Picnic and Nationals Game
Last Friday went great - a truly fun-filled day. John had to skip our team meeting cause he was working on a presentation to the department, so Kristy, Michelle, Konstantin, and I filled each other in on what we were doing. We ended up attending his presentation (joined by Jeremy), which was certainly related to our project. Another faculty member did a presentation on her topic, which was studying injection effects of interference into multi-layer boards. She created a lot of really great MATLAB simulations and animations showing how interference injected into a board can ripple through the various layers. We left at 1pm to go to teh picnic, and arrived when it was already going on. They had a full University catered food table, and the quality was pretty good. I had a veggie burger while others chowed down on burgers and hot dogs. Much to our delight, they had frisbees there. We started throwing a frisbee around and soon got a crowd going for a game of Ultimate. John our professor even came by and was throwing the football around and playing Ultimate with us. He brought a soccer ball so after a short break we went out a played a game of soccer. It started winding down at around 4:30 or so we took Dan’s car back to the apartments. I realized en route I forgot my cell phone so I headed back to the grounds but it wasn’t there; no worries — someone brought it back to the apartments.
Matt mentioned a Nationals-Phillies game tonight that he and Mark (Who is from Philadelphia) were going to. I joined them and at around 6pm we walked over to the Metro station. Konstantin and Tal also came along. We were going to meet Mark’s high school buddy who is working this summer at the NRC in DC there. As we came out of the Metro at RFK, it was pouring down rain. We walked in the rain and Mark’s friend was waiting for us with the tickets at the stadium. They were just $7 each.
RFK isn’t as nice as Camden Yards, because it’s a temporary baseball stadium that used to be where the Redskins play. They had a tarp over the field and we had to wait over 1.5 hours until they finally got the game started. I joined Mark and his buddy in rooting for the Phillies while Matt, Konstantin, and Tal rooted for the Nationals. It was probably less than half-filled, probably due to the World Cup starting and the rain. I thought the Nationals Mascot, Screech the Eagle, was adorable.
He was incredibly fat for an eagle, and kept dancing around. There was also an Indian family there, with their grandmother in a sari. Bizarre. Some high school choir group sang the National Anthem and they ended up sitting directly in front of us. The Nationals broke out during the middle of the game but then the Phillies hammered them in the 8th to tie the game. The game went into extra innings, and it wasn’t until the bottom of the 12th when the Nationals finally scored. It was a really really close play too. Runners on 1st and 2nd, and a base hit to right field. The fielder got it and hurled it to the plate, but the runner was just half a second too fast and he made it safe.
I was already tired before heading to the baseball game, and we didn’t get back home until nearly 1pm or so. But nonetheless, it was a really fun time.
Today we had the two single rooms in the apartment fill up, and two unique additions they are. One is another Ross, from UMD-Baltimore County and the other is Michael from NC State. When he came in I swore I recognized him, and it wasn’t until we introduced each other that we realized that we had dinner once when I joined Greg and Ben for a crew-dinner at Fountain Dining hall. Michael was a coxswain for the NCSU Crew team for a while. Both are physics students doing a summer internship for the NASA Goddard Research Institute.
It’s a nice day outside and I bought a Frisbee, so I’m going to go break it in.
