The lows are low, but the highs are home

Honestly, when I was asking people what to do in Edmonton, I didn’t get a lot of suggestions. Whyte Avenue is close to where I live, and to the university, so a lot of people recommended it. There’s the West Edmonton Mall, obviously (look it up - I’ll wait). After that, most people struggled for a few minutes to come up with things. We did wind up collecting some suggestions for nice places to eat, trails to bike down, etc - but never wound up taking advantage of any of those.

        We did explore Whyte Avenue a bit. The Chapters I mentioned in the last post was the farthest we went, though - about fifteen minutes of walking, maybe. Aside from browsing different small shops, we tried and failed repeatedly to get decent sustenance. We got ice cream at a really disappointing Dairy Queen near the University (it’s by Sobeys, don’t go there). We also had an atrocious milkshake from a place called Mike’s Famous that, as I later learned, tends to mostly serve drunk people (also on Whyte Avenue, and best avoided).

        Then we got dinner at an Irish pub, where the wait for food and our bill was long, and the service was… well, there wasn’t really much service at all. Every patron who wandered in spent five minutes looking for a place to sit, because they give you the liberty of seating yourself. We had a nice spot by the entrance, where we got to watch the confusion first-hand. So that was our evening entertainment, free of charge!

        We went to West Edmonton Mall for an entire day, just shopping and looking for stores that Ottawa doesn’t have. I bought a light cotton hoodie to replace my trusty old XKCD one, now stained one time too many. M- felt that green went well with my complexion, and like most things she tells me about fashion, she was right. She mostly browsed, but tried on one extra-small dress at Suzy Shears that didn’t quite fit. One of the cashiers got the item code for us, though, so she could get her mother’s expert opinion on whether it could be altered to fit. Incidentally, the cashier was a neuroscience student at UofA, and generally a lovely person. She told us we seemed like a great couple, which was cute.

        We actually went back a few days later to see the amusement park. Back to the West Edmonton Mall, I mean - you know it has an amusement park inside, right? And a water park, and a hotel, and two mini-putt places. It was Friday when we went, though, which is apparently a bad idea - that’s when nearby schools send their kids on field trips to the park. The folks at the information booth were kind enough to let us transfer our passes to Saturday, actually, which was pretty smart. Otherwise I’d be telling you about how we wasted sixty bucks!

        Instead, I’m here to tell you that it’s a pretty alright amusement park. Admittedly, it was more to M-’s taste than mine. I’m a fan of variety and medium-ish adrenaline - I’m generally satisfied if I do a roller coaster once, and even then I’m not big on the craziest ones. Neither of those things are true of my wonderful partner in crime. There aren’t really that many rides in the amusement park, actually, so M- did a couple things multiple times while I sat aside and read. I went on most of them once, for her sake. Oh, and we bought all the pictures where we were visible, at least one of which shows us grimacing painfully.

        Eventually we moved on to Southgate Mall, where a new Lego store had opened more than a week ago. They were having a grand opening event this particular weekend: visitors could help build an 8-foot tall statue of Yoda. M- and I contributed one “brick” each (mine constructed with painful slowness), which we built according to instructions out of 39 regularly sized bricks. They were having a prize draw for the 50 people with the best estimates on the number of bricks used in the entire statue, and we spent some time trying to calculate the number. Pretty quickly I gave in to pessimism and let her work it out, which I’m not proud of, but there you go. The actual store itself had a two-hour long line to get in, despite being empty when I was there a week ago. Needless to say, we didn’t wait.

        We took buses to travel to/from the malls, which cost $2.50/person each way. You get a three-hour (I think) transfer slip, but unlike in Ottawa, taking a new bus doesn’t renew your transfer. The buses themselves were a bit less… advanced? than Ottawa - ours have a speaker that declares the next stop, a display for the stop name, and have recently moved to an NFC-enabled bus pass. Luckily for us, it’s obvious when you’ve arrived at the West Edmonton Mall, but we could easily have missed our stop if we were going to a street address.

        We also borrowed bikes from two of the linguistics PhD students. However, M- nor I really knew how to adjust them, and both bikes needed it badly. So we never used them. After M- had left, my landlord and I rode the bikes to campus to return them. At this point, I realized that I hadn’t ridden a bike since 6th grade (plus or minus a year). Also, the helmet didn’t seem to fasten correctly. So while we were riding down the back streets, I was utterly terrified of all the potholes. I went pretty slowly the whole way, and in the end I did survive. But I had to be reminded that the bike had handbrakes and kicking the ground wasn’t the best way to slow down.

        Oh! And we also went to the farmer’s market early Saturday morning. Didn’t buy much, but M- grabbed business cards from the interesting spots. I tried to buy Belgian waffles, except they only took cash, and I had none on me. But one of these days I’ll go and stock up and then have waffles and be happy.

Surely you’re asking yourself: how was your girlfriend’s visit, Matt? Well, I’ve got two posts lined up to tell you! This one is a bit more personal, the next one is a bit more about the city itself.

        We hadn’t seen each other for just shy of a month and a half. On April 28th, M- went to Paris with her family. We’d spent an hour or two together the night before, after I finished my last term paper. On their way to the airport, they stopped by for a brief visit. I spent the next few days preparing to leave, then I left for Edmonton on May 1st. We didn’t see each other in the flesh until June 9th.

        It was hardest when she was in Paris, when the time zone difference made it hard to exchange e-mail more than once per day. When they got home, things were better - we could text and IM and Skype, without the distractions of Paris (said if flowery French). But even so, we’d never been apart for more than a few days since we met - we bonded quickly, shared most of our classes, and we worked together over the summer in 2012. So this was a test of our relationship!

        For a variety of reasons, the stars didn’t align for M- to start working until late May. I got a bit excited when I heard of the first delay - perhaps she could visit before starting work! I may have been a bit of a pest for a couple of weeks. When the first good sale came up, she booked the nearest flight that had a reasonable arrival/departure time. I wound up with a week for warning of her visit, but it was a lovely surprise.

        To be honest, we didn’t do anything terribly interesting. We curled up on the couch to finish the fourth season of Adventure Time. Over the course of the week, we caught up on the third season of Game of Thrones (her family has HBO!) We spent an hour in Chapters, browsing the manga, sci-fi and fantasy sections at length.

        We tried to play Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light in co-op again, only to be utterly baffled after being away from it for months. We laid in bed and held hands and chatted about fanfiction for an hour before going to sleep. We learned about communicating expectations, and that opening my e-mail on my phone and saying “hey, did you see this thing I sent you?” is not the best way to guarantee an answer. Read receipts are way better - I’m using Boomerang for Gmail now.

        I managed to convince her to make use of the Pokemon TCG cards I’d bought and left in Ottawa for her (one pack of cards for every week that I’m away!). Or, at least, she decided she could suffer a little to make me happy. At any rate, we played two games, and I was right in the end - she enjoyed herself and asked if we could play again in the future. Though I suspect we’ll need to beef up our decks a bit, because our second game was painfully long. But with that fixed, this may be our activity when we sync up on weekends from now on.

        I think it was good for us to be on our own for a week! We cooked together and did dishes together. We ate more dessert than we should have. It was, generally, a lot like living together. We managed fairly well! Granted, it’s nicer by far to be home with my parents, or with hers. But we didn’t get in each other’s way, and nobody died - both good signs. It was lovely to see her again, truly. I got sad during our last evening together, but like usual, she cheered me up pretty quickly. I did have trouble getting back into the rhythm of a full workday, but now I’m feeling pretty good. Only two months until we see each other again! I can manage that. I think.

        As far as work goes, I’m learning a lot of valuable stuff about natural language processing! I’ve been attending weekly meetings of the NLP research group, and going to AI seminars when the topic seems interesting. I’ll put up some notes from the good ones, I think. Anyway, I’ve been writing a lot of Python code, some of which I think is quite nice. I’ve learned how to process XML data with Python’s iterparse(), which is far more intuitive than any of the DOM-esque approaches I’ve looked at in the past. XML had never really “clicked” with me before this. I’ve also been parsing command line arguments for the first time, using argparse. Similar to the XML thing, I looked at optparse when I first started with Python 2.6, and it seemed sucky. Maybe argparse is a big improvement, or maybe I’m just “better” than I was then - either way, it’s a good skill to have.

        One other thing I’ve learned is that I hate working on things that don’t seem like they’re going to do any good. There was a period of a week or two where I was struggling to get to a point where we could evaluate the real-world performance of some programs we were looking at (more on this in another post). In the interim, I tested the programs on data from English, and the results were really not good. It later turned out that my calculation of the results was wrong (I tried to be Pythonic at the wrong time), and that a non-sensical tweak vastly improved the results.

        But even though the results did get a bit better, I got really demotivated, because I knew I had to keep working on the task. But I also thought that I already knew how it was going to turn out (badly), and felt like I was wasting my time. In the end, things were better than I expected, and we’re back to making forward progress - but it was sucky for a little bit.

        About two weeks ago, I worked up the courage to e-mail the university’s fencing club. I kinda figured I’d never get a response, but it turns out they answer their e-mails pretty quickly! So last week I went out to practice with them, got introduced to everyone, and so on. First, everyone there seems cool (not being facetious, I mean I should hang out with them some time). Second, my co-worker also fences, which is hilariously improbable. Third, man am I out of shape after not fencing for eight months. I could probably fence a few bouts to 15 a year ago, and last week I practically collapsed after five bouts to 3. This week we did drills, and I got some perfectly deserved advice/criticism from the foil coach. But I felt really, really good as I was walking home after practice. It’s nice to be back.

        The hardest part, I think, is being far away from my girlfriend. For as long as we’ve known each other, we’ve generally spent a significant portion of our time together. We text each other daily, chat on the phone every couple of days, and spend an hour or two on Skype watching Adventure Time on the weekends. We’ve got about half of Season 4 left to watch, then it’s probably on to the newest season of Game of Thrones. But anyway, it’s still a lot less time together than I’m used to.

        She’s going to visit in July, as a birthday gift from her parents. Which is sort of the most boring part of the summer, because her birthday is in June, while August has Animethon and my birthday. It’s the best time logistically, but still. I don’t think we’ll be able to scrounge up funds for a second trip, anyway.

        But I’m fine! Life is pretty good. I’ve got summer projects planned, but I don’t know which ones I’ll follow through on. Some things to get ready for September. I’ve got some physical and social activity outside of work. So stop asking me if I regret accepting this job every time we talk! glare

I’ve been in Edmonton for a month now as of today. I’m definitely settled in, though there’s plenty of things I miss from home. I can’t really claim to have seen the city and formed an opinion on it, because I haven’t been anywhere that takes more than 30 minutes to walk to. But I’m happy about that! It’s really nice not having to deal with public transit. Also, walking gives me time to play video games.

        I started writing parts of this two weeks ago, but got kinda sidetracked. I’ll try to run quickly through a few big events…

        On May 10th, I got a tour of the “Linguistics department”, which is about one and a half floors of a building on the far side of campus. I learned that we have a lounge with a fridge and some other appliances, and that the department sells shirts that say “If you can read this, you must be a linguist” in IPA. Which is the best thing ever. I also got introduced to a lot of people. The whole process took… about two and a half hours. I got home around 7pm and was completely exhausted.

        I haven’t had an incredibly varied diet, except when I get lazy and waste money buying food on campus. Mostly it’s been pasta, rice, cereal, bread + peanut butter, and a couple of frozen pizzas when I got lazy. It’s strange being transplanted into someone else’s kitchen, where you know the things you want are somewhere, but you have no idea where. At any rate, I should really get around to buying cold cuts and other sandwich materials, plus meat and vegetables and such to add to rice and pasta…

        There’s a few niggling things about the furniture in my room. The desk and chair aren’t really home office quality. Which would be fine for lots of people, but I can’t keep going to bed sore because I was on my computer for more than an hour. But I’m not sure to what degree I can do something about that. I suppose I should talk to the home owners about it, but I don’t know what the etiquette on that is.

        Speaking of which, for the few weeks I only ever saw Mike, the husband. Last weekend, when he came back from Calgary on Sunday, he brought his wife back with him. They arrived around 9pm, and Cindy proceeded to spend three hours cleaning, decorating, baking, and more. It was really nice meeting her - she gave the distinct impression that they treat this place much like they treat their bed and breakfast near Ottawa. She said she’d clean my bathroom for me, fix the headboard on my bed, buy a slow cooker, and a bunch of other stuff. I mean, I’d totally survive if she didn’t do any of those things! But she said she’d take care of it all, which is super nice.

        My shower has apparently been leaking into the basement - turns out water was getting through some of the tiles and rotted out a part of the wall. So someone’s coming in to fix that at some point. Until then, I’ve been showering in the basement, which is fine. The other exciting not-living-at-home-anymore event was deciding to turn off the mini-fridge that came with my room. I uh… learned a bit too late not to unplug the power from a fridge and leave it closed afterwards. Apparently everyone knows that except me - I never asked why my mom does that with the spare fridge at our house… Had to clean it out, got water all over, but it’s good now.

        This got long, so I’ll post the rest in a few days.