Stanford Photoshoot

Yesterday LL and I drove up to Stanford because it was a beautiful day. So nice in fact that we decided we would throw a blanket down on one of the big lawns and lounge in the sun to read. It's totally one of those romantic images you have about college life...that along with picturing yourself at a baronial desk surrounded by tall shelves stacked with leather-bound books, lost in thought about Dickens and Poe while watching a single spec of dust, just gently stirred from a century of stillness, drift lazily in a shaft of warm sunlight flooding in from a skylight in the high ceiling above (that was supposed to sound cheesy because it never happens...As a general estimate, a laptop + Wikipedia/Google has about 1000x more useful information than any campus library. Colleges don't have a monopoly on information, they just provide the service of giving you grades, which makes you actually study**. And when people have their romantic thoughts about college, they never think about grades. Ever. Actually, that's probably best).

Anyway while we were there I wanted to first take a few pictures in my frequent haunts...it just seems like some day I'll be happy to have a few shots of my life as a grad student.


This first one is of me in the cube. Usually I have a laptop open where all those cords are, but I didn't feel like I needed to be that authentic. LL stood on a chair to take this.

This is me acting like I'm walking to class. Confession: I never walk this way when going to class. In the background is Hoover (the president, not the FBI guy) tower. He (Hoover) was in Stanford's first graduating class.


This is memorial church in the center of campus. All faiths have access to the church, but it also has a giant picture of Jesus on it. There are approximately 1.87 million pictures of this church in existence, but I decided to take my own. It doesn't hurt anything to take one more.

When we finally got out to our reading spot (there was a hamburger pit stop along the way) it was getting to be late afternoon, which means we didn't get to stay much more than an hour. But I can only lay on the ground for a limited amount of time anyway before I get really uncomfortable, so that was fine. I think that this picture of LL is really, really cute. She thinks her hair looks bad, but I never notice that.
In this last one I'm holding the camera out for a self portrait. I don't remember why we were laughing, but we look happy! The happiness might be a result of wearing short-sleeves and sitting in the sun in early February. When we were getting burgers, I saw on the TV that temperatures in the midwest were at -40 (with windchill). Bummer.

** Note that I think universities serve lots of valuable purposes and I do not actually want it to sound like I'm reducing them to learning cops. Especially when you get into areas of specialty, many universities in fact DO have access to information that you can't get anywhere else.