Birthday Cookies and Black Hole Chocolate

12:01 While most SSPers stay up until our 1:30 curfew creating noise and shenanigans, I am not among them and so I’d like you to just imagine what might’ve happened this morning while I was deep asleep.

7:30 Even though we have no morning lecture today, my alarm still woke me up so I could get to work time nice and early.

8:10 Now that I had showered, gotten dressed, and maybe watched a YouTube video, it was time for breakfast.  I tried the omelet bar for the first time and even though it had been highly recommended my omelet ended up taking forever and ended up dry and disgusting.  Luckily the view from the outdoor seating made up for it even though my early wake up time meant that my only company was the distant mountains.

8:45 Ahhhh home sweet home, the computer lab.  I was the second person in, right behind Uluc, guess no one else decided to sacrifice sleep for a little extra work time, though by our usual 9:00 lecture time 25% of SSP had made it in!

11:40 Lunch time!!!!!!  Since we didn’t have a morning lecture, we got to pick our own lunch time, so me, Lana, Youja, and Cam all decided to eat at 11:40 and sat outside together.

(Cameron can’t even stop eating for a photo)

12:30 Because we had some extra time after lunch, all four of us decided to go listen to Youja practice her flute for the talent show.

(Can’t refuse a FREE concert, even if the flutist was laughing throughout it)

1:15 Our TA Laura gave an amazing talk on her journey into quantum mechanics and told us how Alice in Wonderland and Bob the Builder could communicate by q-bit!

3:10 The talk was over but the computer lab still had a class occupying it, luckily our site director Ms. Bana saved the day with an announcement of Alyssa’s birthday!!  After singing her happy birthday we all went outside and ate cookies to celebrate.

     (A very enthusiastic birthday girl)                  (Emily didn’t want to be left out of the blog)

3:30 At this point the class had all cleared out so we got right to work, continuing to code our final orbit determination programs.

4:45 My brain was thoroughly scrambled so I left a little early so I could relax a little for lunch.

5:30 Almost all of us made it on time for pre-dinner announcements which as usual contained calls for overdue blogs (hopefully this one won’t join those).

5:45 With a plate full of persian food and grapes, I joined table 2’s conversations about french horns, central Oregon, and astronomy inspired ice cream flavors!  

(A few of my favorite flavor ideas were: Hot Young Star (blue raspberry), The Rocky Road to a Dark Sky, Black Hole Chocolate (VERY dark chocolate), Meat-e-ors (maple bacon), The Milky Way (sweet cream), and Star Clusters (chocolate clusters))

7:00 Time to get back to coding…  While some of us had really good luck with our code, some codes took a lot of debugging, only to find it was a single negative, or a few decimals in the wrong place.  Just like any other coding night, there were shenanigans everywhere, including but not limited to, pictures of hairlines, curse counters, pride flags appearing in code, and muffled screams of unknown bugs.

(using simple subtraction and division we can figure out the rate of curses to be ~17 curse words per hour)

(guess Ben’s strangely formatted code decided to come out as non-binary)


Hi, I’m August and I go to George Washington High School (a really unique name).  I love space, rockets, art, crochet, teaching, being a part of the best team ever: Freeze Dried Apple Worms, being awesome, and of course, being a big nerd.  (I also like watching YouTube but that’s not quite as cool as space)