The next few weeks

For the past few months there have been a number of events that I have been looking forward to which are now all about to happen within a couple weeks of each other.

First, my brother-in-law Scott is getting married in Edmonton January 30.  We are all flying out there this coming Friday morning for the weekend.  I am not looking forward to the cold.  We get so spoiled here in Vancouver where the winters are so mild.  I've become a major wuss when it comes to cold weather.  They have asked Kaylen to be the flower girl and we've been pumping her up for that.  Hopefully she actually walks down the aisle - I'm a little worried she'll start doing somersaults or start showing off some of her new dance moves she learned from dance classes over the last couple of weeks.  When you put a 2.5 year old in charge of something you never know what's going to happen.

Second, my San Francisco trip.  Last semester a group of classmates and I were designing and analyzing a 5 foot high model high-rise building to withstand the shaking of three earthquakes modeled after earthquakes that were recorded over the past few years.  The largest of these earthquakes is the Kobe earthquake of 1995.  Over the last three weeks we have been working relentlessly on building our designed model to take to San Francisco to test it in a competition against a bunch of American schools.  I'll post some pictures of the building soon so you can see what it looks like.  For the competition we had to design a team T-shirt and I came up with the idea seen below.

I was bored in law class last week and thought of this.  UBC Engineers are well known in this area for hanging VW beetles off of bridges.  About 8 years ago a bunch of students went to san Francisco and hung a bug off the Golden gate Bridge, see picture below.  I thought it might be fun to remind them of this.  Anyway, I drew up a conceptual sketch and gave it to a team member who then gave it to her sister who is an animator and she then took by not so amazing piece of art and made it look like the above image.

As I mentioned previously, while I'm down there I thought it might be cool to swim from Alcatraz to shore.  I spent a lot of time looking up the viability of this idea and it is soon to become a reality.  There is a guide down there that helps people do this for his job.  He will be taking care of the permits and providing the boat assistance.  Basically, my safety is covered so there is no need to worry.  I'm doing the swim Tuesday Feb 2, at 7:00am.  The water will be freezing but oh well; I'll worry about that later.

Lastly, the Olympic Torch Relay.  I will be carrying the torch February 8 at about 7:13am in Maple Ridge BC.  I will be running along Route 7 from 228St to 227St in the odd chance that anyone wants to come watch.

I'm quite excited about all of these things and I'll definitely keep you all posted and how everything goes.  Hopefully I'll get some good photos to share.