Caltech

Fin, Part II

Now... Time to write about the start of my SURF and tour guide training!

SURF

As I've mentioned before, I'm working in Professor Julia Greer's lab. While she's not actually in the chemical engineering department, she is in a materials lab in the Engineering and Applied Science department... and I'm in the materials track of chemE! Her research is centered on the strength of nanostructures. My project specifically is on the mechanical properties and deformation mechanisms of nanopillars. You can read more about it here: http://www.jrgreer.caltech.edu/research.php#nanoscale_deformation.

This first week has primarily been devoted to the electroplating of nanopillar samples and training on various machines. I've been making nanopillars that have diameters ranging from 50 nm to 500 nm, via electroplating. This is a process where I have a larger dummy chip and the chip that I want to create pillars on, an anode and cathode placed in a solution of iron, and then a current, which plates the iron onto the chip. The chip itself is 1 cm by 1 cm, and it's made up of a thin gold layer, on top of a titanium layer that coats a silicon wafer. The gold layer is covered by a template which gives us the pillar structure, and it's washed off after electroplating using acetone and isopropyl alcohol. Anyways... This tiny chip holds around 60,000 pillars at the center of it!

Here's a picture of the setup:

The light-green bath on the far left of the picture is for iron, made up of ammonium ferrous sulfate. This is where the anode and cathode are. As for the other solutions, the blue is copper, the small beaker next to that holds the dark green nickel bath. The two bottles in the back hold the dead yellow-colored iron baths that don't work anymore, because the Fe(II) oxidized to Fe(III).

Once the pillars are created, we take them down to the clean room to use the SEMentor, which is a scanning electron microscope combined with a nanoindentor. This allows us to see the pillars and also conduct a number of tests on them. There's also another machine, the G200, that we use to gather compression test data.

We have to wear lots of ridiculous clean room gear when we use the SEMentor, like the people in this random photo I found:

And look! Here's a picture of the super cute nanopillars that Jarvis, another SURF student, made! This is of 100 nm nickel nanopillars, magnified at 40x. Normally, 100 nm is too small to see easily, but these pillars were overplated. [I'd show you a picture of mine, but my project currently isn't working... My mentor and I are working to figure out why.]

 

Oh, and here's a picture of some of my iron nanopillars, taken by the SEMentor:

And here's a close-up of one:

Anyways, this has only been the past two weeks of my SURF project. There's a lot more stuff to come.

Tour Guide

Now that my stint as an admissions blogger is reaching an end, I found myself a new job to do! I'd wanted to be a tour guide ever since I became a Techer. After all, my choice to come here was thanks to a tour here, where I fell in love with the beautiful campus, unique culture, and academic challenge of Caltech. Soo... I wanted to share my love with others! :D

There were a ton of tour guide applicants. If I remember right, there were at least 50 applicants, but only room for about 20. To apply, we filled out a form and went through two interviews. From there, those of us who were chosen had to undergo training, which involved shadowing two tours and attending an information session. Anyways, I went to those... and now I'm a fully trained tour guide! I'll probably start giving tours in July, after I come back from my two week vacation with family. I still have a lot to prepare before that happens though: I need to plan out a route and also figure out what I want to say to people... Also, I need to figure out how to walk backwards while talking to a large group without falling over. Now that is going to be the key challenge... xP.

And with that... Goodbye! This is my last post. D: Thanks for reading my blogs this past year; I had a lot of fun writing for you guys!

You guys should come to Caltech and catch one of my tours! ;D

-Jennifer

Fin, Part I

Oops, my last post was over a month ago, and that was when I was planning on writing a series of posts... >_<'' That failed miserably. I'm really sorry about my flakiness this term, but now you guys have a whole host of new bloggers to follow!

Anyways, a lot has happened since then. Most important among these were Ditch Day, finals/the end of the school year, the start of my SURF, and the start of my life as a tour guide. I'll give a recap of them in these next two posts:

Ditch Day: 

For those of you who don't know, Caltech's Ditch Day was originally very similar to the ditch day of high school: seniors would skip their classes and leave campus for the day. However, the underclassmen would prank the seniors' rooms in retaliation. This soon evolved into the seniors barricading their doors with stacks of objects to hinder the underclassmen's progress. Then, this somehow evolved into the modern day Caltech Ditch Day: a super awesome day where assignments are postponed and classes are canceled. Seniors spend a ton of time (and money) planning and executing their stacks, which are best described as a series of puzzles, games, and obstacles based around a center theme and targeted for the underclassmen to participate in. It's a ton of fun.

Now, the stack that I joined was based on Calvin and Hobbes! The two seniors (Nadia and Jenny) actually sewed together an adorable stuffed Hobbes. But first, we made newspaper hats, put together a toy wagon, and then we had to catch Hobbes by throwing cans of tuna into a bucket for Hobbes to eat xP. From there, we made water balloons that we filled with iodine and threw them at a poster of Suzy to reveal a hidden puzzle... This led us to our next destination, Nadia's apartment! The seniors then took us out to lunch and drove us to the Getty Villa to do a scavenger hunt. The Getty Villa is a gorgeous museum in Malibu that showcases Roman art and architecture. If you guys are ever in the area, visit it! After that, we were taken to the beach Point Dume. This was followed by a nice dinner and then we finally got back to Tech at 10 pm. All in all, the day was super fun, albeit exhausting.

Here's a picture taken by Bob Paz of our group. You can see me holding Hobbes! My hat kept falling off, unfortunately.

If you guys want to see more Ditch Day pictures, you can find them here: http://www.bobpaz.com/. Some other themes include: Star Wars and Inception, as well as another Calvin and Hobbes stack.

Finals/End of School

My finals all went pretty well, and it definitely helped to be off core: I only had three finals, consisting of Ec 11, ChE 63b, and Ch 41c, and I had all week to take them, so I was able to space them out. Granted, I also had a lab report that was due the week before finals, and also a ten page paper for Artworlds. Grades were due almost a week ago, but for whatever reason, I'm still waiting on my thermo (63b) grade... Grr... But yeah! Despite the fact that the orgo exam was terribly hard, I somehow managed to do decently overall. AND NOW I NEVER HAVE TO TAKE ORGO EVER AGAIN! Yay! That class was definitely my hardest class this year. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't attend graduation, because that was when I was busy slaving away at the orgo final... However, I did get to attend Ricketts' Pool Party, which was held on the last day of classes. This only happens every other year, and basically, it's like Ruddock's Hot Tub Room (which happens during PFW), but wayyy bigger--the Skurves transform their entire courtyard into a pool! 

Here are some pictures I mooched off of Sam, aka Pixie:

There's the completed frame for the pool:

The plastic-covered frame:

Pool!!! This picture's from the afternoon, with just the Skurves hanging out. The actual party didn't start until nighttime:

Aight, SURF and tour guide stuff will be in my next (and very possibly final) blog.

-Jennifer

So Much Art!

Life has been crazy this term, what with 53 units of classes, weekly field trips, plus random fun things, so I’m really sorry my blogging’s been very unreliable this term. So I'm going to churn out the highlights of this term in the next couple of posts. 

So first, I'll write about my H/Art 119 [Art Worlds] field trips! I signed up for this class because of the field trips, and man, they’ve been a lot of fun. The material that the class covered doesn't interest me that much--we're focusing not on the art itself, but on the business, networking, and culture surrounding the art and museum. As an example, we've been learning about big important patrons like Eli Broad and Norton Simon. Anyways, I’ve been to LACMA, the Norton Simon Museum, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, among other places. At Lacma, I saw this famous painting in person:

as well as one of my favorite prints:  

Francesco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” which I learned about in my third term art history class last year! We didn’t get to see much of LACMA in the few short hours we had there; that museum was huuuge—it was a campus made up of multiple buildings.

I loved the Norton Simon; they had a gallery filled with Degas’ works, but I didn't have a chance to take any pictures there. As for the Museum of Jurassic Technology, that place was awesome. You can read more about it at http://www.mjt.org/. It’s this two floored kooky old building, made up of twisting dark hallways filled with esoteric randomness.

Some examples: 

Some guy by the name of Athanasius Kircher made a bell wheel:

There was also an exhibit on microscopic art. You look down into the microscope...

And you see this exquisite piece of art, made by butterfly scales:

There was also a gallery of floral radiographs, which we had to look through wearing these ridiculous 3D glasses:

That's Karen from swimming and water polo, 

There was also a gallery of needle microminiature art:

As you can see, there's a figure (I forget who it was) placed in the eye of the needle. Sorry about the blurriness of these pictures; the museum was really dark.

Then, on the second floor of the museum, there was this lounge for the visitors to gather and drink complimentary tea and eat complimentary cookies!

So yeah, these field trips have been taking up a large portion of my weekends, but they've been a lot of fun so far. More to come soon!

-Jennifer

Prefrosh Weekend Part 2!!!

To continue with my post about PFW, Friday was packed with events, one of which was Club Fair [there was a dunk tank and a ton of carnival food!]

COTTON CANDY~~~

EVEN MORE SUGAR~!!!

Dunk tank, with Dabney president Alan in it:

Then, at the same time as club fair were Dabney's Boat Tours. After all, when you come to Tech, you've got to see it the way it was meant to be seen... by water and boat! ^^''

On Friday night, Ruddock House converted one of their frosh rooms into a giant hot tub! In addition, they build a crazy mini golf course within the house. Anyways, I'll post pictures of these events in a later post, when I manage to dig up some photos.

Also on that same night was Ricketts House’s Open Mic Night. They host one of these every term, and it’s *awesome*. Techers have an extraordinary amount of talent, not only for music, but also for telling exceedingly bad [and hilarious] jokes…

Awesome duo #1 [plus the panda-drummer]:

Awesome duo #2:

Awesome duo #3:

Darb group!

The self proclaimed frosh, white, Jewish rap group:

There were also activities on Saturday, including Dabney’s Tie Dying, a water polo event, as well as more free food, but I didn’t participate in much on that day, using it instead for sleeping and working.

Anyways, now you guys have an idea of some of the awesomeness of Prefrosh Weekend. I'll try my best to post more regularly, but I've gotta go to ec now.

-Jennifer 

*Credit to Bob Paz and Sam [Pixie] for pictures.

Prefrosh Weekend Part 1!!!

Hey everyone! Sorry it’s been so long >_<.

Anyways, I hope that those of you guys who went to Prefrosh Weekend had a good time. I know I certainly did, both as a prefrosh and as a Techer [granted, I didn’t have as good a time catching up on work after PFW…]. As much as PFW is a recruiting event geared for the prefrosh, it's also a blast for Techers.

To those of you who missed it and to future, potential applicants, next up are some pictures of my favorite parts of PFW [none of which I took, because I forgot to bring my camera around -___-]. Keep in mind that this is only a tiny part of PFW; there were also many activities that I didn’t go to… To say the least, PFW is packed with activities.

First of all, I *really* like shuttling prefrosh from the admissions building to the rooms they stay at. It sounds cheesy, but it’s my way of helping the new “generation” have as much fun at PFW as I did. Plus, it’s an easy way for me to help them learn about Caltech, which is, after all, what PFW is all about. As an additional bonus, we get a delicious barbeque lunch.

Shirts for the prefrosh:

And awesome sunglasses!

Me + volunteers [TedX is to my right!]

Nom free food nom:

Dabney also puts on a One Act Theatre performance. Well, technically, it’s a Caltech program, but most of the members of One Acts are Darbs. Anyways, they put on two shows on Thursday night, one for prefrosh [which is packed] and one for everyone else.

The first two plays were really short ["DMV Tyrant" and "Dalmation"], but still pretty funny. My personal favorite was "Harry Potter and the Unified Field Theory", written by two of my fellow Darbs! What is it about? I quote from the program, "What if Petunia had married a physics professor and gotten a PhD herself? The story unfolds as the characters learn to embrace the Power of Science." Twas filled with Harry Potter jokes *and* nerd humor, a winning combination. The last one was called "Lysistrata."

Here's Harry Potter [played by Dabney's exalted President, Alan] with Petunia and Dursley, waxing poetic about obscure science stuff:

Professor McGonagall [she was my host for PFW!!] comes to tell Harry about magic!

Harry befriends Draco [played by our exalted ex-President, Andrew!]

And here's Hermione, coming up with their plan to destroy Voldemort:

And here's the cast for Lyristrata [you can also see the rest of the Voldemort-destroying-plan on the board behind them]:

It was awesome.

Anyways, I've gotta go to class!

-Jennifer

*Credit to Bob Paz and Kathabela Wilson [wife of my Ma1b prof, Rick Wilson] for pictures.

Dabney Dinner Traditions

This Friday’s dinner was one of the most amusing I’ve ever been to. First of all, since today was Prefrosh Friday, we were all a lot more excited and energetic than usual. In addition, today was the day that our old president, Andrew Price, decided to act upon one of Dabney’s dinner traditions—the outgoing president must shove a pie in the face of the new president. However, the new president has no idea when the outgoing will do so; it’s a complete surprise.

Here’s a picture of the new president, Alan Lin, with pie all over his face:

... Ew, ew, ew xD. Oh, that peace sign is from one of our frosh.

As for some of our other dinner traditions:

-Our frosh Pinheads (which are two “elected positions”; I put that in quotes because we elect them by cheering) tell stories and jokes at the end of Thursday dinners.

-We have a woodworking competition that… never occurs. This directly relates to another “elected position” of the Keeper of the Flame Award/The Norm Abram Trophy Manager. It sounds ridiculous, but really, this person is simply responsible for spinning elaborate tales to explain why the date of the woodworking competition has to be pushed back. [On a side note, some Moles, who are members of Blacker House, actually believed that the woodworking competition is a real thing xD].

In addition, Dabney’s also started practicing for our Jai Alai tournament! As a whole, we’re honestly not especially interested in athletics. I’m not saying that we don’t have any athletic Darbs, obviously. I’m a case against that, we’ve also got another swimmer/water polo player, a soccer player or two, multiple track kids, and a couple divers, including one of the best divers in our conference. When it comes to the organized interhouse sport games though, our attitude about playing is generally just about having fun, not about winning. However… we are very intense about Jai Alai. If you don’t know what Jai Alai is, here’s the wiki article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_alai. We modify it a bit by only playing against the south wall of our courtyard, instead of with the three walls of a typical court. Our house athletic managers draw up a bracket for all of the interested Darbs, and the playing usually takes place before and after our house dinners.

However, I don’t play this game (the ball’s too small and it goes way too fast for me to follow…), so I took it upon myself to distract those who were practicing. I tried my best to intercept the throws and rebounds, hehe.

While all of this was happening, some of our frosh were playing the game of 2 to the n. It is exactly what it sounds like: one person hops 2^1 times; the next hops 2^2 times, someone then hops 2^3 times, and so on. At one point in time, one frosh was hopping 256 times…

Anyways... I’ll leave you with that, as it’s time for me to read orgo >_<.

-Jennifer

 

TGIF

With the end of week two, I’ve finished my first two sets of the term, one for Ec 11 and one for ChE 63b. On the bright side, these are my only two sets each week. But on the flip side, they’re both due on the same day (Thursday), and my Wednesdays are filled with classes and lab. In addition to that, they would be filled with water polo games in the evening as well, but I made the horribly difficult decision to quit the team for the rest of the season on Thursday afternoon. As much as I love the sport and my teammates, I realized that I was stretching myself way too thin, what with chemE classes and playing piano for my chamber ensemble. The water polo team takes a lot of time (about 20 hours a week), even when compared to other sports (swimming takes about 14 hours a week). Soo… I’m off the team *sad*. I do plan on cheering the girls on at their games though, and I hope to play next year.

Anyways, back to talking about those two sets… The Ec 11 set wasn’t too bad. I did pretty much all but one problem on my own. However, I realized that part of the reason why I don’t like econ is because of all the assumptions one has to make. I much prefer cut and dry problems to the rather open-ended and flexible problems that econ classes tend to assign… It’s alright though. I looked at the set for next week, and I know that I can do at least half of it without any difficulties.

The lecture on Thursday proved to be pretty amusing. The professor started with the auctioning of a $5 bill. The rules were as follows: the highest bidder would win the bill for free, but the second-highest bidder would have to pay the prof his bid. The prof specified that he would actually collect on the debt, but I guess nobody believed him, since the price somehow got jacked up to over $2000 by some of the frosh in the class. It appears that they’re not very rational…

Now, as for the first ChE set… At the start of Wednesday’s lecture, the prof asked us about our progress, and we all stared at him, all panicked, and said that we could only do #1 (of 5 problems)… Thankfully, the prof cut the set down to only the first two problems. Even then, a lot of us had difficulties, since most of us had never used MATLAB (or any programming) experience. I ended up so panicked and stressed that I completely mentally blocked up by Wednesday night. I was at the point where I couldn’t make any progress without freaking out. So, I emailed the prof and the TA, begging for an extension. I got the set’s due date extended until Monday morning. The extra time allowed me to calm down and clear my thinking process, so I managed to finish and turn in the set by 4 pm this Friday :D. I am *so* glad it’s done, although I suppose I'm rather proud of myself, what with having successfully coded something for the first time ever. Next week’s set looks to be a lot easier, thank goodness.

That’s it for this post. Sorry my life’s been rather boring lately! However, today’s Prefrosh Friday and also the Pasadena Games (Caltech's competing against some other local schools in ridiculous activities), and Lloyd’s interhouse party is tomorrow, so I’ll have some more exciting posts coming up.

-Jennifer 

bloop

Sorry I haven’t posted this past week! I’ve been pretty sick >_<. Thankfully, Caltech has a number of resources to help us. First of all, each house has multiple Health Ads. To become a Health Ad, one has to complete a three-term program that trains one to deal with emergencies, first aid, and basic mental and physical health problems. They also have a stockpile of cough drops and various types of medicine to give to those in need. My favorite Health Ad is Andrew Price, who was Dabney President last year. He’s super awesome. Anyways, back to the topic at hand… For more serious ailments, Caltech also has the Health Center! They’re pretty much just like your doctor, but they’re right on campus. Usually, if somebody’s sick and needs an extension on their assignments, they’ll need to go to the Health Center to get a note to give to the professor. I’m pretty well recovered by now, which is good, since now that the first week has passed, my workload is going to skyrocket.

Now, I realize that Melody’s posted about our classes already, but I figured I’d add in my take on the subject. Plus, we’re taking different hums [though I am considering taking the Beethoven hum as well…]

• Ch 3b: I’m pretty nervous about this lab course, but excited at the same time. While I like doing labs, I don’t have a lot of experience, so I’m afraid I’ll mess up or break something… Also, lab reports aren’t going to be fun…
• Ch 41c: THIS WILL BE MY LAST TERM OF ORGO!!! My grade from 41b was a full letter grade up from 41a, so I’m hoping to continue this upward trend, and boost my grade up even more. Unfortunately, I’ve heard that this class goes at a wicked fast pace.
• ChE 63b: The fact that our sets are going to be heavily based on MATLAB is both a blessing and a curse—a blessing because it’s a good opportunity for me to learn to program, but a curse because, well, I need to learn programming… I miss Professor Tirrell though, while Flagan is alright, he doesn’t have the organizational talents or charm that Tirrell had.
• Ec 11: I never liked economics in high school, but I think that’s due to a horrible AP Econ teacher [all he ever talked about was how much he *loved* Ebay, and how much he *hated* Walmart and Craigslist. We watched multiple Walmart-bashing films… It was a complete waste of time.] This class looks like it will be a lot better. Plus, even though the class size is huge [we’re in Baxter Lecture Hall, which is Caltech’s biggest lecture hall, seating ~250 people, I think], Professor Rangel seems to focus a lot on class discussion and making sure that everybody understands the concepts before moving on.
• H/Art 119, Art Worlds: This hum class is about the “art world,” which is this abstract… concept-thing *shrug*. There’s also a specific focus on both art and culture in LA and Latino art, which will be pretty cool. However, the main reason why I signed up for this class is this: we get to go on field trips for this class! We’ll be going to the following museums: LACMA [LA County Museum of Art], Norton Simon Museum, Museum of Jurassic Technology and Center for Land Use Interpretation [Jurassic Tech sounds super cool], Watts Towers, California Institute of the Arts, and the Getty! It’s gonna be awesome :D.

That’s it for now. I’ve gotta eat lunch and then go to my first lab session. More’s coming soon!

-Jennifer

Last Day of Break D:

My spring break and super relaxing [and delicious] weekend will be ending in 12 hours... Eeeek. Classes are starting. Anyways, regarding the past couple of days:

Friday afternoon was the last of our spring break water polo practices. On Saturday, we watched the recording of our game against Macalester, to look for areas where we could improve and such. One of my teammates, Megan, brought a bunch of delicious, fresh-baked cookies to share :D.

After that, a friend and I went to Old Town Pasadena for some [window] shopping! While it is only a two-mile walk, we decided to take the Pasadena ARTS bus. It has stops just off campus, costs only 75 cents, and comes by every 15 to 20 minutes. It’s pretty great. We stopped at Forever 21, H&M, and Gap first to get the actual shopping out of the way, and then we went windowshopping through stores like J Crew [the original price for a shirt was over $70 bucks], Armani Exchange [a pair of flip flops were $25; I buy my flip flops from Old Navy for a tenth of that cost…], and Juicy Couture [a headband cost $40!!!]. But yeah, Old Pas is great; it has something for everyone—from the poor college student to the super rich people…

It also has lots of delicious food! I ended up going back there that same Saturday night to go to Cheesecake Factory for dinner. We would have gone to Buca di Beppo, but the wait was an hour and forty minutes… Anyways, I got this delicious pasta, their “farfalle with chicken and roasted garlic”.

Looooook, isn’t it beautiful?

It has pasta [duh], chicken, bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, peas, and caramelized onion. Yumyumyum.

Now, as for the rest of the night? I was hanging out with some Rudd-frosh friends, and we got *really* bored, so we decided to mess around with hair and makeup and such. Yay, girly things! So, Sabrina gave Liana a purple wig to put on, and did her make up to match, and she also made me up into a pin-up girl…

Before:

After [so much makeup and hair stuff ahh @____@]:

And there's the three of us, plus the new stuffed wolf that I got!

On the other hand, today’s been a lot less exciting. I went to IHOP for chocolate chip pancakes, and then I’ve spent the rest of the day bumming: I rewatched Lion King, took a nap, did laundry, and organized my desk and school supplies. Aaaaand, I only just got back from the Dessert Night that economics and political science Professor Erik Snowberg [who lives in Avery] hosted in his room. He laid out quite a spread, consisting of three ice cream flavors [vanilla, samoa, and chocolate fudge brownies], cookies, blueberry tart, tiramisu, and candy. >____> So now I’m quickly getting a sugar high. Hehehehe.

Time to bounce around!

-Jennifer

 

So Much Water Polo

After my trip to Universal Studios, I spent a few days at home devoted to sleeping a lot, eating delicious home food, and meeting up with friends… And then I came back to Tech on Tuesday for water polo! Since I didn’t get in until 3pm, I missed the first three of our double daily water polo practices. The two-hour afternoon practices each day were focused on water polo, we lifted on Tuesday and Thursday morning, and we had a beastly swim set Friday morning. In fact, our coaches were cackling about the difficulty of it on Thursday afternoon, so all of us girls were scared… The set turned out to be this:

Each interval decreased by a second, starting at 1 min 30 seconds and going down to only 10 seconds, so we swam for a total of ~1.5 hours. Regarding distance, we started swimming 100 meters, which is 4 lengths down the pool. Once we failed and missed the start of an interval, we sat that time out, and then at the next start, we swam 75 meters [3 lengths]. This continued until we dropped down to 25 meters. When we couldn’t make that distance, we were to tread water until everybody failed.

The good thing about the set was that it accommodated for the team's different levels of swimming ability. On the other hand, it was hard for us to find the right pace. Since our goal was to swim the most distance we could, that meant that we could relax when the time interval was longer than necessary. However, when it came time to speed up, I had difficulties keeping up with the decreasing interval.  We ended the practice with a leg set: the assistant coach threw a bunch of random things into the pool, including metal lawn chairs, plastic chairs, a water jug, and both unweighted and weighted water polo balls, and we were to tread water and work as a team to keep everything dry for ten minutes. All in all, it was a great workout.

Another really fun thing about this week of water polo practices was our Wednesday beach practice! We drove to Huntington Beach, which is really, really nice. It allows bonfires at night and there are lots of surfers during the day, and there’s also a lot of nice shops and restaurants [including Johnny Rockets] along the beach as well :D. Our jogging workout was interspersed with stretching, push-ups, crunches, burpies, stair runs, and wall-sits. Although we didn’t run too long of a distance, it was pretty difficult since we were jogging on loose sand. Plus, the water polo team is made up of swimmers, not runners… After the jog, we changed into our swimsuits and swam in the freezing ocean while the water was at pretty high tide. The waves were *really* big so it was rather scary, and the cold was *really* cold. The trip was all so, so much fun ^_^. It was the best and most fun workout I’d had in a long time. Afterwards, we went to the Johnny Rockets that was along the beach, where I ordered a delicious BBQ chicken bacon melt and a kid’s size neopolitan shake… Yum. Thankfully, the weather was great while we were there; it didn’t start raining until after we were in the car driving home :D. Unfortunately, since I was busy with my workout, I didn’t have the opportunity to take any pictures. However, I found this on the city website: http://www.ci.huntington-beach.ca.us/residents/beach_info/livebeachcondition.cfm, it’s a webcam of the beach!

Anyways, now it’s Friday night, and I’ve only got a few days left before term starts, so I’ll write later!

-Jennifer