Got back, slightly muddy and grassy, from a sparsely-attended Saturday morning practice (nearly everybody's in a freshman dorm, being either a frosh or on staff, and off on some ski trip or another) to find Rob Jack finishing up his kitchen clean shift and up for a little bit of throwing on our lawn. At one point, the disc landed in the brush by the van, and to retrieve it, we had to reach over the big plastic doohickeys, welded tubing, and box of springs that'd been sitting in the rain since September. I'd found it on su.market over the summer and brought it to Syn when school started, but sI'm not really sure why I'd never gotten my act together enough to round up a gang to assemble it. At nearly the same instant, we turned to each other and decided: Let's put it together!

The whole shebang went much more quickly than we'd feared: twenty minutes, tops, between the two of us and a few minutes of brute hand strength from harpist/EA Nick. Summation of the past 36 hours: approximately 16 of them were spent assembling, moving, reading, sleeping, bouncing, or watching the great big sky change from flat dawn grey to spotty golden clouds to clear midmorning blue on the big old trrrrampoline in our yard. Whee! Daisy was made fun of this morning for eating her bowl of millet flakes so darn slowly. A backhandeded insult, really, because it was decided that she did so because she was so interesting... whereupon she promptly stood up and started bouncing exuberantly around, shouting, "Eeentresteeing! Eeentresteeing! I'm eeentresteeing!"

Between trampoline time, I've been doing reading for classes. Only two of 'em—Phil80 and CEE45Q—have really gotten underway, and the readings for both classes are so starkly different. By the numbers, it took me two hours to get through twelve pages of philosophy and just around an hour for the 3/4-inch-high stack of stuff for the seminar, largely clocked during the two white papers. Most of the rest is business school-type reading (it is, after all, modeled after a startup, if one whose agenda is primarily social), which is kinda odd. In the same way that I distrust psychologists (yeah, I know, analyze that...) I have a deep distrust of those amorphous terms "team rapport," "management techniques," and "brainstorming" codified on paper, which means I have an almost-as-deep distrust of those readings.

Earlier this evening, though, I spoke on the phone with a returned Peace Corps volunteer who worked with photovoltaics in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the early '90's. It was incredible how vividly he remembered lifestyle details and potential concerns of the folk in such a conceptually remote place, and I'm really excited about turning such clearly-articulated needs into an actual product and plan for deployment to fulfill them.

Also, my CS103 packets make me laugh.

Molly & I just decided that we detest cute example names: when her biology problem sets have fruit flies named after the TAs and my CS exams have variable names of Care Bears, however torturous said problem sets and midterms might be, we feel societally coerced into not being mad at freakin' Care Bears.

Just dismantled our weekend toy until next Friday afternoon to avoid the wrath of the facilities folk. Though, sadly, it marks the end of this bouncy era, the speed at which which Rojo and I were able to pick up two other folks to help us, and the cheer and goodwill with which the whole operation was done, made it the most heart-cockles-warming part.