there the week before; that meant I had some 'splainin' to do, since having a dysfunctional half a face, besides the drugs, kept me off the floor last week.

I arrived, and barely got a chance to talk. The girls I met at Super Saturday stomped up to me and promptly bled dances from me, not even giving me a chance to empty my man-purse pockets into Damian's jacket. Two dances later, others had spotted me, and soon I had done five sequential songs, without a growingly-needed sip of water and waking my legs up from weeks of sitting in front of computers (the biking didn't help). I got to sit for half a song before someone else asked me to dance again.

Damn, but it does feel good to be missed.

My etiquette may have degraded since the last time I had been on the floor. Before, I had the good sense to not do too many turns with someone who was out there for her first night. However, a girl from SOGO who I think has a marvelous sense of humor was there, dressed formally for a going-away party for one of her graduating friends (from NTHS), so I just had hell with her. She didn't even know what I was doing when I started the dance out in closed position ("Ok, Alex, I don't even know what the hell this is, how'm I supposed to do any good" (loose quote)? "Just count in six and you'll be fine" was my sure-wasn't-comforting response). Probably scared a little bejesus out of her. But, she showed that great sense of humor and laughed the whole time, so I think it went well. Hell, everyone was laughing last night, and I had good grins all over my face.

I even tricked some newbies into doing a Lindy basic. I know their feet didn't have much of an idea of what to do, but their torsos and centers of mass had exactly the right idea.

It was a good night for the Lindy Hop.

Forgot Somethin'

In these two weeks of trying to write this paper, I just realized I hadn't ever written an outline. That's why the bastard has been so hard to finish.

I blame this on a furtive lack of blogging. It has left me out of practice in writing. Unfortunately, there's little time for practice now, as the paper must be submitted tomorrow. But, an outline's been done, and now I can get to work on the blasted thing.

It can't be stressed enough, the element of steady practice. I'm thinking about copying David with his weekly logs. But, decisions later, paper now.

Journal of One With Less Wisdom…

…teeth. Got'em all out last Tuesday. I've started taking advantage of OS X's Stickies, and kept a running journal.

An aside: Stickies does far better than Windows Notepad at just jotting down random thoughts, but as per the real product they emulate, they can inevitably lead to a, pardon the pun, sticky mess (see right for graphic detail).

Back to topic, this is a brief recap. of my at-first wonderfully drugged days with four less teeth.

1400:
my lower lip feels like this large mass of detached flesh. Some pain's starting to trickle in; may lead to many four-lettered words later. I seem to still be tasting blood in the mouth, but I sort of expected that.

1945:
Aaron and Cassie said they'd swing by and pick me up. The Novocain has worn off slightly; I'm starting to feel temperature again in my lower lip, but it's still mostly numb between there and my chin. I've had my second round of pain medication, which has probably made me drowsy. Well, the little marathon of Star Trek (TNG) I've had going since the appointment probably added to the drowsiness.

Didn't take pain medications; I wasn't in pain when I awoke this morning, so I didn't subject myself to any further dependence-building on those pills. I did take the antibiotic. Something I should've been doing since early on was the saltwater treatment for the wounds and the application of ice to my cheeks. Missing the former results in poor oral hygiene, while missing the latter has lead, to, well, this.

The swelling in the cheeks is bad enough that now I can't close my bite without letting the cheeks slowly settle in an accommodating position. To contrast how bad this is compared to normal, here's the side-by-side:

Monday night	Thursday night

The video games were fun last night, though I was fairly conked out by about 12:30, probably from the narcotics. I've felt much less sleepy today since deciding to not take the pain medications. As an added bonus, I'll be able to drive myself about tomorrow, including to the lunch Oli wanted to have with some of the SPSCC Jitterbugs from a few years ago.

The downside to the lunch: About noon tomorrow (my my, lunch time) is the expected peak of the swelling of my face. And I think I'm still feeling it get bigger. It took me ever so slightly longer to realize that the bigger face looking back at me in the mirror this morning was me. Kinda creepy.

The lunch actually went quite well, mainly thanks to me taking the opportunity to discover bubble tea instead of eat soup. Those tapioca balls are fun, up until they get frozen from being consumed too slowly. I assume there's warm bubble tea in existence, so freezing tapioca pearls wouldn't be a problem...must ask Katie.

Little change in the face. Significant change in speech, which has degraded to archetypically-tubby-kid's lisp. I won't be recording that one for hindsight, no siree.

Breakfast: After a cup of yogurt, my mom came home with a tub of soup. My ingestability (pardon the coinage) graduated to chicken noodle soup, with chicken and noodles.

Finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which has had a few side effects. One, I've accomplished half of my reading goals for the vacation. Two, feeling damned happy with myself for reading a (horrendously exciting) novel in three days. Three, not feeling quite so good about having put off the Java paper even further, but oh well, concentration doesn't come easily with cheeks that don't easily permit the bite to close completely.

Unfortunately, I discovered on one of my afternoon-snack waffles that I still can't eat regular foods, and one of my surgical sites feels a bit crummier than it probably should be. My cheeks and gums still require recovery. This means that the celebratory graduation dinner my family was planning to have tomorrow night won't happen for another week; it'd be awfully silly to hold a dinner in my honor, and just have me suckle soup the whole time. In any case, I should actually be graduated before I have that dinner - which entails bearing down and writing that blasted paper. With the fourth Potter book finished, I'm off.

My cheeks are deflating! Huzzah! Though, there was no hissing sound or popping, flapping, or sputtering. It's just easier for me to close my mouth now, and I can smile (open-lipped) a bit bigger.

Some of my stitching is coming out. It came out the top left early on, but that sector's givin' me no problems; currently coming out of the top right. It gives my tongue something to play with, just hanging out of my (former) tooth spot. Mmm, dangly parts…

…

Kinda gross. No less gross that Fools Play tonight, though. Ho man. The show overall was great; three songs, a magnificent chunk-scripted end scene (something like 30 suggestion cards ran through in that one scene), and Chris came back after his operation. Great times. However, there's only one scene that I'm sure anybody will remember from the night.

There's a solid structure of The Invisible Man (let's say TIM) scenes that I adore. (I expect Leah's going to skip the rest of this paragraph.) First, spymaster gets randied by TIM. Then, TIM's target is silently dispatched after doing something horrible; dispatch by some greatly raunchy death, usually, er...choking. Then, the spymaster gets the successful report, with tawdry bonus for TIM. Neat. But never clean.

And tonight's TIM scene: Mmm. Dead hooker & dangly parts. I'm so glad Geoff's shameless.

Cheeks are about down to normal, but the bottom surgical sites are aching. Harumph harumph. Still can't eat normally. Found that Quizno's chicken noodle soup isn't bad, but is quite salty.

This journal's probably long enough. To the web it goes.

Post Graduation, Pre Being-Graduate

Graduation went well. Our speaker, Derrick Jensen, was wonderful, and I bought a commencement DVD specifically to hear his speech again. As for interesting walkers: 2 tigers, one in a full jumpsuit with ears and tail, blazing orange; 2 pirates, one with a 3-point hat which looked really good; one cap that had a miniature garden and even fence; moss atop and covering all MES candidates' caps; one graduating Dachsund; and apparently three bare asses, but I was in line to have my name read when those were flashed, so I didn't get to see. I have pictures of most of what I just listed; no moss or ass. I'll post those later.

Though I've been through the ceremony, I've not graduated yet. The day before my evaluation conference, I asked my professor how I should evaluate my neural net, and she told me a five page paper should suffice.

…Though my face did not show it, I quickly thought it: Fuh-huuuuuuuck…

She told me her evaluations aren't due until the 24th. I intend to get the work done by the 17th, because I fully intend to have a vacation that lasts more than 4 days before I start full-time work. I have a lot of journal entries to catch up on (mostly, but not exhaustively, listed).

I at least have a little comfor in knowing that five other people couldn't finish their work by the eval. time, either. Goes to show, the Computability program's workload is pretty high up there.

But I've been on vacation for a few days, anyway. Friday night, after graduation, I played in my teacher's all-student recital, played fairly well. I joined Aaron, Cassie, and Katie after that and proceeded to hear Something Completely Different. Powercastle (where Aaron's brother Brian plays bass) got back together, and played a set for something like two hours. The show was in a venue about the size of a 3-car garage, and had plenty of things for the senses to contend with: Amps that went up to 11, and work lights being used to compliment strobes. At least the music (what we were hearing besides ear-splitting sounds) was pretty good: I could hear some key modulations, the guitars played great together, and the lead guitar had some awesome solos which reminded me that fingers need not be seen to be heard (so – damn – fast). Good times, though I couldn't hear myself talk at a normal volume after leaving the show. (Heck, at points I couldn't hear the drums.)

On Super Saturday: As will become the tradion, I went for Olympia-area acquaintances that I never see at other times of the year, for pretty stones (no great Tiger's Eye this year), for Klingons, and for belly dancing. I was not disappointed in any of the above this time around. The belly dancing even had swords; I'll see if I can post a picture later.

I ran into a few girls that frequent the Oly swing dance, who promptly and properly interrogated me on why I wasn't there. I told them I usually have orchestra rehearsals on that night, but that I'd be able to come Tuesday. I told the woman I was sitting next to at graduation that I'd be able to come Tuesday, too. That's three people I may have disappointed, for I forgot what else I'm doing tomorrow. Wisdom teeth are comin' out, all 4; while I'm hoping things will go smoothly enough that I'll be able to bike in the afternoon (as a gauge of good operations, not as something I'd actually do), I doubt I should be expending a ton of energy when my diet is restricted to liquids for the day. So, I accidentally fibbed to three people. Pity.

I expect, at the very least, to either blog tomorrow or to start up on Harry Potter. Here's to hopin' the pain killers don't kill me.

And on the Tenth...

I appended a journal entry to yesterday's enigmatic Family Guy quote. The short of it is, my presentation left a taste of suck in my mouth that I have yet to wash out.

Oh well. In other news, Friday! I graduate Friday! It's 1 o'clock on Red Square at the Evergreen campus. I will be deeply grateful if any of you should come, but I will also instantly forgive anybody for not coming. Here's why: There are 900 people graduating in my class, most likely 90% of them will be walking. That leads to a 3-hour ceremony. Not only that, but it also means thousands of people will be in Red Square, it'll be outdoors, probably sunny...Mmm, smell that Greener. And I have the added bonus of not being able to have a graduation party that night - maybe the next night.

I will be attending the graduation, because I won't have slept poorly and given up books, dating outside of breaks and all that other stuff that makes life good, doing the work of at least two people, for an unceremonial piece of paper. I'd like ceremony to accompany this end of a four-solid-year era. And of course, my loving parents will be in attendance to see their son earn his 5-year degree his technically-ambiguous sophomore year.

I'll mail out invites to everyone whose address I have...or, I'll bike over to houses and hand them out, since I have a really spotty address collection.

Only a weekend to go, and then I'm done with school work for the year. Hmm, better get back to it, it's looking to be a full weekend, slightly interrupted with a concert Sunday night. By the way, if anybody's interested: Haydn's Creation, 7:00 at the Washington Center, performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra and Opera Pacifica Chorus with soloist singers. The baritone and soprano heard at the end are so sweet-sounding. Single tickets are $15, $10 students, full details at OCO's website.

Three more days.

Friday the Thirteenthd

"Peter, the party starts in half an hour. If you're going to pull something out of your ass, I suggest you stand up."

11:50 PM For the past few weeks, I've been writing the Java neural net (now dubbed ooann, class documentation here). It has come out to three craploads of Java, to be precise: Define a crapload to be 1000 lines of code or documentation. Other people in the Connectionism class who wrote nets did theirs in Python, or C++, and just made their nets based on matrix operations, which is much more efficient (computationally) than what I did. Their programs came to about a single crapload apiece. As I was afraid would happen, the basic demo programs that were to show the classes worked, didn't. My back propagation program flopped with an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundException whose origin eludes me to this hour. My BAM demo, however, finally worke, and showed a BAM getting trained successfully. The problems: (1) The net didn't actually run on any inputs, showing its awesome memorization capability, it just trained. (2) My presentation was slated for 1100 Friday, and when I got the last bug beaten out of BAM, it was 0130 Friday. Noooo presentation was prepped; I had realized this 45 minutes earlier, and thus posted that all-time favorite Family Guy quote. Two hours of pacing and 1-sentence-per-idea "Speech composition" later, I was fried. I decided to go to bed, with the option of getting 4 hours of sleep and more speech composition time, or 7 hours of sleep and walking in and winging it. I set the alarm dutifully for 7, but forgot to turn the CD player on. So, at 10:11, I opened my eyes. I swore loud enough to wake up Sherri. Time to stand up. My presentation was crap-tacular. I have an impressive amount of code, that's pretty likely to see further use when I finally get a JSP front end onto it. I just wish I could've had time to have working code and time to prep a presentation, but oh well. I still have my paper to write about the whole experience, so the project ain't done until Monday. This wasn't the greatest way to end the Undergrad. years. Oh well, I'll just have to write a good paper and present it at PNWSUG this fall. I've gotta kick some ass at speaking, after all.