30 days

(28b) Beer Bike: Can't Rain On Our Parade

Posted by Ivy

Photos taken March 20.

The rest will be up on Facebook or Flickr sometime tomorrow (I hope).

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Puppies playing while their owners watch the water balloon parade from the safety of the sidelines.

Dudes in capes running to catch up with their college’s trucks

Rice students: balancing work and play since 1912

Alums watching the parade/staying out of the rain

Jones College as viewed from the steps of Keck Hall

FIGHT. (That’s not rain splashing in the background)

It’s important to come prepared to these kinds of things

Ammunition, please!

Enjoying a brief calm in the (literal and figurative) storm

Right after the parade had finished and everybody had run out of water balloons, it started raining again. Ugh.

On days when it’s not cold and rainy, the main event of Beer Bike are (surprise!) bike relay races around our outdoor cycling track. The teams have twenty members–ten bikers and ten chuggers. A chugger has to drink 12 (for girls) or 24 (for guys) ounces of water as fast as they can; after they finish, a biker immediately starts on a set number of laps. Once the laps are completed, the next chugger goes, and so on and so forth. Some colleges train for months for Beer Bike, and it’s pretty disappointing when the races get postponed.

They did hold the alumni race this year, because alums tend to come back to Rice specifically for Beer Bike and it would be hard to postpone this particular event. The alumni had to do a Beer Run instead of biking, which, sadly, I didn’t get any pictures of because I was busy being freezing and wet in the alumni tent (also, I didn’t want to get my camera gear soaked…). I did take this one after they had finished the Beer Run and just before I left the track area.

At least we got the water balloon fight in!

RICE FIGHT NEVER DIE.

(28a) Beer Bike, pre-parade

Posted by Ivy

Photos taken on March 20.

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Rice University + hundreds of thousands of water balloons + hundreds of college kids + early morning wakeup calls + pouring rain = 2010 Beer Bike parade.

Balloons loaded in the trucks pre-parade

Alumni reunions

Brown College getting ready for the parade…right before it starts to rain

Brown moves out in spite of the rain

Remnants

(27) Eat Your Heart Out, Krispy Kreme

Posted by Ivy

Still catching up with 30-photos/30-days. These were taken (very early in the morning) on March 19.

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A couple of weeks ago, when I was talking to Alex about my upcoming trip to Houston, he mentioned a plan to stay up extremely late one night and then go eat Shipley’s Do-Nuts at five in the morning, when the donut place first opens. I thought he was kidding.

But I should know better than to doubt my old roommate, and, sure enough, on my first night in Houston I found myself staying up way past my bedtime, cramming into a car with five other people, and driving down Kirby to wait around in the parking lot of Shipley’s, because we’d gotten there ten minutes before opening.*

I tried to shoot this as a modified five-points-of-view assignment, just for practice. I’d edit the series way down if I were actually turning it in, but I’m okay with all ten of these pictures being up on on the blog.** That’s what blogs are for, right?

*It should be noted that the freshly-baked hot-off-the-press donuts were well worth the absurd effort we went through to get them.
**More pictures (i.e. the non-candid ones) will be on Facebook eventually. I’m slow about posting things.

(26) Up in the Air

Posted by Ivy

I’m exceptionally behind in posting these photos, but I have been keeping up with the daily challenge! These are from March 18.

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Even though I’ve been to Texas multiple times in the last six years, I can’t remember the last time I took a night flight there. It might have been freshman spring, back in 2005.

This is kind of sad, because as much as I enjoy flying (quite a bit), I like night flights even more. It’s a very surreal feeling to get on a plane in one location when the sun is still up…and then land in a new place while it’s dark. I love it. I love seeing the landscape below me, and nightscapes in particular are fascinating. National Geographic did a great feature on this phenomenon last year (I think it also won some POYi awards), which I highly recommend checking out.

I was scheduled to arrive in Houston at 9pm, but gave up my seat on that flight for a $200 voucher on Southwest and a brief layover in Dallas. And it only took an hour longer to get to Htown. Not too shabby!

Dallas by night

Got tired of highlighting passages of reading for my thesis and instead highlighted all of the states I’ve been to on my Southwest napkin.

A happy accident of a picture taken right as the plane was landing. I had the shutter set to ‘bulb’.

(23) Relief

Posted by Ivy

Wow, I fell off the wagon with posting. I would blame coding, but Phoebe has kept up with her 30-Day project in spite of having far more newspaper images to work through than I did, so really, no excuse.

That said, today is probably one of the best days I’ve had all semester long. Scratch that. It IS the best day I’ve had all semester. This is for two reasons.

1) I don’t have to wear a leg brace anymore! This is the first time in exactly two months that I haven’t had some sort of immobilizing contraption on my left leg, and it’s a wonderful feeling. I’m so free! Take that, irresponsible SUV drivers of the world.

2) I finished coding all of the photos from my thesis data set! There were 635 total, and I made a 65-page spreadsheet cataloging them all (this is much longer than my thesis currently is, which is kind of depressing, but I won’t focus on that part right now). Now I can start actually analyzing stuff and learning things. Yay!

Fittingly, on the day I finished coding, I also got my film back from the Tennessee trip I made in order to get 548 of those images. But those (except for the very next one) will get their own post.

My little workspot in the Vanderbilt library. Disposable cameras can’t handle closeups.