Nick’s Blog

The past two days have been pretty good (no post yesterday, camp internet was down, and I was probably sleeping anyways.)

Yesterday was a bit of a bummer because there was fog in the morning that prevented us from rowing boats. Instead of rowing, we did a very miserable jog. Forgive me for my complaints. I just prefer rowing to running. The other two practices went well, although my this time in the week, I’m exhausted. It feels like every movement hurts, and between the pulled muscles, the innumerable blisters and the flaming sunburn, my body feels like it has been betrayed.

Today, we had fog problems again, so had a nice calisthenic workout. It was actually fun becuase instead of jogging, we did some fun little relays. Good workout and it was not of the mundane nature of jogging. After that and a quick breakfast, we had our only slow day! Its kinda a team tradition to go to Charleston, SC for the day on the Tuesday of spring break, so thats what we did. We ate crap food, explored the city on food, saw the ocean and all around relaxed. Those activities combined with some time in massage chairs in Brookstone made some of the body pain subside, but I’m sure it will be back in full force tomorrow.

Hope everyone up in PA is doing well, again I plan on returning Friday night around midnight, so I’ll be functioning by Saturday.

Wow, very long day for me. Today consisted of three on-the-water practices, each with their own challenges and payoffs. This morning was really exciting because for the first time, I got to row in a varsity boat with varsity people, and the difference was remarkable. When we practice as novice, a lot of our energy and time goes to fixing little fundamental things like keeping the boat level, etc, so when you are in a boat with more experienced people, you get a better, more fluid practice. Definitely a good thing…

Mid-morning practice was a more challenging workout. I got put in a 4 with the three other strongest kids on our team (varsity included), so we were a beastly heavy weight boat. After we go used to each others rhythm, things went very well. We did 4 tricky 15-minute races.

The last workout was a little lame, because it was all novice drills, but I guess those are important to, so I can’t complain. This evening was low key. There was a camp-wide dodgeball tournament, and sure enough, CMU got beat by a group of high school girls, ha ha. Tonight, a bunch of varsity kids buzzed their hair in spring break tradition, so I followed suit. Attached in this post is a picture, yea, I know, I’m sexy, don’t have to tell me!

I should be able to find time to post and update tomorrow. Have a good day sitting on your butt while I’m rowing for hours.

Hey everybody. Thought I should give a status report of my Camp Bob Cooper rowing experience. Yesterday, we left at about 3:30am and drove the better part of the day. We got in to camp at about 3:00pm after a short Wal-Mart trip and some food stops. We spent last night pretty low key. We rigged the boats and got them ready to row, which took several hours, and then after that we had our first Camp Bob Cooper dining experience. Not terrible for cafeteria style cuisine. Played some low-aerobic sports and then went to bed.

Today, we intended on getting three good water practices in, but the first one didn’t go very well because of terrible wind gusts, so we decided to not risk damaging ourselves or the boats and did not have any more water practices today, so instead, we did 40 minutes of body circuits, ran for maybe an hour, and played some low-impact games (non-tackle football, soccer, etc.).

It must be PA week down here, because by chance, Penn State, Pitt and Robert Morris have showed up at the camp for this week. Funny to travel hundreds of miles and have your next door neighbor move in next to you, eh?

Finger is hurting, but I am doing alright I guess. It’s only the first day, which has been really easy, and I’m already exhausted and destroyed, which makes the coming hard practices worry me a little. Still, I guess I’m in high spirits. Kinda regretting not having a relaxing spring break, but I would have regretted sitting on my but more. Don’t really have time to use the internet lounge that often, so I’ll report back when next convenient.

Well, another way to systematically destroy an engineer is to force him to cram for a test in dynamic systems and control. Here it is after 1am and I’ve been studying all day for a test that I still feel rather unprepared for. Still, I feel compelled to comment that the only thing between be and the sweet release of spring break at camp bob cooper is Wednesday.

I’m actually in pretty high spirits, as my RedRover project turned out very well, and this new laptop has given me nothing but content since I deleted every trace of Windows Vista from it’s bowels.

I did find out some very depressing news today though. I haven’t had a good complain-about-Carnegie-Mellon moment in a while, so I feel the need to comment about my disgust upon hearing that our spring carnival musical performer is none other than Sisqo. Yep, thats right, the thong song guy. Way to go Carnegie Mellon. Generic 90’s hip hop, thats been sold out and stale since I’ve hit puberty, and has no musical benefits to my ears. I do not want to cram myself into our gym all excited about carnival and have to accept that I have to listen to some under-achieving musician talk over sampled loops of boring rhythms and very little real musical content. Maybe I’m over analyzing this and would be better suited to say, CMU, the thong song sucked in 2000, why bring it back in 2008?

Carnival will still be fun, even though Sisqo is a huge downer. That, and if I stay committed to semester’s goals, I’ll spend all 4 days of carnival as a stone-cold sober. I’ve kept up the semester with this goal superbly until now, but in case you don’t go to CMU, pretty much the whole idea of CMU is to get drunk and party and forget about classes for a weekend. Oh well, the sobriety is paying off and I still feel great, so maybe I’ll enjoy babysitting more.

I’m getting really pumped up for Spring Break and Camp Bob, as you would expect. The challenge for the week is just getting done everything else so I can have an academically clean mind when I’m rowing my butt of in beautiful South Carolina.

The official verdict on my hand: No apparent fracture but they could see evidence of a severe sprain on the x-ray (didn’t know you could see those on an x-ray, wooo medicine) so I have been advised not to “lift anything heavy” for a few weeks. I am not going to count rowing as lifting heavy things, ha ha. I’ve been advised to keep wearing that stupid brace I can’t wear anymore as it’s uncomfortable and even I don’t like giving the world the finger for more than a few hours. I tried to practice on the finger today and actually had to quit. It just simply is to painful to function as a rower, so I’m praying that I make some big headway by Spring Break. For those of you who ask how I injured my finger, I wish I had a better story for you; had a rough practice, hurt for a few days, got it examined and X-rayed. Thats my extravagant story. I’m going to row this break no matter what, even if it means finishing the leftover vicodin from my wisdom teeth surgery.

In other news, I am typing from my bed on my spiffy new laptop. I got it in today and spent several hours making it what I wanted. What did I want? Nothing to do with Vista. This machine came installed with Vista and it was absolutely terrible. It was disgustingly slow and ugly and a truly good investment of time to search the entire internet for XP drivers for all of my hardware. So a word to the wise, if you get a new computer, do what you can to supply it with XP, even if it means buying a copy OEM and installing it yourself.

But, thats about all the news I have for you. Keep and eye here next week, as Camp Bob has some WIFI zones and I intend to post pictures/blogs from the south.