Another childhood gem

We've reached the elementary school layers of the great closet excavation:

My favorite part is the spitting sound effect.

Closet Cleanout

We're at my parents' house for the holidays; they are getting ready to move into a smaller house in Baltimore so my sister and I need to go through all the stuff in our childhood bedrooms and decide what to throw away and what to take back to our respective homes. My closet had all my binders and notebooks from high school and college, the vast majority of which are getting recycled, but I've been  flipping through them to look for things worth keeping. The high school work in particular reminds me of how extremely neurotic and bored I was at that time - for example, check out my math notebook:

Every speckle is colored in a different color, and outlined in pen - front and back, and even the sides are colored in rainbow. The inside is much the same:

The actual contents are page after page of meticulous notes, complete with color-coded section headers:

My favorite thing I've found from college so far is the page of quotes written down from my calculus professor, who was a very sweet old man who was also somewhat crazy. Highlights include:

• MIT has many strange rules, and one of them is that I'm not allowed to torture you any more than I do.
• ≈ is a sort of Saturday night equal sign, you're not quite sure what you're doing.
• There's nothing magical about the damn second derivative!
• It's complicated, so my advice is to use the arm-waving method to decide what's true.
• Mathematics is difficult to explain to someone who doesn't know any mathematics at all.
• We could solve this by bribing a friend, or an enemy, or by standard methods, or by writing down the answer.
• You won't need to know this til after Thanksgiving, and you'd better give thanks.
• So much for that problem, which I'll never assign again for as long as I teach this course.
• Greenspan wrote those problems, I don't know how the hell to do them.
• Any questions? This is pretty easy stuff, right? That was meant to stop you from asking questions.
• You don't believe me? You'll believe me when you're sitting there again next term.
• Mean Value Theorem - some are meaner than others.
• Lagrange was a very smart guy and now he's dead so we have to give him credit.
• The Jacobian is always lurking in the dark alley of calculus.
• Whether you remember it or not, Simpson is still dead.
• I don't want to test you on the intricacies of elementary calculus, but I might mistakenly. 
• I am available to take the test for anyone for the price of one million dollars. I will put on my teenage disguise.

Rocks!

We went up to Boston this weekend to play with our friends. Mostly we ate, played board games, watched Doctor Who, and lolled around on the most comfortable couch of all time, but we did go out Saturday to Quincy Quarry so the boys could climb all over rocks while me and Stephanie cross-stitched on a picnic blanket. Gender roles!

Look at Ben climb up that rock like some sort of rock-climbing monkey!

Look at Martí climb up that rock like some sort of shirtless rock-climbing monkey!

A lot of the rocks are covered in graffiti, which looks somewhat cool but apparently makes them harder to climb. Also, we learned that back in the day the quarry was full of water, and people would dump bodies there. So, I guess some vandalism isn't too bad, historically speaking.

We also spent time hanging out in Boston Common, where we randomly ran into a big group of people we went to college with. Then we walked up Newbury Street and ate ice cream at Emack and Bolio's, which was as delicious as I remembered. All in all, a great weekend - the only downside is that now we both really want to move back to Cambridge.

Then and Now

Since my sister and I moved out, my mom uses our return every Thanksgiving as an opportunity to take our annual holiday card photo. This year she decided to duplicate her greatest hits.

1994

2011

1990

2011

After two days of these painstaking reenactments, we have created our family's 2011 holiday card. I think it's our best one yet.

Front

Back

Maybe in 10-15 years we can recreate these photos again with our own kids. I hope neither of us has boys, or, if we do, I hope they don't mind wearing dresses.