Wednesday/Thursday – Day 97/98
November 12, 2012
Today was back to the usual grind and it was harder than usual after such a long break! The work suddenly piled up again, with assignments coming in from all fronts. To top it off, by this point I was low on sleep, and had been trying to spend as much time with Dad as possible. I barely scraped through my classes today, thoroughly distracted and on my phone for much of them. I only barely made it through the goodbye, and this further stole away my focus.
The evening brought another onslaught of rehearsal and the announcement that the show had been postponed till Friday to allow us time to prepare and tech the show, which despite the hurricane, was coming together quite well. In addition, we were to add a matinee show to our offerings, and hope that the theater would fill up despite the late announcement.
Another part of my day was walk-shifting on Locust Walk, handing out flyers with such slogans as “You think my accent is awesome? Not as awesome as the Penn Glee Club Fall Show” and “Kiss me kangaroo and pickle me ginger – this is something mate, that you don’t want to miss”. Exploiting my accent turned out to be highly profitable and I managed to turn over one hundred flyers in thirty minutes. A record.
Rehearsal tonight ran again very late, with more chances to get close to everyone and enjoy the music and dance. Vanessa Lam, our stage manager and a wonderful, short, Canadian girl was having a hard time keep it all together as madness converged on the theatre, setting us all on edge.
Again, another late night of work followed and very little sleep.
Thursday was much the same, but by this point hell week was really starting to hit me. Physics and Operating Systems, my two harder classes, we both today, and I almost slept right through them. I pushed through some of my remaining work due Friday and slept an hour during the day before again, hitting the rehearsal block at 6. With Dad gone, rehearsals were even harder as I had no good excuse to take me away from the action (not that I so much regretted it). Our performance was improving radically and some of our songs were really getting to the point of excellence. Even our few dance numbers combined with Penn Dance had reached an acceptable level of performance.
Finally, at 1:03, I returned to my room, talked deliriously to Mum and Esther, a close friend back home, and got to sleep around 3:30.
Sunday – Day 93
October 31, 2012
Hurricane Sandy is coming! Bolt down the windows and door, keep your children close! This morning also marked the start of PGC hell week and boy was it going to be a whole lot of hell.
I arose early to get a little work down before a lovely breakfast with Dad at ten thirty. Unfortunately it was then we discovered that his flights had been cancelled and together we spent the next two hours trying to get hold of someone at the airlines with the ability to get him from Philly to San Diego in the next three days. At 1PM I had to run to load-in (set up for a show) at the Iron Gate theatre and worked my butt off till 5:05 when we had a forty five minute break. Yup. A long rehearsal. I arrived back at the hotel room to find two things: first, classes at Penn had been cancelled for the next two days and, Dad was no closer to finding a flight out of the city. I grabbed a quick dinner downstairs with him and at 6PM returned to the theater.
A few hours in we were informed that the theatre would be closed for the next two days, thus denying us the 6-12 rehearsal that were planned for every day of the week and that as a result, we would be cancelling our Thursday performance debut! In addition, to compensate for the lost rehearsal tonight ran till one AM. That’s a whopping 13hr rehearsal!
After that I most surely went to sleep pretty promptly.
Wednesday/Thursday – Day 82/83
October 21, 2012
Today was yet more stress! I had a large programming assignment due for algorithms that I hadn’t yet started! As a result today was a flurry of activity for me. The lecture in the morning was nothing special but until my Ruby on Rails class I worked hard on the project, barely even stopping for lunch at Hillel.
My Ruby class has also improved significantly, largely due to the fact that I have recently put in a good few hours in to learning the first few weeks worth of material that I had only skimmed over previously and now understood it much better.
Evening was a rehearsal again, PGC as per usual, with dancing and the band. Fun as per always,
Following rehearsal I grabbed my laptop and walked over to the engineering quad, where a number of the TAs (teaching assistants) and students were busy on the assignment. To give a brief overview, the task was to write our own implementation of a stack in Java using two queues and then write an Infix to Postfix converter and Postfix calculator using the stack class we had made. At the end were a few analysis questions that also needed to be completed just to ensure we actually understood the task we were completing.
At about 9:23 I received a message from Charlie McClelland, one of my favorite oldmen from PGC whom I was meant to be interviewing this evening. We ended up rushing over to an Indian restaurant, Sitar, to catch a meal before it closed at 10PM. Our meal was delicious and the conversation excellent, though he had the sportsmanship I lacked ( being a past member of the Penn track team). However Sitar was soon to close and our meal was forced to end. Thankfully we didn’t end there, running by the Harnwell Starbucks to find a place to sit. It was all taken up by students busily finishing off the remainders of their work before fall break so we retired to my suite where we shared a little wine and chatted, discussing Australia amongst other things for a few hours. So far this was my favorite interview experience.
Thursday was my day to do errands, the shopping, various forms, the bank and a few other miscellaneous items. Physics was hard as per usual, though I followed along relatively well today. Operating systems was nothing special, as per usual I slept a little, keeping awake just enough to follow along. However, today I received excellent results from several assignments and so was in a dapper state all afternoon.
After a few hours of working in the evening, I received a message from Molly Hutt, a PGC alumna, inviting me out to check out a few bars in center city. So overjoyed to have received an invitation to go out and one that coincided with a downturn in my workload, I immediately replied in the affirmative, dressed myself and, set out to meet her and Patrick, another newman, to adventure in the city.
At the first bar we visited, the atmosphere was not so exciting, the crowd was too dressy and unfriendly and the only redeeming feature was the five dollar champagne. After a creepy guy invaded Molly’s space, we finished our drinks quickly and headed out to explore further.
The next place we found was a bar called Barbuzzo, which was a bit of a dark venue had an inviting feel to it, lively, with a great looking bar and well set tables. The bartender was excellent and the specials menu was terrific too. Patrick went for a pilsner, Molly a wine and I the sangria, all of which were fantastic. A pizza that was shared received top marks as well and the service was great. Highly recommended and we all said we would go back there.
Our final stop for the evening was the dog bar with pictures of puppies on the walls. The place was filled with an older crowd this time and we sat in our own booth discussing life while Patrick sipped yet another beer, Molly a wine, and I some Jacob’s Creek. Good to drink the taste of home.
Thoroughly tired from our night out we all walked back to Penn together before heading to our respective rooms and dropping to the floor.