Today started rather lazily; Amy got up and read for a few hours; I got up at 11 (not being used to getting up at 6:00 like she is…). After getting dressed (we dressed up, to some extent, certainly a bit more than usual) for the day, we went to Commons for breakfast/lunch, dragging Matt along with us. A pretty normal, quiet Saturday morning, except for the Amy-being-here part.
We thought that one of the shows we were going to was at 2:00, so we headed over to EMPAC to pick up tickets and go to the show; I took my camera so we could take some pictures in the 30 minutes between ticket pickup time and the actual show (so that they didn’t give away our tickets!).
Those pictures are on my Flickr now; it turned out we misread the website vs. the ticket receipt, and the show wasn’t until 10, which was really optimal because that was the same showing Mike and Nate had three tickets to. We wandered a bit more, ran into Eli (my physics grad TA from last year who graduated, but came back to see EMPAC and have coffee with a bunch of our old class), and some others…
Carol had planned on doing dinner tonight, but for numerous reasons ended up making lunch instead; Amy and I headed over there in lieu of our 2:00 show. One of Carol’s friends from home, Anna, is up for the weekend, so the four of us sat down to some excellent eggplant parmesan (I’d never eaten eggplant in that quantity nor cooked that way, as far as I can recall, but it was really very good!) and a long game of Apples to Apples… eventually we were joined by Victoria, which further broke the already broken-for-RPI ratio. All in all we had a great time, good food (as always!); even Amy came away smiling and admitting she had a good time, which is something to say considering the number of people she knew going in! We were there for a few hours, and when we finally returned to Davison (at a bit past 5), it was time to wake Robb up…
… and head back to EMPAC, this time with Nate and Mike and Matt and Robb! We met up with Carol and Anna again, and eventually Gino and Jillian, and the whole bunch of us went to the inaugural concert (with the Albany Symphony Orchestra). We were sitting just in front of the construction manager; it was rather humorous to hear some of his conversations with other people about some of the features of the building. The concert hall is absolutely beautiful, and really rather perfect, and every single one of you should convince me to take you to something in it some time! The concert was quite good, though they started out with rather old music even in the scheme of classical music, and it had a somewhat dark, dissonant feel. Things cheered up by the end, though, and they – of course – finished with a standing ovation!
Through a walk to Davison and back to EMPAC, we lost Carol, Anna, and Matt (on purpose) and went to a show in the theatre which turned out to be incredibly strange, and also rather loud (they handed out earplugs while we were walking in!)… it’s not clear to me (or, I think, anyone else… numerous people walked out on the show) what the show was about, though there was a point where a girl laid on a bit of grass in the middle of the stage chanting “I wish … (xyz)”, over and over… and another point where a person dressed only in underwear and a space helmet was dancing around on the stage with a toy space shuttle and disk on a stick… and (at a different time) another astronaut-like-person sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow… it was really rather… strange. But cool! They made good use of the theatre, in any case, and it looks incredibly cool… ah, the possibilities 
We dragged Amy to Pizza Bella after that, had our midnight snack, and now we’re back here, arguing over Orange and how best to destroy Robb’s laptop… so, check out Flickr, comment on stuff, and have fun!
Later!
Tim
