Day 77 & 78 - The Opera

Technically i got home from Berlin on Monday. I got home around 1Am. rode my bike from the train station. when i woke up in the morning, i wasn't feeling that well. kind of a sore throat and a headache. not too bad though. i'm pretty tired though. i think my scarf is making me sick. its right around my neck/mouth all the time. and travelling it can brush up against things. so i throw the scarf in wash. the washing machine is a freaking animal. it runs for 2 hours and it completely tore apart one of my very expensive victoria's secret bras. literally it tore it apart. into pieces.

monday i start working on a project for adriaan, to provide some parameters for a pile foundations for a machine pad. the machine will be operating in such a way they it produces an ellipticle motion at varying operating frequency. this cointinuous motion acts like constant small dynamic load on the piles. so i'm just trying to find out a bunch of info, like where the pile cap is relative to the adjacent ground, the site grading, the operating frequency, the pile type, etc. etc. they have a few programs called PYDYN and TZDYN to caluclate the p-y curves and pile spring constant for dynamic loads. i think they are in-house programs. so i mess around with those for awhile and put together a general soil profile based on a few nearby CTP's.

after work, i went to the gym to my kickboxing class, but was dismayed to learn that i had used up all my gym credits. i bought 10 for the ypenburg gym and 10 for voorburg. i still have about 5 left at voorburg. it was going to cost 15 euro to go the class so i decided not to pay and just went home. i should really not be sporting anyways.. i'm sick and i should really go to bed early. so i headed home and unpacked from the weekend, heated up some lasagne for dinner and got into bed around 10PM. hopefully i will wake up tomorrow feeling better. i havent resorted to taking any medicine yet, but hopefully it won't come to that.

tuesday i'm still not feeling that great. i've developed an annoying cough. bummer. i worked on my pile design again and started writing the report. i started working on something else for annemiek and maarten. some utility duct banks are going to be put in, and some paved roads will cross in certain areas. the duct banks are going to be put on piles (everything is on piles!!!), so they want us to provide differential settlement input so the approach/transition slabs can be designed. annemiek already stared it and she said she calculated about 5cm of settement. i knew that didnt sound right. that's a ton of settlement for a thin pavement section constructed at grade with a very light traffic load (just service vehicles). plus there had already been 2m of sand added to the site (about 6.5 feet) and it had been sitting there for over a year. it was done settling. so i re-ran the calcs and it was less than 1cm. i told her i don't think they even need an approach slab. i'll write the report tomorrow.

after work, i left right at 5PM, so i could catch the inauguration!! i watched in the internet. it was fantastic. i watched it twice actually. the speech was engaging, motivating, yet realistic. overall, i felt excited of new things to come. i think this inauguration means more to the previous generation. tom brokaw's fellow anchorman said following the inauguration about how he and obama are about the same age, and he recalls as a child growing up in a chicago suberb, how it was a big event when the first black family moved into the neighborhood. someone burnt the house down days before the family moved in. and now we have a black president.

following obama's speech, i felt excited and optimistic, but i also felt apprehensive for him. you can almost see the weight of the world on his shoulders. the world has put him on a pedestal. i hope he doesn't fall. its especially evident in the national news. i think we need to remember, he's just a man, not the messiah. this global financial crisis will take years to sort out and the effects will be reaching. it won't turn around overnight. there's no quick fix here.

so after the inauguration, i'm feeling pumped! i'm wondering... what can i do to help? i want to make a difference. when i get back to vta i'm going to explore some possibilities. i need to get an obama tshirt.

also on tuesday night, i went to the opera in zoetermeer. it was an event organized by fugro. the opera is called Die Fledermaus, and its presented in german with some parts translated in dutch. i ride over with herman, who's in the hydrology group, and he also lives in delft. he's probably in his 50's. on the ride over, he asks if i live near santa monica, i said oh about 1 hour away. he says i'm very lucky becuase that's where his church is. he belongs to some sort of following that believes on the year 2012 (when the mayan calendar ends), that there will be an alien invasion. herman hopes that obama is prepared for this. not the conversation i was expecting, but enlightening nonetheless.

the opera.. well, i'm the youngest person by about 40 years. adriaan was there! i didn't know he would be coming. i got to meet his lovely wife. the opera was actually quite good. it showcased all of johan strauss's famous works, and the orchestra was perfection. the play was set in late 1800's vienna. the costumes were beautiful and the cast was talented. basically it was about a husband and wife and thier maid who, by different circumstances, end up at a big formal party, and then end up in jail, and it turns out the whole thing was arranged as a joke by a "friend". it was difficult to follow because of the language, but it was funny and beautiful and lively nonetheless. i got home around 11:15. i didn't sleep very well because i'm coughing up a lung i think. time to resort to medicine i think.