Shabbat – Day 193
February 17, 2013
This was my calm before the storm. The day was spent relaxing and preparing mentally for what was to be an intense and almost insane week. Lunch and dinner with Ariella, Aviva, Michal and co. was a good was to prep myself, but it was over too soon. After dark, I rushed to finish what work I could in the remaining hours and for once, caught an early night, knowing I’d struggle to get much sleep at all the next week.
Thursday/Friday – Day 191/192
February 11, 2013
Today was the last physics lecture before our first midterm. Terrifying. After lunch I tried to study, I really did, but sleep overtook me and I ended up taking a four hour nap, waking only at around 6PM at which point I headed over to Hillel for dinner. Thankfully, now I was a bit better rested and this made me more productive later in the evening.
I had a brief team meeting with Charu to discuss our networking homework (which I had already completed most of) and then set to work finishing up a few little things with it.
Friday was spent working on revision for my midterms, both physics and security, and catching up a little more on all the missed sleep. In the afternoon we had our staff meeting, which went relatively well though there were definitely a few rocky moments. Teaching in an academic environment is harder than I thought. Though I’m used to teaching in an informal setting, the requriement of communicating more content places restrictions around the use of more creative educational media. TA training was fun-ish but mainly useless as always and I had to run out a little early. Friday night I led services (ma’ariv) at Shira Chadasha and it felt good to get back in the rhythm a little. It went fairly well, but I needed a bit more beef on me to prevent it from being too draining. Afterwards, the usual dinner with Ariella, Aviva and Michal made it a lovely evening, and when I finally got back to my room I was well ready for sleep.
Superbowl – Shabbat/Sunday – Day 186/187
February 4, 2013
Shabbat was fairly stock standard for me, sleep in till late, trying desperately to catch up on a missed week worth of sleep. In the evening I worked with Charu on some code for networking and managed to complete my assignment, which was great. Then moved on to dinner with Shadia Al Shafei, a Saudi friend of mine from computer science. Pasta in my apartment tasted better than expected and we hung around for a while chatting, eating pistachios and strawberries. I again worked late into the night.
Sunday (wow, I’m writing about today for once), was a combination of work and fun. The morning was spent on physics until Charu came by and pointed out a bug in my code (for which I was most grateful) and she hung around till around 2PM. From there I raced to the Rose Recital Hall for the final violin recital of a good friend Amalya Lehmann. She performed beautifully and managed the difficult and demanding Kreutzer sonata, (by Beethoven). She was so wonderful that the audience threw multiple roses at her by the end! After that I was late to PGC rehearsal and burst in just as I was meant to have a solo (didn’t end well) and stayed there for a good two hours doing an initial run through of our show.
Next up in the day plan was the Superbowl! For those of you who don’t know the Superbowl is the equivalent of the NFL (US Football League) ‘grand final’, and is watched live by many millions. First stop on my party tour was Hillel where they were eating ‘dougie’s’ for dinner, an apparently famous NYC kosher restaurant. I wasn’t so impressed. Next up on the list was the exchange student party where I engaged in spirited political debate with a somewhat drunken Sam Murray of Australia. I watched the half time Beyonce spectacular (really was pretty spectacular) and then went off to the ‘Glouse’ to chill with Glee for a bit. However, due to my outspoken nature I ended up in another political debate and with another new friend Lainie Huston.
My night however was not over! From ten onwards I worked with Pulak Mittal (a veritable celebrity in the computer science department) the head TA of my algorithms course and, with Grace Wang, another co-ta. Together we assembled parts of homework four and at just after midnight I came back to my room to write and hopefully (soon) to sleep.