Day 22 5/31/14 (Getting some sleep, more surveying, BROhan, skating, clubbing)

So we decided not to get up until about 11 AM and this meant I actually got around 9+ hours of sleep! I felt pretty well rested too! I had a salami and cheese sandwich and a PB&J for lunch. Shoop and I then headed to the office to print out some more no-contact slips and then headed to the Arboretum to survey some more streets like Northfield, Arboretum Road and Washington Street. We covered the region without all that much trouble. It took a good 3 hours though (and we didn’t finish all of Northfield). Part of this was because we ran out of cover letters to fill out. We did have some good information from people. Several people were really excited about the project and I was able to talk to the one woman from the ARA meeting! We even spoke to this one lady who was so excited to talk to us since she was now eligible to take our survey. Several people even shut their door in our face (including this dude in a Microsoft shirt)! We did have a good conversation with Brohan though and he gave us some tea and the one response he had gotten back too! After 3 hours we headed back to campus to eat food and get ready for later! It was only 5 so we started laundry and the darned gel pack found its way into the door pocket instead of dissolving under the clothes.  Aw well. Appears it washed okay. Dinner was good! It was lots of chicken and good pasta too! Gotta run! Peace!

Day 21 5/30/14 (Dat clubbing life style (feeling like Tyres from Spaced), morning work, robotics, surveying, free beer, pizza, going out again)

When I said I wouldn’t go out last night I thought that was the case until I got this sudden burst of energy and decided to head to Sin with the team. We got there and I had this double shot of vodka and Red Bull (not in a chugged form though), and I sipped it very slowly. I got so jacked up on energy from the caffeine that I was going solid until 3 AM. At the Sin nightclub (the first one I have ever been to) I had a blast just dancing and throwing down by myself. We even saw one of the Energize Worcester peeps there. After a while this one chick started dancing in the proximity of me and we had Sambuca (this actually tasted identical to Nyquil). After some time I had soaked through my t-shirt as I rage so hard at dancing. At like 1 AM Sin closed and we had to move over to Bushwackas (another club). The highlight of the night was hearing In Too Deep by Sum 41 at Sin. At Bushwackas we raged hard (Shoop and I) with the chicks (Emma and Gemma) from Sin. We partied there until 2:30 AM (dancing not drinking) and then went home. The best part of Bushwackas was hearing some great remixes, dancing on the highest stage/pillar box thing and Fat Lip by Sum 41. I finally got to bed at like 3:30 AM.

After waking up at 9:05 AM (we decided to start an hour later) I headed over to the office when Shoop went back to bed. I was the only person in the office from 10 to 10:45 AM, but I worked on revising the methodology and the other survey things. It went well. We worked a bit on all the writing sections before breaking and I headed to the City campus to meet with Katy. At the City Campus Katy introduced me to Colin (one of the web development and technology guys in the computing group). Colin then took me downstairs and introduced me to his two research assistants who are helping him develop the stuff for next Friday (3D printing and making some simulations). The two guys down in the basements working are named Neil and George. They even have a Replicator 2 in there! I bro-ed out with George about robotics and circuits (he is a computing major (recently graduated) but taught himself enough electronics to build a line following state machine robot based on the Atmel 328). Super chill dude. So basically the two of them are getting content ready for Friday which includes 3D printing custom hexbug-like toys. Neil is working on developing simulations of physics and robotics with the UDK environment. It was pretty cool! I also talked about electronics and WPI robotics for about an hour and a half and had to leave for surveying. I hope to chill with these dudes some more!

I met Shoop outside of Paul’s house at around 3 PM and we started more surveying. We did several more streets. We even talked to one guy who gave us some home-brewed beer! He gave both of us a bottle of it to enjoy later after the sediment settled! He is a really chill dude and wants to help with the project quite a bit. We had a decent amount of responses and people seemed generally interested in talking to us. We had some who slammed the door in our face though. Oh well. After we worked for some time we met with Nick and Stefan to get the extra surveys from them before they jetted off for the weekend. After all of this Shoop and I did some more surveying and then went to Sainsbury’s to buy a pizza for £3. I also got another one and some carrots and canned corn. We cooked the Hawaiian pizza and then headed off to the pub to meet Katy at 9. We have some cider and then some other drinks. Shoop and I then went to Velvet which was having a 80s, 90s and 00s night with three separate rooms. We danced around there, but there weren’t any young people there. We talked to some cougars who were chatting with us and raged with some old twenties peeps (so there were some peeps there) and they worked in CNC machining and tooling. It cost £6 to get into Velvet with a shot, and we left to go to Tramps (which was closed). We then went to Sin and raged for 40 minutes before leaving. The last song of the night was Don’t Stop Believing by Journey at 1 AM. After that we went back and slept. Sorta chill/good night.

Clubbing at Bushwackas at 1 AM

Home brewed!

Fruity cider at the pub with Katy

Our first survey from a person dropped at Paul's!

Day 20 5/29/14 (I regret my late night decisions, survey revisions, STARTING SURVEYING!!!, visiting a haunted house, speaking with a baked lady, nice old ladies, rather low response rates and cooking up some freezer food)

So let’s preface this with the fact I didn’t make the best choices last night. No nothing crazy like drugs, alcohol or rock n’ roll, but rather just staying up late watching videos. It really started out by playing quite a ton of Killing Floor with Tomko and Cara. We were playing this one server that had so many perks. The monsters for the map were so overpowered that some could kill us in a single hit, and we were on beginner! We played on this one Doom map and got crushed so so much. Although one time we managed to do alright and the game lagged so much as the monsters behind this one door kept spawning extra zeds (so there were like 500+ on beginner)! Anyways after playing until about 12:45 AM then I went into my room and started watching trailers. I started out watching the 22 Jump street one and then moved on to reviews of Watchdogs and A Million Ways to Die in the West. Then I watched 22 Jump street trailers more. Somehow I ended up getting into full length movies. By 2:30 AM I had watched most of Parker (with Jason Statham) and some other dopey movies. Thus, 8:05 AM came in like a wrecking ball. By 8:50 AM Shoop and I were at the office. We started working on the survey revisions. Stefan and Shoop got the labels printed out for the free post addresses. I got to Guillotine (basically use a paper cutter) to cut apart the 3 no contact slips per page. We had about 450 of them to cut and that paper cutter could do about 8 pages or 24 at a time. After about 2 hours we broke for lunch at 11 to get ready to start surveying after. I made a 3 slice of turkey and salami sandwich. It was quite good. After that I went down to the bike shed and waited for the rest of the team. We biked to the Arboretum, broke and then Shoop and I started on Little Southfield street. The first couple of houses were not all that great and we had quite a few apartments there. It was going aight, but not great. We had a couple of HMOs and this dude in a bathrobe said he would get the survey back to us. Probably not, but whatever. We even had this great chat with this elderly woman going to Bingo. She told us all about her dog and how she has an issue with drunk chicks who congregate under the street lamp outside her door. After our chat we kept walking around and talking to people. The next most interesting part of the afternoon was chatting to this older woman with a small dog named Tula. She invited us in to her home and the Pomeranian Tula was trying to lick us to death. The lady then told us of the one time she entered into her front room and she saw a man standing in overalls. She thought it was her son, but later the figure walked through the wall and disappeared. She said someone else showed her a picture of the old store owner of the house before when it was a store and it was the same figure. The old woman mentioned her son also saw the figure but it hasn’t shown itself in a long time. \ O.o /   Anyways after that we covered the rest of Southfield street until we got to an HMO right across the street from this woman. We came upon another house with quite a bit of activity in there. When we first walked up there were two dudes trying to get in and we let them pass. They somewhat invited us in but I took one step and smelled weed so I stayed outside with Shoop. A minute or two later a woman came out with her daughter. This woman was so baked. She just kept swiveling around and asking us questions about the Worcester MA and what we thought of England. She also told us she would fill out the survey and return it, but who knows on that one. She apparently did all the power for the home too, so we really hope she returns the survey. It was kind of sad how high she and the kid must be…After that we kept walking around. I would say the majority of people were not home. We also found only about 4 HMOs. One dude invited us in and it was like going back into the 70s in a Rolling Stones’ or Grateful Dead follower’s home and was in a word “dense.” After that the rest of the walking around was rather dull. We had one lady who opened the door enough to see us and say no and shut the door in our faces. Beyond that is was boring. We saw a metro cop dolling out parking tickets. After about 4:30 PM we knocked off for the day. After stopping by the pub to check in with Nick and Stefan, Shoop and I traveled back to the UW. I had started thawing out some of the meat that Marceli gave me before she left at lunch time and at 5:30 PM it was time to start cooking it up! Knowing nothing about the food and nothing about cooking steak I just dropped it in the pan to sizzle. After sizzling it until it didn’t seem pink inside I ended up with a steak and a nice piece of beef. After that I cooked up some ground beef. MAN THAT GROUND BEEF WAS LITERALLY THE BEST BEEF I’VE EVER EATEN. Wow it was so good. After that Shoop and I just chilled here and watched British tele. We saw this police interceptors show about cops driving around. There was even a motorcycle accident where a 110 defender just absorbed the hit from the bike on the front right fender. I was going to go skating, but it started dumping out right after being sunny. Aw well. TOMORROW IS FRIDAY! So stoked for some skating and the weekend! Also I will hopefully get to talk to a dude about 3D printers tomorrow! :D 

Dat turkey

Defender doing some work!

This is a Ford Transit here, so much larger!

Who knows what it is?

Mhm 'dat steak

Best hamburger ever!

Day 19 5/28/14 (Sleeping late, presentations, a lunch to rival all lunches, sitting in the back of the bus, presenting for the dude responsible for allocating 5 million pounds, feedback from Professor Ruiz, motivation…such an aggravation)

We didn’t have to be at the first conference session until 10:30 AM, so we were able to sleep in an extra hour. In my case I decided the best course of action was to play Contagion with Tomko and Cara until 1:10 AM. It was not the best decision for sleep, but definitely the best for fun. Man! I have missed playing KF and contagion with them! It was so much fun as we were all terrible at extracting survivors from the houses as zombies were pouring in. As for me personally I was running around the house with a nailgun boarding up windows. It was a blast! Anyways I had a good breakfast at 9:30 AM (cereal and two slices of bread) and then Shoop and I met Stefan and Nick and walked to the riverside arena where the event was happening today. It was a short walk and it luckily wasn’t dumping rain yet. The weather here is very British as it drizzles or rains most days, which is a huge bummer for outdoor skating as I want to go so badly…maybe I’ll skate in the dorm (like in East)…It is also maybe like mid 50s or low 60s most days so not quite the sun and beach weather like back home (or Oregon’s beautiful 70 degrees and no humidity). At any rate we arrived at the conference and found we were broken up between 3 different tables. I was at my own table with Professor Ruiz and about 4 other people unknown to me. The conference in the morning was supposed to be a mini-intro/lecture on the sustainability efforts of the University of Worcester and the new elective they have on this topic. As a random note I accidently made a double shot of tea (as I chose a tea bag and still poured in more tea). It was decently interesting and described how the elective is a mixture of lectures and group project work to emphasize the real world nature of the field. It has experienced quite a bit of success actually and the program today was designed to tell others about their success to start other programs elsewhere. Nick asked a question about direct feedback and how this had been involved in the program. I asked about where they saw the program in 5 or 10 years and how they wanted to improve it. Both of which had good answers. After the first lecture it was lunch at 12:40 PM (One ironic thing is that the main leader for the event said there were University of Minnesota students instead of WPI students there (awkward)). Lunch was actually really good. The different serving dishes of food were laid out in a buffet style with slices of cheese to quiches to couscous to salmon, potatoes and green beans to rolls to salads to ham. It was actually quite good and I ended up eating two plates of the food (the salmon was not as good as the salmon I cooked from last night). I dare say I was the only one who had two plates of food. No regrets! It means that I can eat a light dinner and save money! After food we were moved over to hang with the Energize Worcester students and had probably between 50 and 75 photos taken (seemed endless) of us by the various camera totting attendees. We were in our obnoxious orange t-shirts from the program to support them as we are only on the very front end of the extension of their original work.

After a good number of photos we met the VIP of the day, a guy named Steve E. from the higher education funding council of England (HEFCE) who made the allocation of 5 million pounds of government money to support sustainability initiatives (and awarded the Energize Worcester project over 100,000 pounds). So he was a pretty big deal. After photos and Steve we walked downstairs and piled into the same mini-bus to go to a student property to tell Steve about sustainability. Correction the Energize Worcester peeps went inside and Team CANS (us 4 from WPI) were left outside in the van. We knew this was going to happen as we already have a good idea of the student accommodations and the information the Energize folks would present. Also the home was really tiny. So we stayed outside as a team in the bus and chatted about American stuff and the project. After about 20 minutes the VIP and several others (including Professor Ruiz) came back and we vanned back to the University and went inside the Pierson building to a first floor conference room. We then proceeded to have cookies and spring water inside while Peng gave a brief overview of the Energize Worcester site and the app in the website to compare energy bills. After this it was go time. We had to present our PowerPoint on our project to the VIP, Professor Ruiz, Peng, Katy, another publicity person and another guy wearing a suit, who turned out to be the provost of students and another higher up for the university named Ryan. We had this as yesterday we had crafted our PowerPoint to include our updates on progress (EPCs and averages, leaflets, surveys, letters, council permission etc). We had practiced it twice (although it was for all intents and purposes the same as the final PowerPoint from ID2050) and we absolutely killed it today! It ran a bit longer than we wanted but we had a full half hour for that and Q&A so it didn’t matter. After we finished the presentation the VIP said it was a really professional presentation and that he was quite impressed. BAM! WPI setting the bar for presentations! (It was ironic because this morning one of the presenters had a really futzed up PowerPoint where all the text had been shifted around on the slide and the images obscured so much of it. It was scary). Anyways we fielded a whole host of questions from the VIP such as data security and smart meters, the purpose of the project, the scope of the project, future work and the like. After this Q&A we chatted a bit with both the VIP and the provost before they left with Katy and Peng. We then had a meeting with Ruiz and she really congratulated us on our presentation and answering of questions. She then dropped a bomb on us about our writing saying it was not up to the level of the rest of our project work. It is very true though. We are still working on the writing and she gave us a number of tips and sets of feedback on our survey and introduction and methodology. After such raving reviews of our work today it was kind of a buzzkill, but the feedback is only for the best so I am really happy she and Professor Shockey spend so much time with us! After this Professor Ruiz headed back to the train station and our team dispersed. Shoop went to the shops downtown and Nick and Stefan went to chill. I went back to grab a nap (after eating an obscene amount of those good cookies from the presentation room) and ended up sleeping for about an hour and a half in 30 minute increments. I’m still tired though, but I think it has to do with catching up on sleep from those incredibly late nights in the past week.  It’s also crummy weather so I don’t feel terrible about it. I haven’t had dinner yet but it will most likely be something small as lunch was huge. 

Day 18 5/27/14 (Starting the week off right!, a new recipe, more survey revisions, printing out the surveys, visiting the Worcester Cathedral and going in on Salmon)

So I actually felt like I got a good bit of sleep last night. Although it was still less than 8 hours, but I’m improving on sleeping at the very least! After a quick breakfast it was off to the office to get started. When I arrived with Shoop we were the first two there. Stefan showed up about 10 minutes later and said Nick would be showing up later (to catch up on sleep and cashing in his time from the weekend). We started working on adding the last EPCs for Sansome Walk and Landsdowne Road. While Stefan and Shoop worked on this while I worked on revising the Landlord survey. It took me quite some time to work on the survey revisions. It was all morning before I finally finished that. We then worked on getting the power point presentation for tomorrow. We added just a bit of our progress thus far; getting surveys ready and adding EPCs for each street. We added the fact we leafleted the Arboretum. Not too much after this Peng showed up and gave us a bit of feedback on the tenant survey and the powerpoint. We then broke for lunch. I went to the flat and created my new favorite sandwich: a PB&J mixed with a turkey and salami sandwich. It is quite good. Highly recommended. After lunch we worked more on the revisions of the landlord survey while the other guys did more EPCs and then we practiced the presentation again before presenting to Katy and Peng. They seemed to enjoy the powerpoint and asked for a few minor revisions. After that we got the tenant survey to Katy to print out with our maps and no contact cards (to leave if we don’t find someone at the door). Peng, Shoop, Stefan and I then went hardcore through the landlord survey to get it sorted out. We finished it much more quickly than the tenant survey (understandable as the landlord survey is much less critical). It was basically 5 PM when we were done printing out the surveys and revising our work (the copier could photocopy and staple our 6 page surveys (which given that we wanted 50 of them) cut down on the time by quite a bit. After this Shoop and I went back to the flats to grab our bikes and peace down to Worcester Cathedral to watch one of the WPI choirs performing the evening service music. Worcester Cathedral is rather massive for a small town (Cathedrals in Nicaragua were bigger!), and it was strange sitting there and listening to the music. The choir did fantastically though! It was very strange seeing so many other WPI people again in the other Worcester. I even saw Colin (one of my LCA bros) and he killed it! At any rate you are supposed to buy a photo pass to take photos in the cathedral, but I did not realize this until after I took some photos, so here I come h e double hockey sticks. I’m sorry, but I’ll buy one next time! IT really is a beautiful old church. At any rate after that I went to Sainsburys (standard almost daily activity) and bought some corn, milk, 3L of OJ, some yogurt and another loaf of the really good bread! Now I’m set until at least 10 PM tonight! Seriously though I go through a LOT of orange juice here (upwards of a liter a day on weekends). After that I hit the stationary bike hard at the gym and it hit back even harder. Man I am so out of shape for riding that sucker. Must have sweated out a good 2 L of water. After that I came back and after some planks and a shower, I rolled up my imaginary sleeves (harder than you think on a t-shirt) and got ready to cook up the salmon I was supposed to use by yesterday (I live dangerously). Anyways I marinated 4 filets in some teriyaki sauce for 5 to 10 minutes and then I just dumped sunflower oil in a wok and lay the fish slabs right in. Never cooked fish before so just rollin with it. After letting the fish cook for a solid 15+ minutes (and failing at flipping it several times) I dumped it onto a nearby plate and tried it. OH MAN! THAT WAS THE BEST SALMON I HAVE HAD IN THE PAST LIKE 6 MONTHS (I don’t think my mom cooked salmon in that time period). Seriously I liked my salmon more than the Sole’s salmon (although it was almost equal). Shoop was even surprised at how good it was. Anyways I also ate about a fifth of a jar of peanut butter and then made gnocchi and approximately 15 fussili (the spirally pasta). Shoop also cooked up some pork sausages and I swapped a salmon filet for 2 and a half. Dang I really liked cooking that salmon. Only cost me $12 for the 4 filets (-.-//////////// *silent weeping*).   

Outside the Cathedral

Just the entrance

Enter in peace!

Before things got rough

Aw yeah! 

Mhm mhm yeah yeah mhmhmhm yeah yeah! 

Day 17 5/26/14 (Sending off Marceli, revising the paper, more skating and more chicken)

Last night was helping Marceli get ready for leaving at 3:45 AM. One of the funniest times had to be taking a taxi to Storage King on the other side of the town across the river. She had several bags we piled into the taxi at around 12 AM and then drove over. Naturally the storage place was not open so we had to put in the codes to open all the gates. We even had to open the front storage door which had to be a good like 50ft tall. It was like opening Fort Knox. There were so many levels of security and codes to put in. As we walked through to find her storage locker it was like moving through Area 51. We found the locker and stored her bags and peaced out of that joint after shutting down and sealing the compound. Back at her place we had food to use up some of her extra food. At 3:45 AM she headed off in a taxi and I walked back to my place with all the junk (food, silverware, laundry stuff etc). It was a sad time since she had been my best friend I made here in 12 days. Aw well. I traded her a WPI t-shirt for her skating jacket from Brazil. It’s so awesome!!! I’m really going to miss having her around! At around 4:20 AM I finally passed out. I didn’t wake up until 12:45 PM as my alarm went off at that time. I showered and made lunch and then Shoop and I went to Pierson to work on the paper due tomorrow. We were 2 of like 4 people in the entire building. There was a dude chilling on a computer about 50 foot away that was playing music in his headphones so loudly I could hear it working at my table. After about 2 hours we had revised and fixed the methodology and the literature review. It was about 4:30 PM when we decided to break for the day. I went back and got ready to go skating. I did the same route that I normally do and then practiced skating around near the river for a good 40 minutes. I worked on grapevine and other jam moves. Not really too much going on today as it was relaxing for a Monday. I also cooked quite a bit of chicken and gnocchi. 

In Fort Knox

Mystery car 1

In the south of Worcester

Almost a Motolita wheel!

Newly weds?

I'll take it!

Corn, gnocchi and chicken!

Day 16 5/25/14 (Finally some good sleep!, leaflet bombing the Arboretum, skating!!!!!, last day with Marceli)

So I had told Shoop I didn’t really want to get up before about 1 for lunch as it was about 2:40 AM when I left the party. Anyways so after I woke up (I felt so well rested today!!!!) and showered, I went to make lunch. Shoop eventually came up and we talked through covering the Arboretum with the metric futz-ton of leaflets he and I folded yesterday. For lunch he and I demolished the huge plate of pasta I had accumulated from the last few days. We texted Stefan and Nick to get them to help us as we didn’t want to cover the whole area ourselves. Luckily they responded today! So we met them downstairs and biked over to the Arboretum. I had to carry the box of leaflets on my handlebars the entire way without issue. Once we got there, we divided up the streets and divvied up the goods. We then hit the streets to slip the papers through the slots! I covered my area pretty quickly and had basically run out of leaflets by the time I met up with Stefan, Nick and Shoop. One of the interesting encounters I had while leafleting the houses was on Lowell street. I was walking down one side of the street when I noticed policemen standing behind this one car with a resident looking at something on the ground. As I got closer I realized there was a dude lying with his head on the curb. At first I thought it was a murder. Seemed the most logical thought haha. As I got closer I saw him moving so no Barnaby I suppose. It was weird though. I couldn’t tell what had happened except that maybe the guy on the ground was a homeless dude who had passed out there or had hit his head or hurt himself somehow. It may have been something worse, but I’m not sure. At any rate I leafleted around them and snagged a photo too. The rest of the leafleting was pretty low key after that. Although I have to say one time I was opened the mail and a dog tried to bite my fingers and was snapping at the slot so I just delicately put the letter through and he bit it and took it in his mouth. So I guess that resident won’t know what we are up to…After some reshuffling of routes and covering a few more areas, we managed to distribute all the leaflets in about an hour and forty minutes! BAM! TEAMWORK! After that we wanted to go to a pub to get some lunch, but it wasn’t serving lunch on Sundays so they went to another place and I to the coop to get some jam for 40 pence. As I was checking out the store was closing at 4 PM and the woman announced closing in 5 minutes as she rang up the jam! That’s so early! Also they didn’t like my VISA there for some reason…After that I walked back to the city campus and got on my bike with the now-empty box and rode to Sainsbury’s which was closing at 5 so I had some time. I went in there and got some more canned corn, peanut butter and blackberries! Literally the blackberries were only 25 pence for a small package (marked down from £2!!!) so I bought two of the cases. I really find myself at Sainsbury’s almost every day…I am eating most of my meals at home (not going out and trying to save money, so I don’t mind it). I think that when I go back home to the States I really want to cook for myself as I can save so much money and really eat better than I do eating the catered food at LCA! Also I get to pick what I want to have. Sure it will take more time and I don’t always have time, but I’ll survive. At any rate after I got back from Sainsbury’s (I think my back tire is getting flat) I stored food, snacked and decided I really wanted to go skating as it was beautiful out. Probably like 60 degrees and sunny (no rain finally! (it was bad yesterday when I was trying to fold leaflets and not have it downpour (I even had to spend time with Katy getting all the danged leaflets printed so I spent a good 6 hours working on the project yesterday, so I could take an entire weekday off basically! (as Shockey says we can take off time we spend on weekends during the week, but since I am the “leader” then I can’t do that or the project won’t get done)))). At any rate I grabbed my skates and headed out. Sadly Marceli was busy packing up as she is leaving tomorrow at 3:45 AM (AM!!) and so she couldn’t go. I skated my standard route down to the apartments and back. While I was practicing at the apartments these little BMX kids came over to the garage where I was practicing and mocked my jamming and then stole the grip off a bicycle that was chained inside of the garage. They first threw it back toward the bike and I put it back on, but then this one doofus took it and rode off again. I really hope they get busted for something else because futz those kids they are off to a great career already. Going to amount to so much I am sure. I was killing it at skating on the way back. I did the one car bridge to the last bridge on the Severn twice and got my speed skate on! After skating I showered and had dinner which was tea, yogurt, blackberries, this great seed/multigrain bread sandwich of turkey salami and a PB&J combined (the sandwich combination is actually really really good and I recommend it). After that I met Marceli and worked on typing this blog up. It has been a chill time since then. I’m going to miss having her around for skating and chilling after work. Maybe I’ll see her again. Who knows. Either way, I’m happy that I don’t have work tomorrow! Sleeping in and then working on the paper revisions -.-// (haha I’ll survive). At any rate peace!

Morning

What is this? Where is Barnaby?

Ain't nothing like a police call on a Sunday morning!

The small river that is the one edge of the Arboretum

Looking at the greenhouse and area that so many take pictures of the Arboretum from

Looking from city campus toward the river

Swan attack!

Day 15 5/24/14 (Sleeping in, operation leave-let, a 90s party)

Once I finally rolled out of bed super late at like 11:30 AM and showered I met Shoop for lunch. He wanted to go to the Arboretum to start surveying (just taking down the numbered addresses so he could make a pretty Word mapping of each street). I convinced him to wait a bit and we finally arrived down there at around 3 PM. He decided he was going to walk around and mark down the number for each house starting from the north most part of the Arboretum on Landsdowne Road. I started from the bottom at Little Southfield Road and worked my way north. I started out with about 100 leaflets to put into the mail slots of the houses. Sadly they were flat sheets of paper so once I got to the first house I realized that given the fuzzy mail slot guards most people had installed that I had to fold the leaflets before sliding them through. So I then plopped the stack of 100 onto a trashcan and started folding outside the first house. Ironically I didn’t get arrested and didn’t even get any strange looks. It was kinda disappointing actually. Once I had folded all of them I (into thirds) I put one in the first house’s mail slot and had just moved to the second one when someone pushed the paper back out the front of the mail slot. I should have put it back through the door, but I put it into the second house’s slot and moved on. It was about an hour and a half before I ran out of leaflets and saw Shoop finishing up one of the streets I was working towards. Unfortunately I ran out of leaflets about 6 houses from the end of Southfield Street. In about an hour and a half, I had given out the 100 leaflets we had printed with the date of 5/24 on it. After that Shoop and I went back to campus. By this time it was almost 6 and was dinner time for me. So I made something like pasta and something else. After that I started watching the final match of the Champions league which was Real Madrid vs. Atlético. I also decided that I should fold the other 600+ leaflets that were flat paper. So I started folding the leaflets at around 7:50 PM when the game started and I folded through the whole game, the post game and to about 11 PM (after Shoop had joined in to help fold some too). The game was actually pretty good. Real Madrid was down by 1 for the first 92 minutes and then someone scored a goal with 3 minutes left. Both teams were tied at 95 minutes and so they went to play another 30 minutes. In this time Real Madrid started racking the goals up and scored another 3 more goals to end up winning 4 to 1. It was crazy. During this time I had to fold so so so so many leaflets. One of the girls from my flat even decided that she would count all the leaflets I had folded (which actually helped out tremendously). At first I was really bad at folding the leaflets but I started nailing them and getting them almost perfect every time by the time Shoop decided to help. After we finished folding them it turned out I had folded probably a good 575+ of the 724 leaflets we printed. After that Shoop was kinda freaking out about the team as Stefan and Nick had been MIA for folding, so I asked Marceli if he could join us for a 90s party that some of her friends were throwing. Once we finally we were to head over there it was about 12ish but we headed over and after some awkward hiding outside of the party (common room) door we went in and joined Marceli and her friends. This 90s party was more like about 15 people chilling in the kitchen talking to one another and drinking. It was pretty on the DL. I didn’t have anything to drink beyond two sips of Marceli’s beer. We had a pretty good time there chatting with everyone and the music was a Spotify station for the 90s and 2000s. After about 2 hours of chilling and chatting, Shoop left. Before he did we had this conversation with this American dude named Joe from Indiana about dimensions and how angels exist in the 5^th dimension and can exist in many time epochs. I said that time in his sense of defining it was more like a HD where you access the period and jump between eras. Kinda blew his mind a bit (he had been drinking). Anyways we got started talking about dimensions and I said how dimensions don’t have to be anything crazy, but can be additional properties of an object. For example the 3 standard dimensions might be X, Y, Z coordinates for defining geometry. To add another dimension you add an associated color or perhaps the temperature at the coordinate. In this sense you can add an infinite number of dimensions. As an extension of this you can create larger sets of dimensions by taking objects with multiple dimensions and uniting them in a larger set of dimensions that encompasses the subsets. Getting all theoretical n stuff there! Hahah anyways after that the rest of the night was pretty low key. 

Droppin' leaflets!

Parked on Southfield street!

Almost American Mags!

Disco!

Under all those chopped tomatoes is pasta. This is actually the best meal ever!

Going in hard on folding!

So many to go...

Done!

624 folded leaflets!

Day 14 5/24/14 (Slow ride Friday morning, ‘dat survey, hey you! Do you want to take a survey? It doesn’t have to be a survey…, time pressure, the long awaited meeting with City Council, so many corrections, another Mug Shot, a chat, final revisions?, making it rain at Sainsbury’s, Superbad)

Welcome to 8:05 AM! I really do not like getting up early after I stay up late. This is my fault and I like summer too much to be waking up at this time. Sadly I have to do this because I want to be productive. Anyways breakfast was quick and really only a transitional stage before heading to the office. At the office I pulled up our survey and started working on the corrections to fix it up. Peng said we should pilot the survey on people around the campus so we had to fix it up and get 12 copies printed. Of course when we printed it we found many small errors and formatting issues. At least this is the point of having the trial run of the survey. Shoop and I each took 3 surveys and I left 6 with Stefan and Nick to take around campus. This survey is basically our combined demographics and main survey for tenants in HMOs in the Arboretum (the main survey simply asks more about their energy and sustainability habits and energy meters etc). So I took the survey to the student union building, but there weren’t any people there that could take the survey. I then walked over to Firstpoint (basically a helpdesk) and asked one of the women there kindly to take it and give me some feedback. I then walked upstairs to the IT desk and had the woman there fill it out. She had no real feedback on the form and filled it out in under 10 minutes! I had to stop back several times with Firstpoint before the woman had finally completed the survey, but she actually lived in the Arboretum so it was worth waiting to get her feedback. Unfortunately she didn’t really have any feedback on the survey but she did fill it out in entirety. After collecting the two surveys I had I returned to the office and checked in with Shoop (who had been having several other folks working on the survey). I also heard from Stefan and Nick about their surveys (as they had one of the sandwich guys fill it out). They even had a security guard fill out the survey and this dude had some serious issues filling out the form (to the point of circling YES or NO at the top of a checkbox column. -.-// such struggles). After I had all of the surveys back I looked at all 10 we had filled out and worked through them page by page and put the corrections into the updated survey file on my computer. We only had like 30 minutes until we had to leave at 11 for our meeting with City Council at 11:30. So I was racing through the surveys making the changes as quickly as possible. We then dashed off to the dorms to drop off laptops etc and grab bikes. I also luckily decided to grab two printed copies of the survey. We then biked down there in about 15 minutes to city campus where we locked the bikes and walked to the city council building. We tried to get into the front by pushing the door button but it was not letting us in. We were about to pick up the phone and call people inside, but then a woman came and opened up the door and asked us who we were meeting. We had no idea as Katy and Peng had never said so we had this awkward waiting time until we were let into the building. We had all arrived in our bright orange Energize Worcester t-shirts too and were ready to meet with whomever.

I trust that Driver!

Such food!

Mounds of chicken!

A little charcoal never killed nobody

Dat pasta!

I had so much food

Too early in that bright orange shirt

Eventually we were taken into the back conference room (the same one that we had presented in last week) and waited in there for Katy and Peng and the other council members. Paul even showed up for our meeting! Once everyone was there we started talking about the progress of the project thus far with EPC centralization and analysis of individual streets. We then talked a bit about the letter we needed City Council to sign that we could carry around in case of police activity or questioning residents. We also discussed the workflow and what we needed to accomplish in the next few weeks. We then talked about delivery of the survey and how to inform (warn?) people that we would be walking around the area. Paul said the best way to accomplish this was to leaflet drop (blitzkrieg) the region. We then went hard on the survey and questions about that and other topics to include. Despite Shockey’s comments yesterday we decided the best place for the demographics section was at the end of the survey. I felt so proud that the council wanted to use my idea of which brands do you know (organizations) and which organization has the most respect. We had included this on one of our original surveys, but it had been dropped over the multiple revisions. Despite the long meeting City Council did approve of our work finally! So once we leaflet drop the region we can start our survey!!!! After the main meeting we had an in depth talk with the woman from the County Council and she went over quite a number of points on the survey. So many revisions on this jawn! I feel like I’ve learned quite a bit about surveys and wording and government work through this process already. After we left the building we said we wanted to be back at the office by 2 PM. So I biked home and had myself a Mug Shot (this time it was chicken flavoured (ß British of course) and tasted just like the chicken Ramen noodles if there was a limited amount of water so it became super creamy). It was delicious. I also finished my PB&J. I headed back to the office and was there early with Shoop. We were then waiting on Stefan and Nick who showed up a good 10 minutes late. We then had a chat on how our team has been working and what we need to work on for the project. The point of this was to get everyone on the same page with standards and working on a document on the project as they have not always been 100% focused on this and play on their computers or tablets or phones. It is irritating as I have to constantly ask them their opinion to keep them engaged. It only make everything worse. I don’t think I quite went about the talk the right was and I think Stefan was annoyed with me. I’m just trying to get everyone on the same level and have everyone contributing. What also annoys me is that certain teammates are completely unwilling to work on the weekends at all (without taking time out of the week). Sure we are not supposed to work on the weekends, but we need to sometimes get a bit more done before we can start doing the weekly work (such as revising our paper). At any rate I gave Stefan and Nick the leaflet to work on and I asked Shoop to draft the letter for us to carry around. I just dove into the survey and corrected everything as much as possible with the City Council recommendations, Peng’s recommendations and the results of our pilot surveys. Whew. It took me so long to format everything and get all the corrections made. We then called Peng in and he, Shoop and I went line by line on the survey through every question. After another hour and a half we finally had gone through everything and the new survey looked really quite good. We then sent it off to everyone. We also went through the leaflet and letter with Peng and got those fixed up. After all of this we talked to Katy and got about 100 of the leaflets printed. Shoop and I stayed another hour or so to help Katy and talk to her about the documents. Katy also had given us another piece of technology to play with that is a clip on in-home display from British gas! So I’m excited for that. After the printing we headed back to the dorms in the dumping rain. I then took a nap (finally!) and it had stopped raining when I woke up. I rode to Sainsbury’s and dropped mad money. So I bought about £30 worth of food (almost $60) and got everything from corn to shredded cheese to lunchmeat to toast to milk to 3L of OJ to yogurt to 40 tea bags for 15 pence (fair trade of course) to more Mug Shots to good chicken to salmon. So much food! It was also strange because I saw one of the council women at the store. I have so much food now! At any rate I had to bike and then got ready to start cooking food. Marceli came over and cooked pasta while I went hard cooking so much chicken. She made this really good penne and lasagna sauce with sliced peppers pasta. I cooked much chicken and managed to make the kitchen slightly smoky too! (I’m getting better at cooking chicken I swear). After that she and I watched Superbad which is actually like the worst movie ever. It has the dude from Scott Pilgrim in it with Dave Franco (cameo), Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan. It’s just about really angsty teenagers and Jonah Hill being a jerk. Anyways after that it was chill. I drank a good 1L of orange juice last night and had so much food. Wow. 

Day 13 5/22/14 (I have energy to be awake?, putting that tenant survey in its place, Shockey visits, the 2 hour power crunch not sour meeting with everyone, finishing ‘dat tenant survey, workin’ out, eatin’ like a college kid)

Hello Thursday! I was actually decently awake this time! After a quick shower I started with breakfast: cheerios, toast with jam. After that Shoop and I headed over to the office. It was early and somewhat menacing outside (looking like it could start teeming rain any second). The morning was actually decently productive. We cranked out combination of the tenant survey and looked at the methodology revisions from Professor Ruiz. We only had about 2 hours to get this done as we had to grab lunch and then head to the train station to pick up Shockey. The reformatting of the tenant survey went well and I got everything nicely set into the boxes. After this we broke for lunch. I had Nick and Stefan work on getting more EPCs online and Shoop helped with the survey. We decided to combine the demographic and tenant main survey. This worked out pretty well too! At 11 I had some chips that Shoop got as I was continuing to work on some EPCs. After that I ran back to my flat and made 2 sandwiches of chicken and cheese on bread. I realized that I have a lot of toast left and I need to it so…It was pretty good and I gulped them down as I was working on EPC reports. Not too much later we dropped our stuff in Katy’s office and walked to the train station. We arrived a good 30 minutes early and I went into Tesco to get some OJ and some Mug Shots (like small amounts of Ramen for a mug). It was about $4 worth of stuff that I had to sign for (I even had to sign for a $1.80 jug of OJ yesterday). That’s so much more effort than it is worth. After that I joined the guys up on platform 1 to wait for Shockey and I killed it at zombie highway.

Scotch eggs (literally a hard egg breaded and deep fried)

One way

Pretty accurately describes our energy levels

Pretty happening place at 12:35 PM

After we met Shockey we escorted her back to the University (you know the dangersque streets here). Once we arrived back on campus we start in on a marathon meeting with Shockey, Peng and Katy. This meeting went over everything we have accomplished on the project thus far from our work last week. We went through writing articles for the various websites. We covered adding the energy performance certificates (EPCs) to the drive. We went through survey revisions. We started tackling the survey in hardcore mode where we had the document up on the screen and everyone working on the document line by line and word by word. Yes it took nearly two hours. Yes it was tedious. Yes we killed it! It’s okay only most of the document seemed like a bloodbath with all the tracked changes to the formatting and wording. At around 4 PM we finally broke (after starting at around 1:50 PM) and Stefan and Shoop took Shockey back to the train station while Nick worked on getting a few more EPCs online. I then rolled up my sleeves and prepped to go hard and fix the rest of the survey. I then spent an hour+ on that jawn and it looks so fine right now. Don’t let it go out in public. Whew! Such a beauty. I apologize for sounding incredibly strange, it’s most likely the sleep deprivation catching up with me. At any rate after that I headed to the gym and knocked out some exercising. I managed to get about 350 lbs. on the leg press! BAM! Killing it! I am trying to build up my legs so I can really haul around the rink. We shall see how it goes. I may do some skating this weekend. Who knows! Dinner was really chill. I was going to make chicken and gnocchi, but then I got lazy so I had a mug shot and a PB&J. I also had some of the pork Shoop cooked up. It was a really chill dinner and I’ll probably be hungry later, but I’m saving good cooking for tomorrow night when I have more energy. Tomorrow is the big meeting with the city council, so we may get approved for our survey and then finally get that rolling! Shockey told us some of the other groups are struggling too though, so I think we are in a good place to finally get some work done!