Found some old pictures while shuttling new ones into folders. My first solo lasercutter run, trying out the new machine at Wellesley in early 2007 for the first run of teaching ECS there (Alex and I were the inaugural TAs). Naturally, the first thing I cut had to be...

MetaOlin rice break in Boris's room - from left to right, it's Boris, Dellin, and Chandra. The great thing about rice and soy sauce is that with a bag that costs a couple bucks, you can fuel a horde of college kids through midnight snacks for... well, maybe a month. I'm not sure how long the sack of rice lasted.

For the senior retreat right before graduation, all of us were given an index card and told to make a representative collage. I have pictures of the cards my suitemates made; they're hilarious, at times mildly disturbing, full of inside jokes, clean, stuffed with pictures, nicely laid out, haphazardly thrown together... I started sketching possible layouts in pencil on my card, kept erasing and redrawing them, and then finally decided to make that my card, hanging my pencil up with it at the last moment.

A whole slew of other things in here, too - posters I made for my freshman year hallway, photo shoots for SuIEEEte's yearbook page (my junior year suite did a Harry Potter III spoof), 30 second video competition entries ("finding Gillester"), Halloween costumes (my favorites over the years: Robin (from Batman), the locomotive of a 4-person freight train, a cello, asleep (bed strapped to back), the Prince from Katamari Damacy), pictures of me and my brother as little kids, a high-school Mel clambering atop the blue metal sculpture in IMSA's front lawn (Yare Yard), the Respawn Point poster I made to cheer up Alex and Not during a hellish finals week, Matt Ritter grinning in front of a burrito shop.

I should take more and better pictures; I really do appreciate them years down the road.