Billy Dee Williams

I am working for real, guys. I've been going into the office and everything. It feels good to be back in a routine: I get up and read for a couple of hours, then I have lunch and walk over to school where I work until around 5, then I go to the gym or home. It's a little weird being in the office with no other grad students around -- talking to Jessica is great, but we seem to tend to get sucked into very long conversations, and if I go into Dr. K's office to say hello he always looks at me like I'm about to deliver terrible news. Anyway, thesis stuff is going well so far -- as I predicted, the topic I've chosen to study, although maybe not something I was drawn to most strongly, has become much more interesting as I've started digging into it. Have I told you what my thesis is about? I'm researching an evacuation in Casselton, ND following a train derailment and explosion in December using the Protective Action Decision Model (jargon!). Both Dr. K, my advisor, and Gurt, one of my committee members, are interested in pursuing additional research on the derailment, so I'll hopefully be pretty busy next year helping out with that. It's fun to get to work with people on a project like this, and having some deadlines on my calendar has given me a good push. I should also be getting started on USDA stuff any day now... There were a number of technical difficulties (I spoke to someone at IT yesterday who walked me through what sounded like about a dozen steps to get me my username and password, and then said, "I just don't know how something could have gone wrong!"), and although I still have a couple of silly technical hurdles to deal with (why must the federal government insist on using Internet Explorer???), I'm very close on that.

Other than work stuff, life has been pretty good. Last Thursday I drove down to Minneapolis for Morgan's friend Addie's sort-of bachelorette party. Morgan, Jenny, Addie and I started the evening at the Walker. Out in the sculpture garden, a group of people had gathered to applaud with each other for two hours (of course), and while we were partaking in some of the art activities in another area, someone from that group came up to Addie and told her that his group had expressed a wish to applaud for her. After we finished drawing, we went over and were clapped at for a few minutes, so that was interesting. After the Walker, we went out for pizza, where Julia met up with us. Vegan pizza, guys. Great work Minneapolis. Then it was on to a night of wandering and drinking. We had put together a list of activities for Addie to complete, most of which had a community engagement component, but as it was a Thursday night and few people were out, she couldn't complete many of them (although major kudos for her for approaching so many people for condoms). The next morning we met up again for breakfast, took a little trip to Minnehaha Falls, and in the afternoon I headed back to Fargo.

The rest of the weekend the main excitement was tearing through some library books and doing the crossword with Lia on Sunday. Last night was trivia, and it was great as always, even though we literally ended the night with zero points (go big or go home). Erin's stock response for questions she doesn't know the answer to is "Billy Dee Williams," and in last night's Name That 'Stache round, we considered that option, but went in a different direction because the skin tone didn't seem quite right. In a tragic twist, though, the correct answer was, in fact, Billy Dee Williams, which was the most crushing blow, even though we still would have lost if we'd guessed correctly. Let me know if you've got a new stock answer for us, it would make Erin feel a lot better. The rest of the week is going to be work, work, work (even the 4th, I know, poor Amanda), but that's all ok because my parents are going to be in town next week. We're going to have a great, weird time in Minneapolis and then in Fargo. If you are in Minneapolis and are interested in experiencing my parents first hand, let me know, we may be able to work something out.