St. Paul, MN to Cedar Rapids, IA
300 miles
5 hours on the road

Got up early and had a quick breakfast with mom, then headed south towards my alma mater, Coe College. I went a different route than the one my parents always drove down (I didn't have a license throughout college) and made it in under 5 hours. My memory is that the dad route took 6. Maybe the interstate speed limits have been increased.

Anyway, since I graduated in 1998, Coe college has almost doubled in size. They bought up a few blocks of residential ghetto adjacent to campus and leveled it, building 4 new dorms and 2 new administration buildings, as well as a new quad even larger than the original. The campus is really looking great.

Coe Physics has also expanded. They've gotten so many students and new instruments that they've converted a few classrooms into lab space to make room. They're at the limit of available faculty now, and are campaigning for a new full-time faculty position. They've got a ton of reserach money, are taking a lot more trips to exotic locations (just got back from a conference in northern Italy), etc. They're doing very well for themselves. All of the new publishing they've done netted me two more journal publications (not primary author, of course) so I got copies of those.

Doc and Mario are doing very well. Doc took me to a fancy hot dog place called "The Flying Weenie." Mario has a 2-year-old daughter now. The students are as precocious as always, and somehow all of them seem to have heard of me. I spent most of the afternoon hanging out with Doc and the next generation of physics nerds. Got the latest physics club t-shirt (harmonic oscillator joke) and got invited to come back and give the keynote at a phi sigma phi banquet.

After leaving Coe, I went over to Qunitrex Data Systems (see: Initech, Pentatrode, etc.) to pick up Chris. Having just graduated from a 2-year prison program, he is still in a halfway house and could only get a 3 hour furlow to hang out with me. I was going to buy him a fancy get-out-of-jail dinner at a new Japanese steak house in Marion. Unfortunately, they decided to have an all-hands meeting at the half-way house and he had to be there... unless he was at work.

So we went back to Quintrex and hung out in his cubicle for a couple hours. I got some Chinese take out. Less than optimal, but good to see him in good spirits and nearly a free man again. His last day at the half-way house is Saturday. He has already procured an apartment, which he let me stay in for the night. Spent most of the night listening to cheesy dance tracks on one of the cable music channels and trying to get my computer to talk to his cable modem (failing miserably).