Sunday: Finally found a church out here, called Kaleo Church. Very happy to finally find a church to call home out here. Hrmmmm what else did I do? Had a tasty summer lunch on the grill and……oh yeah I went hiking with my aunt’s friend, Pina that I met at the dinner party the night before! It was so much fun! We went hiking at Torrey Pines which is this “mountain” right by the ocean with all these funky desert plants. It was beautiful! It was great to go hiking with Pina and get to know her more, she’s awesome. Plus she treated me to Roberto’s, this Mexican restaurant right by Torrey Pines. It was both delicious and incredibly inexpensive. We had this crazy burrito thing(she made me try it because it was their specialty), in that it had French fries in it. Definitely not healthy but it was good, happy we split it though! Hoping to hang out with her some more this summer, which I think will definitely happen. Here’s some pictures from the hike.
Monday: NSF refunding site visit started today for the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center(which my lab is a part of). Basically for me that didn’t mean too much though, more for the heads at my lab. I did have to demo my animation and art I have been doing for my internship the past few weeks for this demo/poster session. Unfortunately, there were 46 of these things going on and the site visitors only had 45 min. to get through (and we had 10 site visitors from NSF come). I had about 4 people talk with me (and I believe all of them saw what I was doing). Most of the people I talked with were nice and liked my work and didn’t ask too many questions besides what I was studying. One guy from NSF I guess told the heads at my lab that if I was looking for a job to contact him (hint animation friends, if you are looking for a job, especially if you’re good at Flash, contact research labs….I’m finding a lot of them desperately want animators working for them but don’t know who to contact). There was one guy who was a total jerk though after he found out I was just the artist, tried to belittle what I do (which I was like, “whatever guy, you are obviously just too cool for me and apparently know everything*rolls eyes*”). Afterwards, my aunt wanted me to show her friend Terri(the one we saw The Lottery with a few weeks ago) my animation stuff (both for work and my youtube account). Well, this show and tell ended up with the majority of my lab watching it and them yet again getting amazed. It was good because from this, I ended up finally being introduced to everyone in the lab, so now they all know who I am. My aunt then dropped the hint that I needed a job after I graduate(she forgot about my grad school plans) and both Marni and Javier(the two heads at my lab) said they are going to look into if they have the money to pay me, but they were fairly certain they do, so it looks like I may possibly have a job working here after I graduate if I so choose(and I may be able to work part-time while I’m at school through the magic of the internet). So I have that now to contemplate….which then lead to me just contemplating about many, many things which I don’t have enough room or energy to write about(basically about my life, the future and reflecting on living out in San Diego). It was a deep night of quiet contemplation.
Tuesday-Day 2 of site visit. Listened to my aunt give her 2 speeches which included a Q&A and at the first one, things got really heated between one of the site visitors and the whole TDLC group. I was glad I was sitting next to Judy, one of the scientists who is a part of the center because she was cracking joke after joke about the NSF guy, it definitely relieved some tension for me. But seriously, things got REALLY tense. The guy pretty much disagreed with what the center was doing and considered it “one of the stupidest things I have ever heard”….no worries though, Javier totally changed this guy’s mind by today and he apologized for his comment and admitted he was wrong. By the time that was over, it was time for lunch. The nice thing about the site visit is that both breakfast and lunch were provided. After that, I went back to my lab but no one was there and I worked for a bit before giving myself a half day. I’m happy I decided to do so, I was able to get my first test for the Genesis class I’m taking Distance Ed., get through 2 more lessons, go for a long walk, and catch up with 3 or 4 people via the phone that I had been meaning to call. Poor people at my lab though, they had to pull a very late night answering questions and getting ready to prepare to talk about those answers the next morning. My aunt was a part of this, she didn’t get home until 3am.
Wednesday-Today was relatively boring compared to the past few days….I went to a normal day of work, designed and built racecars in flash for the intro video of this racing game we’re building, got through another 2 lessons for Genesis(over half way done, yay! Trying like mad to get done before the end of the month), called the last person who I had been meaning to call….yeah definitely a more low-key day than the last few have been.
That's all folks!
~Lauren
EDIT: I should probably note something about the potential job opportunity cause some people have been asking about it and I think I was confusing. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it because as of right now, they haven't officially asked me, it's just an idea thrown at them and they seemed favorable about the idea. But that's all it is right now, an idea, a possibility but not a reality as of yet.
