A Georgia Peach in the Big Apple
today was the microsoft intern puzzle day! we spent a whole day (10am – 6pm) with our team solving around 20 different puzzles. many were puzzles on paper, but there were some “live” puzzles where we had to go to a certain place and do an interactive puzzle.
our team did all but probably 4-5 of the puzzles and we solved the first “meta” puzzle, but not the final. not too bad i guess!
a mario puzzle
angry birds puzzle
the family (except willy because he’s in china) came to visit for july 4th weekend! we went on a cruise around the harbor, had dinner with some of daddy’s friends, and showed them my apartment and office!
daddy’s birthday was july 3rd, so we had dinner on top of the space needle!
the cool “lunar orbiter” dessert
we went glassblowing today at blowing sands glass studio. david, the owner of the studio is this really cool guy who went to MIT, took a random class about glass his freshman year and just really loved it. he ended up majoring in materials science, took a bunch of glass courses, but graduated not really able to find a job he really loved that combined art, glass-making and engineering. so he decided to just open his own studio!
glass blowing is also really big in seattle because of dale chihuly and his famous glass sculptures, so we really wanted to try it out while we were here, being inspired and all by the chihuly glass museum we visited last week!
here’s what i learned in my mini glassblowing class as i tried to make a glass pumpkin.
excited to start!
first we gather the glass
the glass gathers on the rod and i spin it so it keeps its shape
roll it in the color that we want – mine is orange and the “sunset mix”
put it in the furnace to melt the pieces of colored glass on
blow it up…this was actually surprisingly similar to blowing a balloon. we actually did this multiple times and put it in the furnace in between to heat it up so that it could blow out more easily!
sculpt it
the body of the pumpkin – it looks purple right now because the glass is still so hot!
david attaches the stem of the pumpkin and makes the cool little squiggly part by wrapping the glass around a pole.
then he torches it to give it some varnish
yay!
we had a barbecue in the park with some friends today! after work, we drove to fred meyer and bought tons of stuff to make burgers, hot dogs, and s’mores. kofi hand-made the patties and they were so good!
we had so much fun we definitely want to do it again!
we went to an art fair at redmond town center today and they had these cool frames set up and anyone could come and web yarn onto it. i added on some orange, of course.
i went to a booth and was watching this guy paint, and he asked me if i painted and whether i wanted to help him with his painting! so i helped him paint the trees!
standing next to painting of the scene behind me:
for dinner, kofi and sam came over and we made pasta and ate outside in the park next to our house. we played some basketball afterward and andrew taught me how to skateboard!
bonnie, my friend/grand-big in my sorority was in seattle this weekend, so we met up and had brunch up on top of the space needle. we had a reservation for 2pm, but it was almost 4:30 by the time we finished!! so much for brunch…it was more like “lunner”
i was so full after our super long three-course meal, but good thing i went to the bellevue mall afterwards with julia, danny and andrew. i didn’t get much but it was fun to walk around.
a friend also told us about a park by our house that was supposed to have a small beach so we went to check it out. it was obviously too cold to get in the water, but we saw lots of ducks and a few people were there fishing. it was really pretty though and had a beautiful view. we want to come back next week and have a barbecue!!
the recruitiers organized a scavenger hunt on lake union today for all the explore interns. it was a beautiful day and we got really nice views of lake union and the surrounding area!
the seattle skyline:
i went to play whirlyball with the devs (software development engineers) on my team today. i’d never even heard of whirlyball before but it was SO MUCH FUN. it’s essentially a combination of bumper cars, lacrosse and basketball. you ride in bumper cars and pass a ball to each other using mini lacrosse-like sticks and try to shoot in the baskets for your team.
the recruiter in charge of all the harvard interns took all of us to visit the chihuly glass gardens and the space needle today. chihuly is an artist known for his cooly shaped and colorful glass sculptures. they had a special exhibit at the museum of fine arts in boston last summer that i went to see, but chihuly’s studio is in seattle, so he’s really famous here and has a permanent exhibit next to the space needle.
the gardens are right underneath the space needle. the weather was perfect today so we could see a reflection of the space needle in one of the glass balls in the garden:
on top of the space needle:
