Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

Scav this year was so much fun! Being on the alumni team was particularly exciting… I got to see old friends and connect with new people. I always forget how exciting it is to spend a lot of time with University of Chicago people; they have a particular kind of intellectual energy that’s not very common elsewhere. It was also great to participate in an alumni event that had some of the characteristics of traditional alumni events (for example, I did a lot of business networking, which I didn’t expect!), but was framed by this context of doing fun, silly stuff together. I’m looking forward to promoting this team to more alumni for next year as a fun alternative or supplement to stuff like the official Alumni Weekend.

When I first saw the list, I was a little disappointed, as there weren’t as many clever items that grabbed my attention as there had been in previous years. But the more I got involved in actually working on the items, I realized the list was actually better-designed than previous lists in a crucial way: the items were chosen because they were fun to do as much as or more than they were fun to think about.

Here’s some of the items I worked on or participated in in some way this year:

13. Take your fashion show to the streets! The city has kindly provided mannequins. If you want to park your car you have to feed the meters, but for this item you have to dress them. [7 points, 3 bonus points if the judges can recognize whom you’re making fun of]

25. Find a slide whistle and an open mic night at a Chicago bar. Impress them and you’ll impress me. [13 points]

36. Scavegon Trail #1: As the University expands, a certain breed of adventurous souls race to reach the fabled new land south of the Midway known as the Oregon Dormitory. Come to Main Quads, Missouri, at 4 pm Thursday to see your pioneering quartet off on the first leg of their journey. Who will you be? A banker from Blackstone? A farmer from the Fallers? A carpenter from Chamberlin? Their first task is to test the sturdiness of their newly constructed, flat-bottomed wagon and the fortitude of their oxen. Like all Scavegon Trail events, in addition to points the winner of this race will win valuable medicine to stave off deadly diseases. Overall Scavegon Trail points awarded for costumes, wagon construction, and number of pioneers alive by the time you reach the Oregon Dormitory. Set a Grueling Pace! [ ε points]

44. Pigs in a blanket, a BLT, and a cup of Joe? That’s far too easy. You’re gonna need your expert slang slinger or you’ll be lost like zeppelins in a fog. Bring your diner dexterity to our favorite greasy spoon, Scott’s Hamburger Heaven, at 11:30 pm Thursday for the Short-order Shout-out. Only one lingo literatus per team, and eighty-six the cheat sheets or the to-go orders won’t be the only ones taking a walk. [3 points for showing up, 25/15/5 points for placing]

56. Scavegon Trail #2: At 3 pm Friday your trailblazers arrive at C-Bench Rock. To supplement their food supply for the long journey still ahead, they are going to go berry picking. But one of your pioneers seems to have lost the use of her legs, another the use of his arms. They are going to have to team up to get these berries back to the wagon.

60. Ronald McDonald is an amicable fellow, and we would all bend a knee in allegiance to our Burger King, but don’t the local restaurants deserve a mascot of comparable level? Choose a Hyde Park restaurant and design an appropriate mascot. If it’s a legit mascot, you’d better have a legit commercial filmed in front of the establishment. [17 points]

61. Blog about your day. Now write it all out by hand with quill and ink. Now transfer it to a wood carving. Okay, you still with me? Now inscribe it in a tablet of baked clay. Bring us the electronic, paper, wood, and clay blogs. Now that’s what I call a chronological scale of blogological technology. [9 points + an understanding of what our ancestors had to go through in order to bitch about their problems]

91. Scavegon Trail #3. What was the best part of this game again? Oh yeah, hunting! After berry-picking, your grizzled foursome arrive at Fort Linnaeus to get some food and have some fun. But there are some tough choices to make. We’ll provide the animals and ammunition.

102. Our Vampire is a tracker. We saw his mind. The Hunt is his obsession. Bring your blood to the DCAM, room 5G, between 8 am and 4 pm all week or he’ll have to come for it himself. [α points]

105. Holy Mackerel! Proselytizing wall fish. [12 points]

106. Settlers of Catan: Human-Sized Edition. Bring your game pieces to (Place TBA) at 3 pm Saturday for a rousing throwdown. All game pieces must be made to scale. The hexagons must be large enough for a person to stand on comfortably (two feet across should do) and look absolutely gorgeous. Game pieces will be assigned at the Oddity. [23 points to build, 12, 9, 6, and 3 points to first through fourth places]

141. Production stills from the following movies [as many as you like, up to 2 points each]:
• Battlestar Helvetica
• Wingdings of Desire
• Comic Sans of Iwo Jima
• The Fall of the Times New Roman Empire
• or one of your own device.

159. Camp Scavvahunta, we hold you in our hearts. Few things are more evocative of the lives of young Americans than the noble institution of summer camp. This Friday, at 7 pm (set up at 6), round up your wagons, pitch your tents on the Eckhart Quad, and get ready to hunker down for a night of good ol’ fashioned fun at the Scav Campout. Festivities will involve a Scav counselor cookout and an assortment of delectable camp activities. We will begin by testing the capacity of both your brains and maws with the “Chubby Bunny Spelling Bee”. Then, the Scavvahunta Follies! Each team will present a short skit recounting their team history in a particular style to be assigned at the Captains’ Oddity. Finally, a massive battle royale Capture the Flag game on the main quads. Each team must bring their own uniquely recognizable flag and will be assigned a random position on the quads to serve as home base. Each team should have at least one tent set up on the quads for this event—expect it to be occupied until 11 pm, for we are the young Americans. [δ points]

201. “They say the Scavhunt brand is growing stale and they need a swell new ad campaign to really push the product. Get the boys down in Creative on this, pronto—the ScavCorp board of directors will be here Sunday and we need to have poster-sized mockups ready!” [25 points for the mockups at Judgment and for blanketing campus with your Scav ad campaign throughout the Hunt]

225. Put your insides on your outsides with a series of epidermal anatomical diagrams. [One major organ system per team member, 10 points per system depicted, 5 bonus points if a pregnant woman models the reproductive system.]

242. On Thursday just before midnight, in Scott’s Hamburger Heaven, actually get an item out of one of those damn skill cranes. [25 points]

Photos? Of course there are photos!

In just a couple of short hours, I’ll be on my way to Chicago for the world’s largest scavenger hunt — a University of Chicago tradition! It’s, er, intense. The item that’s gained most worldwide notoriety is probably the working nuclear reactor some students built in 1999, but there were plenty of exciting items during the years I participated in college (”get circumcised”; “the biggest goddamn sombrero we’ve ever seen”; “a graduate thesis written on napkins from a dining hall, signed off on by a thesis committee” — I also ended up going on a few of the intense road trips, including one year all the way to Princeton, NJ by way of Notre Dame, Oberlin, and the world’s largest general store).

Most of the teams are associated with student dorms, but now, some friends and acquaintances have started an alumni team (”GASH (Grad and Alumni Scav Hunt team): Those Meddling Adults”). As an alum, I’m proud to be a part of this! So who knows what I’ll be up to this weekend…

After a meeting a couple weekends ago I found myself too tired to do much EXCEPT ride the T, so I hopped on the Orange Line and rode all the way out to the end. Sitting on the mostly-empty train, watching the city shade into suburbs and nursing the remains of a small hangover, was remarkably relaxing — an almost meditation-like escape from work and daily life.

I got off at Oak Grove and walked around, but the most exciting thing I could find within a few blocks of the T was a laundromat (I should have done some preparatory research!). I also wanted to find a bathroom, so I decided to search at the next T stop — Malden — where, much to my delight, there was a bathroom INSIDE THE STATION!! More and more T stops have this feature now — this is an awesome public service. Keep it up, MBTA!

Walking around Malden was a little more exciting than walking around Oak Grove, but by that point I wanted to transition back into getting some work done, so I didn’t spend much time there. I also declined to take the opportunity to visit Wellington, which is now the only stop on the northern branch of the Orange Line I haven’t been to yet — I’ll probably regret not going on this trip, since from the train it looks like Wellington is even more nothing-more-than-a-parking-lot than Oak Grove. Maybe some preliminary research will help me discover the secret exciting parts of the northern Orange Line?

The next day, I went with a couple folks to the historic Adams houses, adjacent to the Quincy Center T stop. For most of my childhood — well, actually, probably until as recently as a year or two ago — a guided tour of a historical person’s home seemed like the Most Boring Thing Possible. But when a friend proposed this trip, I looked forward to it all week. Maybe it’s my somewhat newfound interest in politics, or just a broadening of my interests as I get older? In any case, I enjoyed learning about the Adams family and seeing their homes — plus checking out historic Quincy!

Recently, Jesse and I took a road trip through the South (or rather, Appalachia and parts of the upper south); we visited my parents (and their dog and chickens) in West Virginia, drove through Virginia, visited Knoxville and Nashville in Tennessee, crossed Kentucky, drove back up to my parents’ house through Western West Virginia’s mountainous highways, and visited more family in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

I’ve been procrastinating on blogging about this because I’m not sure what to say. I could list the places we visited and things we did there, or I could try to describe the people we met, but none of that would really convey how I feel about it. It will have to suffice, then, to say that this was a strong contender for my favorite of all the vacations/trips I’ve ever taken.

This weekend brought me a handful of new T stops, visited both deliberately and in the course of my other adventures. I spent Friday afternoon working at a cafe in the Charles MGH area (the last new-to-me Red Line stop that’s on both lines!); its architectural feel is a pleasant mix of modern urban business district and (literally centuries-)old-school upscale rowhouses.

I’d also heard great things about “that liquor store at Charles MGH”, as friends had been describing it, so I stopped by. The store did not disappoint! They had two entire walls lined with single bottles of beer, including a lot of fancy/unusual brews. I’ve been a deficient beer geek (and hop lover!) in that I haven’t yet had a chance to try 120 Minute IPA, so I was excited to be able to pick up a bottle — though at 20% alcohol, I haven’t yet found the right time to try it.

Saturday Jesse, Sam, and I spent the afternoon on an odyssey of many-transit-typed adventures around the city. We first went to an art space in the South End to see more of this guy’s work (first encountered at Somerville Open Studios). We hit the Silver Line to uber-terminal Dudley Station for lunch — though the Silver Line isn’t a T stop for the purpose of my transit project (the Silver Line is not a train, my friends! it is merely a bus laboring under the *delusion* that it is a train!).

Post-lunch we took one of Dudley’s approximately 7234582910 buses to Roxbury, where much to our dismay The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Center was closed. Another time! The visit was not in vain, however, since on our way to the Stonybrook Orange Line stop (in a pretty neat place, across from a cutely-landscaped park), we accidentally walked by the Sam Adams brewery and accidentally got free beer (they were asking visitors to vote between two samples of beer, only one of which can make it into next year’s officially-marketed lineup). Nom nom nom!

Since our evening plans were in Somerville (and since this was a stop I hadn’t yet visited), we rode the Orange Line all the way across town to Sullivan Square. Like Dudley, Sullivan is a mega-transfer point, where many bus lines have their termini; unlike Dudley, Sullivan, as far as we could tell, offers absolutely no motive for visiting other than transferring to a bus. So, that’s what we did!

I just got back from a week with some college friends on a yacht one friend’s parents had rented in the Virgin Islands for her college graduation — which is pretty much as awesome as it sounds. I caught up with old friends, swam with a turtle, learned some sailing, drank piña coladas, and many more adventures.

Another remarkable thing about this trip was that I had no laptop, no cell phone, no blogs, no webcomics, no email, no TV, for a week straight — a distinctive experience for someone who’s accustomed to spending hours tied to a screen every day. When we were first planning this trip, I was worried about being forced to be not working and out of contact with clients for so long, but you know what? It was fantastic. I even uncharacteristically declined the opportunity to check my email when it was available at some places we pulled into port — and since I’d warned my clients about my vacation plans and worked a little extra the week before, nothing urgent had piled up when I got home.

In some ways, this email-less week was similar to the “Electro-Sabbath” that Jesse and I instituted a few weeks ago: on Wednesday nights after 9pm, we don’t check email, use the internet, or watch TV or movies. The idea is to clear our heads from the addictive and attention-fraying 20-open-tabs lifestyle of the everyday and free up time to dedicate to non-electronic activities we want to pursue (reading, painting, chatting, going for walks). It’s relaxing to do this once a week, but an entire week without the electronic tether is unbelievably refreshing — obviously something I can’t do often in my profession, but something to keep in mind for the occasional vacation.

I furthered my plan of visiting new T stops this weekend — we went to the open studios at the Distillery in South Boston by way of the Andrew T Stop. The Distillery was about a mile from the T stop, so we got to explore South Boston on our walk, which was pretty interesting and cool (though not literally cool — Boston’s 3 weeks of nice spring/summer weather seem to be over, and it’s oppressively hot and humid). Southie wasn’t quite what I’d expected — with colorful, close-together houses on hills, some streets looked surprisingly San Francisco-esque, but the Irish pub we stopped into definitely didn’t (its decor tended more toward Irish nationalist propaganda).

Later, after walking downtown post-studios, we also hit up the New England Medical Center T Stop to get home — I hadn’t realized that the FAO Schwartz Bear had a new home!

This was the smallest of the three open studios I’ve seen in the past year, and the artists skewed the youngest — one friend commented that it seemed like college art, which I agreed with. In contrast, the Fort Point studios from last fall were full of mostly professional artists, and the Somerville studios from earlier this spring seemed to have a lot of adult amateurs (a demographic that I think produces a lot of interesting work!).

One of the things that I like the most about living where we do is that we’re within walking distance of so many urban and suburban “biomes” — different population levels and feels, from dense forest to downtown skyscrapers.

Our apartment is in a neighborhood that’s reminiscent of suburban residential areas (though the houses are closer together). When I go running, I can go to the commercial-suburban-feeling strip malls and highways near Alewife and feel like I’m in the sprawling exurbs. Or I can go to almost the opposite extreme, the parks surrounding Fresh Pond, where I can be surrounded by trees and water and out of view of human-made structures. The Cambridge and Somerville squares have almost a small-town downtown feel. Stretching “walking distance” to a few miles, Allston is a bustling urban neighborhood. And then there’s the financial district, full-scale city.

Everywhere else I’ve lived, and most places I could live, have a much more homogenous five-mile radius around them — but variety is just one of many perks of living in the Boston area.

It’s not a T stop, but today I went with a group for a local Boston adventure — we took a ferry to Spectacle Island, in the harbor, for a picnic. It was a beautiful day, albeit a little windy, and our picnic, hiking, and beach football-throwing were fun. I was a little disappointed that the island seemed so landscaped (it had wide paths, and few if any trees), since I’d always thought of the Harbor Islands as a crazy wilderness — but what do I expect from an island mostly made of landfill. It’s also apparently one of the highest points in the harbor — we saw a nice view when we climbed the south drumlin.

Today’s xkcd outlines an algorithm for generating a new random set of coordinates every week; it generates only the decimal part of the coordinates, so there’s a separate location in each “graticule” (block of space with the same integer coordinates — 80-some miles on each side, it looks like) for local meetups.

This is pretty neat! It seems scavhuntesque, in a way — I always enjoyed going on road trips whose destination I didn’t know until I left. Now I can do that every weekend if I want!