Tag Archive for 'webcomics'

Since I managed to find an apartment in just one day of hunting, that left me a bit of time to enjoy Ithaca and Cornell on Friday. After a bit of a late start--thanks to the sleepness from Wednesday night's Hotel Room From Hell--I got us to campus without too much trouble from the local construction and one-way streets. My mother and I located appropriate parking, left Remy, and started walking toward the Engineering Quad to meet the professor who will likely be my advisor. Even with oppressive heat, humidity, and hills I wasn't quite ready for, I enjoyed visiting Cornell immensely. I don't think that I'd completely realized how much I missed being at a university until I stepped back on campus, but, even as a visitor, I felt immediately at home. I don't know what it is about the atmosphere surrounding research campuses, but I must be addicted to it. As promised, Ithaca was gorgeous during the summer. After our meeting, we wandered toward the Arts and Sciences buildings so that Mom could see McGraw Tower (still photos) and Cayuga Lake. Virtually every building was dubbed beautiful--unsurprisingly the Engineering buildings were the only ugly ones. On Cornell's website for virtual tours, I'll note that only the pretty Engineering buildings are featured. ;) If you're clever, though, and look at the Rhodes Hall panorama, it also shows a yellow building called Upson, which is where I'll be spending my life. We had to hit the campus bookstore after that so that Mom could pick up some Cornell merchandise to decorate her classroom. She tries to advertise universities outside of North Carolina for her students and so far has decorations for the University of Arkansas, Case, and Cornell--i.e. all the universities our family is connected to. We may have gone overboard, however, because we came back with Cornell shirts for everyone in the family. As I was wandering through the bookstore, serendipity struck in the form of the Piled Higher and Deeper comic books, which I've been looking for since April. Naturally, I snapped up copies of them and kept interrupting Mom's sudoku puzzles at the hotel later with, "Oh man, you've got to read this one!" Now she wants a poster of Newton's Laws of Graduation for her classroom. Personally, I'm thinking about a Women of Valor poster for the apartment. I think it's a must-have for any female engineering grad school geeks. I had more of a chance to see Ithaca this time than I did when I visited before, and I felt very at home there. Mom kept mentioning how much it reminded her of Fayetteville when she and Dad were at the University of Arkansas. Downtown Ithaca is filled with lots of little shops and restaurants of all kinds--and it's about a five minute walk from my apartment. There's a bumper sticker that seems to describe the liberal-leaning college town atmosphere pretty well: "Ithaca - 10 square miles surrounded by reality". Another t-shirt saying that I rather liked is a take-off on the infamous "Ithaca is Gorges" saying: "Ithaca is not George's". In short, I think I'm really going to love living there. And, in one month, I will.