Thursday: new things

I did a bunch of new things today.

1. I played Captain's Ball.  It's a mix between basketball and ultimate frisbee.  It would have been nice if a few more people showed up, but it was still a nice time to meet new people, see Natalie, and get some exercise.

2. I had a door malfunction during my second class.  One person came through the door and it never shut all the way.  When the door doesn't shut all the way the alarm goes off after 30 seconds.  The TA and I took a look at the door and we didn't see any obvious reasons for it to not close.  We did learn that if we swiped our ID card at the card reader it would stop for 30 seconds.  So for the next 30 minutes my poor TA's job was to swipe her card at the card reader every 20 seconds so that the alarm wouldn't go off.  I did call the secretary right away and told her what was going on.  She realized the problem immediately and, while she didn't know exactly what to do, she knew where to start.  People came after 20 minutes, but didn't have the right parts to make it stop.  Then they were going to unplug the door at the control box, but whoever wired it up didn't label any of the cables like they were supposed to.  They did finally get the door to stop beeping; I'm not really sure what they did but I was relived.  I was able to easily survive the first thirty minutes without the TA, but there were a lot of questions as the students were working and it was helpful to have her walking around too.

3. I passed my lead belay class.  Today was practicing more of what we started last week, practicing falls, and trying a different belay device.  Falls were more fun than I was expecting...I get pulled way up into the air too.  I also really liked the other belay device for lead climbing as I didn't get the rope stuck so much.  I was surprised about that too as I was determined to like the device that I started with.