Run #33: Student Services Building, Sweet Hall, Temporary Arboretum Child Care Center, Thornton Center, Tower House, Tresidder Union, Vaden Health Center

This blog entry sets the record for "most days behind the actual run".  The record is two, since we actually ran on Thursday, accompanied by Jake and Mo, and today is Saturday.  It is weird to run in the dark.  We still haven't adjusted to the lack of daylight savings time.

Our first stop was the Student Services Building, which we couldn't find at the end of the previous run.  We ran all the way around this building, and there is absolutely no sign that says "Student Services" at all.  It's a building near the new Munger graduate housing, and it has, among other things, the "Office of Accessible Education."  Hey, map-maker, we'll concede that this is a "student service", and a very worthwhile one at that, but so are so many other things, right?  Clearly all the "student services" aren't in this building, and, um, shouldn't the name of the building on the map match up with a sign somewhere on the building?

Next we ran the short distance to Sweet Hall.  I'm actually not sure what is there now, but when I was a student it housed a lot of the high-powered workstation computers.  As a CS major, I spent some time there.  The joke was that you weren't a CS major until you saw the sun rise through a second floor window at Sweet Hall.  I did so once.  And, in a historical note, I once gave a presentation there in 1995 explaining the new wacky idea of the "world wide web" to a bunch of people.  

Next was a long run to the Temporary Arboretum Child Care Center.  It is a bunch of portables in the parking lot near the corner of Campus Drive and Stock Farm Road.  We knew where it was a found it, but we had a bit of a tough time finding a sign.  When we did, we noticed a printed sheet of paper on the door noting that the center had returned to the original location (way down Palm Drive near the Hoover Pavillon) in August.  I think that, in a crazy coincidence, we ran there when we were on the A's back in the summer ("Arboretum Child Care Center") when they were moving back in.  So, yeah, this spot was actually a ghost town.

We headed back toward the middle of campus to the Thorton Center, which is the building standing near the reflecting pond where the old Terman Engineering Building used to be.  We've gone by this building on almost every run, and I bet Ira walks or drives by it every day, and he had never heard of it.  I had to look it up, but apparently this building is named after Tex Thorton, who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  You go, Tex!

We then ran all the way down Escondido Road (including a run across a grassy field near Sweet Hall that upset Ira because his shoes got wet) and headed toward Bing Nursery School to find the Tower House.  Ira knew exactly where this was, so he was our sherpa guide.  It is one of the oldest buildings on the entire campus, originally built in 1876.  Although, to be fair, it has drastically renovated after the 1989 earthquake.  Check out this crazy picture of it when it was the only thing around!

Two more places to go!  It was getting dark, so Jake turned on the light on Mo's collar.  Yes, if you've been reading this blog and you didn't know who Mo was, well, Mo is Jake's dog.  We ran back to Tresidder Union.  If you're reading this blog and you don't know where or what Tresidder is, well, that's weird.  We did have a tough time finding a sign, though.  It would be fun to make a list of all the various businesses that have been in Tresidder at one point.  When I was a kid, there was a bowling alley and an arcade.

Our last stop was the Vaden Health Center, right across the street from where we start and stop at Wilbur Field.  This building used to be called the Cowell Health Center when I was a student, although it is now much bigger and better.  That's where I found out I had chicken pox on the final day of classes during fall quarter of my freshman year.  Quite a memory.  The diagnosis went something like this:  "Take your shirt off. "  I took my shirt off.  "Yup, you have chicken pox.  You need to go home."

Distance: 4.7 miles (total 167.2 miles.)  We only have nine more buildings.  We're running Sunday morning, and we've got a shot of finishing the whole thing tomorrow if we go crazy, but it will probably take two more runs.