Baby, it's cold outside...(well, 68 degrees this morning but its cold for here...)

I will admit that I feel very guilty that I avoided being in Chicago today. As some people know I am lucky enough to be allowed to work remotely part of the time which means that I alternate being in Florida and Chicago on a regular basis. I was originally supposed to fly in today but given all of the cancellations and delays, along with the fact that people were being told not to drive which would make leaving the airport pretty challenging, I decided it was best to stay in Fort Myers for a few more days. I know, I lead an incredibly difficult life…

(Admittedly while the work arrangement is great the fact that Kim and I often seem to be apart more than we are together does not make for the easiest time for a marriage. We’ve made it work but it does make it a lot more challenging when you can’t take out the trash because you are in another time zone.)

They’ve mentioned that this is the coldest that it has been in twenty years and I can actually tell you where I was during that cold snap twenty years ago. I was down in Champaign at the University of Illinois and it is one of my favorite stories about the campus, what it is like being an engineer and just how backwards things were at the time. First off, the Illinois campus is massive. I lived in the most convenient dorm that I could to minimize my walk to classes and I was still probably five or six blocks from the EE building. However, the smart students learned every possible path through buildings to get from one place to the other to avoid being outside for too long. This was very helpful for us engineers as we felt that any exposure to the sun would result in instant death.

On this day (where I think the windchill was 50 below) I believe I walked through the Psychology building, past the Espresso Royale coffee shop with its permanently fogged windows but surprisingly warm exhaust vent, through the Administration building and the Union to make it to Everitt Lab. If I am right I would never have gone more than a block and a half without walking into another building and I don’t think I would have been able to make it if I had to walk any farther.

I went through my day of EE classes (and if I remember right this was during the first week of classes so everything was just getting started) and I would say that the room was about 90% full. This was EE at Illinois, junior year to be exact, and for the most part the room was full of bitter, downtrodden guys for whom having to brave the cold was the least of their problems in life. As those of us who sat in the back of the room once said “I study all the time, never go out, don’t have a girlfriend and every once in a while we are reminded that there are thirteen year olds smarter than us.” It was literally a room filled with people who never even gave a second thought to not going to class that day.

When I made it back to my dorm that afternoon and talked to some of my friends they were all amazed that not only did I make it to class but that there was class at all. Apparently it was announced in the student newspaper that morning that due to the temperatures that classes were cancelled and anyone who missed class would be given an excused absence. However, since no one on the campus outside of the people who actually wrote the Daily Illini read the Daily Illini, I was completely oblivious to this fact. So yes, twenty years ago on a day when your skin would freeze in less than a minute I went to class because no one bothered to tell me that class was cancelled.

And people wonder why we put the EE building across the street from a bar…

Back to the old Alma Mater

Nothing makes you feel older than returning to your old college campus. I found this out a few weeks ago when I returned to the University of Illinois for the first time in well over a decade. Well, that is not entirely true. I was there for a few hours a year and a half ago with Kim but it was during finals week in December. No one should ever have to experience Champaign in December as everything is simply a different tinge of gray with students walking around stressed and wishing they were anywhere else. Ok, so that is a general description of Champaign at any time of the year but it is even worse in December.


But this time, through a bunch of circumstances that I might get into at some point, I had a few hours by myself on campus on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in April. Which let me do everything that I wanted to do on campus including realize why I should not be on a campus any more.

Kim usually doesn’t believe my college stories. Mainly because when I returned to campus and had a choice to visit anywhere I wanted my first choice, without any hesitation, was Everitt Lab: the home of Electrical Engineering. Most people would choose the bookstore or their dorm or a bar but no, I literally ran to room 245 where I spent some of the most challenging years of my life. I was thrilled to see that they still had actual blackboards and desks without computer hookups just like I did back in the day when it was just you, a calculator, a notebook, half a dozen pencils and a hope that maybe today would be the day a meteor would slam into the building. I went and checked out which of my professors were still teaching, stopped by the old office that I weaseled my way into my senior year and even stopped by my old lab.

Now I have to start by explaining what my old lab consisted of. The Power Lab is located in the basement of Everitt Lab and consists of motors, engines, a lot of complicated monitors and big red buttons labeled “Emergency”, which if you press turns off the electricity to the entire room. We were next to the fabrication lab, where students would be bathed in yellow light while wearing clean suits and building integrated circuits. We looked at them like they were aliens and they wondered why occasionally they would hear explosions from our lab. For the record, only once did part of a circuit I constructed end up embedded in the ceiling tiles.

Obviously labs should be locked on a Saturday but I walked down anyway and was stunned to find the door open. I walked in and saw probably a dozen students working away at the lab stations. It was possibly the geekiest thing I had ever seen. It was a beautiful day out, a Saturday in April of Mom’s Day weekend and here were these students laboring over their projects. My reaction was not to tell them, “Go outside! There is more to life than circuit designs.” No, I was holding myself back from offering to help. That was me twenty years ago. No question about it.

I could accept that I was older than the students in the lab. They were kids, of course, but at least they were still working in the same lab and probably doing the same projects that I worked on. And it was still the same building with the same professors. It was when I walked the campus that it really hit me. Not only were there new buildings but things like a Chick-Fil-A in the student union, the disappearance of nearly all the bars that I used to go to and the loss of all of the record stores that existed in Campustown. I spent hours every week in those stores and they were all gone. That hurt.

But here was when it really hit me. I went back to my old dorm. I walked in behind a student and her parents, looking like I was maybe some uncle who had latched on at the last second. I wasn’t going in to see a dorm room or anything. I needed to find a trophy in the student lounge. A very particular trophy that twenty years ago was my plan for immortality on campus. A trophy whose story will have to wait for tomorrow.

Wednesday Night Music Club: Thought that I would feature one of the Champaign bands from that same time as they look now. Yeah, Poster Children has aged roughly as well as I have. Still, they were a band that deserved much more airplay than they received.