Friday/Shabbat – 148/149

December 25, 2012

Friday I took it pretty easy, deciding that this was time for me to take my well deserved holiday. Montreal being in a French province (Quebec) actually had excellent food. Thus Leo and I went out to the supermarket today so that we would have ingredients to use in preparing lunch and Shabbat dinner. As Leo is vegetarian/vegan the selection was very eco-friendly and lunch was Tofurky baguette with Brie and assorted veggies (including plenty of avocado). Dinner was prepared pasta with a yummy Tomato sauce.

Other than that both days were spent chilling and reading as the snow pounded outside and made it hard to leave the house.Pizza was ordered in Motzei Shabbat and I read most of a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. Pretty decent.

Also, Montreal is freezing. -15 degrees!

Sunday/Monday – Day 108/109

November 19, 2012

I honestly am trying to get back up to date so that my posts aren’t so anachronistic but with all the excitement at Penn, combined with the intense workload, I’m not sure how soon I’ll get there!

I wish I could’ve slept in today, but it just wasn’t possible, with a giant four person group project due. I had to build my own Operating System for Operating Systems (CIS380) and boy was it time-consuming. However, it was incredibly enjoyable, up to the point where some group members didn’t manage to pull their weight entirely (though this came later).  I was up at 9AM meeting in my neighbors room to hack away at the project and managed to make a good amount of progress. This continued for a good number of hours. In fact, I managed to lose most of the day to it! The rest of the afternoon was uninteresting as I assembled various parts of other assignments into submittable work. Including plenty of hard work on physics.

Monday was slightly more successful as by now I’d had a little extra sleep. Finally a little recovery. Algorithms today was a breeze, given by a guest lecturer who didn’t exactly speak passable English. After that it was off to work again, this week I spent much of my spare time coding up the ‘scheduler’ for the ‘kernel’ of the operating system. I was pleased in the evening to finally get back to regular Glee rehearsals but to my disappointment, much of the rest of semester would be focused on holiday music, specifically carols. And, whilst I don’t mind the odd carol, learning twenty of them and singing them over and over doesn’t really fit what I really want to be doing. Also being Jewish, a few of them have lyrics that are a little awkward to sing, along the lines of “the king over Jews is born!”.

After rehearsal, it was the usual back to my room punctuated with a Glee interview (and for the life of me I can’t remember who I interviewed then, though I feel very guilty about it). Then it was to work for the usual, and the usual late night before sleep. Some of my life needs to be a little less exciting. Good for contrast.

© 2012-2024 Shaanan Cohney