I woke up pretty late, at 6:15 am. The other people in the room with me all woke up earlier, and according to
J Wan were all laughing at me for a bit. I decided to stay on the floor for another few minutes before getting up. I got a total of 3 hours of sleep, which was great! Apparently
H Mui and
B Wang came to check in on us before, but I did not notice.
We decided to move to the couches, which were infinitely much more comfortable than the floor. We then played a few rounds of the mind, which went as well as you would expect for 6 people on 3 hours of sleep. After a few rounds of this degeneracy, at which point we were almost all asleep, I decided to go put my blankets and pillow away.
J Wan decided to do the same, so we ran down to the 2nd floor and passed
B Wang, who apparently woke up (Sorry Brandon). It turned out
J Wan had my keycard, so she allowed me into my room, where I saw
M Lu awake for once!
I then put my stuff into my room, at which point I realized I did not own my keycard. I also realized that I held valuables inside my room, and a certain person wanted these valuables. Thus, for the next 30 minutes, I fought a desperate struggle to prevent
J Wan into my room, and I was successful in doing this. However,
S Liu decided to sneak into my room and grab all of my valuables. She then left it into a place I could not access, so I lost everything of value. During this time, while trying to prevent people from stealing my stuff,
E Wang, D Dong, J Wan, and
M Lu attempted to steal my mattress. Thus, I had to enter negotiations with
K Sue and
J Wan to get my things back. We decided to steal
B Wang’s mattress, but he unfortunately would not let us.
It was getting quite late in the morning, so I got people to go to the kennywood trip.
J Lin, A Bu, M Xu, K Wu, M Lu, D Liu and I all arrived early.
L Robitaille told me to be his alarm clock, so I went to wake him up.
E Shen as usual was AWOL.
A Zhao was taking a shower, so I called him repeatedly (his roommate picked up more than once). And finally, our tour guide,
S Rudenko, decided not to show up. After some emergency calls, both to students and staff, we finally got everyone together and found a staff member (
J Godinez). We got our bus tickets, went to the stop, and watched the bus leave us because it was too full. Our group along with another one (including
A Rama, J Lee, and
E Slettnes) waited for the next bus to arrive, so we played some frisbee in the cut. During this time, a wild
J Chen from Illinois was spotted! We talked for a bit; it turned out
K Wu was his roommate at Idea math a while ago, and
K Wu was a very bad roommate :p
J Chen also decided to replace
S Rudenko as the USA team’s deputy leader. He then had to leave, and we waited for a little bit more for our bus.
When we got to kennywood, it was a bit late, but still only 11:30am. Our group of 10 split into three:
M Lu and
E Shen went together,
L Robitaille and
D Liu went exploring, while
A Zhao, M Xu, J Lin, A Bu, K Wu, and I went on all of the big, fast, and scary rides. Some highlights included:
- learning that my voice can go three octaves higher than normal
- Getting splashed during the water slide
- A Zhao learning he could not take off his shirt in the park
- J Lin being a mature person and not joining us in the kid rides
- M Xu and I watching J Lin and A Bu being dead people
- K Wu forcing me to go on scary rides (literally would not let me leave oops)
We got lunch at a really overpriced, sketchy, and bad food court.
A Zhao and I were being dumb and got pasta: it was very oily and crunchy (pretty sure they went bad). I stole some of
A Bu’s fries. We got italian ice as well, and
A Bu and I went to a thomas the tank engine gift shop. We then went back on the bus together, where I was on the verge of following asleep next to
A Zhao (but his shoulder did not let me sleep there)
When we got back, I decided to go to Sushi Fuku with
E Shen, K Vedula, and some others. On the way back,
M Lu let us know that ELMO coordination things were happening in Tepper.
E Shen and I, looking for points for our team members, rushed over there. During this time, we put off coordination an unfinished coordinate bash for later. I also read through several pages of ELMO p6s, which were mostly unusable scratch work :p. Unfortunately,
K Wu was tired of us holding him hostage, so he was not terribly interested in working with us. Thus, we held him hostage again and bumped up a 5 to a 6 (thanks
K Wu <3). I kept looking for points, even asking some really dumb questions to
E Xiong and
E Slettnes (“can you get points if the previous precedent was 0”).
L Robitaille, who was observing me attempt to get more points, suddenly found motivation to argue for partials for his team. This culminated in him yelling “points, points, points!” really loudly and excitedly when he finally discovered some possible partials for a problem 4. During this time,
M Lu and
E Shen were being extremely helpful team leaders by:
- Stealing my ELMO papers
- Giving me E Shen’s phone
- Going to the 5th floor to run away from me
- Pranking me by tricking me to go to the 5th floor and sending E Shen waving outside in the football field when I needed him
S Liu was also colluding with them and shouting stuff from the 5th floor. After 2 hours of attempting to coordinate, we got a total of 1 extra point.
ELMO coordination morphed into storytime with Po. He talked about making money and his thoughts on the differences between small/medium/large sums of money. He also told us a bit about his past life playing the market (and how he thought that playing stupidly made him money). After storytime, I headed back to Stever, where
M Xu, D Dong, K Wu, and others heard about our sleepover on the 5th floor yesterday. Thus, we, along with several other (~a dozen) people headed up to the 5th floor to play card games and sleep there. I worked on IOI\cap IMO problems because they were fun. Around 12am, which was 1 hour after curfew, we decided to pull up blankets and pillows to the 5th floor.
J Wan went downstairs to “sleep in her room”.
J Lefkowitz, Lu Tang, K Wu, D Dong, M Xu, A Zhao, E Liu, T Zhang, and I stayed up there, and I proceeded to immediately go to sleep.
B Wang went to check on us but he did not care. Unfortunately,
H Mui also came, and he did care about us sleeping on the 5th floor. He made all of us go back to our rooms, but I later learned that he was actually saving us because an RA was later coming up.
M Xu decided to sneak into my room after getting kicked out. He wanted to sleepover, however
M Lu did not want it. Because RA’s were still wandering outside,
M Xu had to stay in our room for the next hour. He attempted to run back to his room once, but an RA was outside and he had to run back inside our room. Luckily, at an opportune moment, he was able to go back to his room, and
M Lu and I were finally able to sleep at 2:30.
by Eyed, Nov 1, 2022, 1:59 AM 
November 2023
January 2023