I have been extremely deliquent about posting here since moving to Michigan. The main reason is that I still intend to blog about the two baseball games I saw in California, but I haven’t actually gotten around to doing so. And now I’ve decided that whenever I get around to them, I’ll just fudge the dates and make it look like I wrote them in a timely fashion. And you and your RSS readers will just have to deal with my deception.

In the meantime, I have started to get settled in to Ann Arbor. Prior to the start of the summer program, severe homesickness* and loneliness set in. I then attempted to distract myself in the best way I know how — a project! I bought an unfinished futon loft (looks a little like this) and proceeded to prime and paint. A ridiculous mock-up of the concept is here**. I am nearly done — only the vines on the crossbeams remain. Next I’ll have to put the pieces together. Once I do so, I’ll post pictures, as promised to a number of people (most of whom read this blog).

* The worst part of it all was that Ann Arbor technically is home, so what was I homesick for?

** Subtle readers will note that I now have the same username at Michigan that I did at MIT. I had to go through a great number of hoops to get it, as the computer initially assigned me erhode, which just looks like a bad spelling of my username.

It’s probably worth mentioning that as of Wednesday (two days ago), I live in Michigan. Also, and this is probably a sign of an upcoming apocalypse, as of yesterday I have a mobile phone. If I didn’t give you the number yesterday, it probably means that I hate you and never want to speak to you again. Or it means that it didn’t occur to me that you’d want it and you could e-mail me if you do want it. You can interpret however you choose.
I spent sometime at the pool in my new apartment complex yesterday to try and beat the heat and wound up chatting with a few of my new neighbors. It seems that no one cares about baseball here (although women’s softball came up, as Michigan apparently just won the NCAA national championship). The sports talk was dominated by the Pistons. I don’t think this bodes well for my next five years as a baseball fan. I somehow doubt that I will have friends who want to get together and have some beers and brats while watching the Tigers play. Although I’m not too far from Lansing, home of the Lansing Lugnuts. Maybe it will be worth getting into minor league ball. I can be like Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham.

Today I got official word that I was accepted to Michigan’s Summer Institute for incoming grad students who received the particular fellowship that I received. Which means that come end of May, I’ll be moving out of Boston for Ann Arbor. The details haven’t been entirely worked out yet, but in the next month and a half, I’ll need to find an apartment, buy a car, and most likely — drum roll, please — a cellphone. (And no, this time it’s not an April Fool’s joke… but I’m sure the Minnesota Zoo appreciated Mr. Sarwate’s text message. And speaking of April Fool’s jokes, everyone should go to this entry and read down the first letter of each line, as apparently most of you missed my cleverness the first time around.)

Someone in Michigan likes me! More specifically, someone in the Computer Science and Engineering Division at the University of Michigan likes me.
The important question to consider…
Do I or do I not want to bring my magic baseball luck to the Detroit Tigers? They don’t have quite the drought that the Red Sox had or that the Cubs still have. Plus, they’re in the American League central and would be competing directly with the Twinkies.