Rush!

I'm sorry it’s been so long...I hope that I can get you caught up quickly, but due to the fact that it has been so long and I don’t want to do one 35 page post (over exaggeration...I hope) I will be doing several posts over this weekend (maybe this week, but I hope I get them done quickly).

Summer was great. I was home. Worked at a dentist office and had a lot of fun. Went out to Utah with my parents and Aunt Annie for the “Power” family reunion (although the 4 of us were the only Powers there)...I don’t think that there’s really anything more that needs to be said about this summer. You guys where there (ok, most of you that I know read this were there). :)

I came back to school in the middle of august so that I could help out with dorm rush. For those of you who don’t know what dorm rush is, we get to pick our dorms here at MIT. So the dorms do a lot of stuff to let the incoming freshmen know what their dorm is all about and attract the freshmen that will fit in best with their community. Personally, I think our dorm takes it as an excuse to build really cool stuff! But it’s all good, that just makes it more fun for us! This year we had a lot of really cool things in the courtyard (area between our two buildings [aka. Parallels]). There were three main big projects: a lazy river, a waterslide, and a giant swing that spanned the two parallels. The lazy river was pretty interesting, it was only about a foot and a half deep and it kinda twisted around the furniture coliseum (a circle of old furniture that we did things in the middle of--like spaghetti wrestling). It was really neat, but no one really went in it because you had to get wet and the weather was a little on the cold and rainy side, but oh well, it was fun to build. The waterslide was pretty awesome though, it twisted around a tree and was something like 18 feet tall (see pic below). It was a lot of fun! One of those things where you ride it once and can’t resist to ride it again and again and again. It was also a lot of fun to build because we didn’t have anything more than a basic plan, so we basically kinda got it the way we wanted it to look and added supports to it as we went along where they looked like they should go. It was interesting, but still quite safe (and I'm not just saying that because my parents reading this, it really was safe!). The last of the big projects was a giant swing that spanned the two parallels...I spent a lot of time working on this because a couple of my friends from the floor below me designed it. There were only about four of us that actually spent a lot of time on it, although there was a handful of other 3rd east-ers that help out here and there. Anyway, the four of us spent a lot of time trying to get the thing hug up. It was made out of really big cable (I think that it was gauged to hold something like 2000 lb, I'm not sure, all I know is that it was some obscene weight) that was strung straight across the courtyard between the kitchens of the fifth floors--two of them, one just for redundancy. Then there were 3 cables hanging down (off center so that the people didn’t run into anything)--one of these also being a redundancy wire with a shock absorber, just in case. It was really cool! In order to swing, you got strapped into a climbing harness that was then attached to the three cables after that you were pulled up to about the third or fourth floor using a smaller cable running through a pulley attached to an additional cable that was also strung between the two parallels. (I hope all that made sense) It was so much fun!! Awesome. I was the fourth person to ride it (having spent so much time working on it) and also the last (only about six people rode it more than once). *Mom, Annie, you would’ve LOVED it!!*

***There are pictures if you would like to see them, however I'm not sure how long they will be up on this public directory because I may run out of space.

In addition to helping out with rush I got myself kinda settled into my new room and started painting (got most of it done too...I wish I could finish it up faster though...and I will post pictures when I get it finished up).