I caught a chinchilla, what did you do today?

So this week began with graduation on Sunday.  It started out hazy and then turned beautiful, so beautiful in fact that I got a wee bit of sun on my face and arms.  Hopefully this won’t be the only sun I get all summer, but if this rainy weather continues, it just might.

 

Then Monday…oh dear, Monday.  Monday was as crazy as crazy could get.  I woke up early so I could get a little bit of work done in the lab and then rushed around doing a million different things.  It didn’t help that I realized late that it was Memorial Day and everything was closed…except my favorite deli (thank the heavens!).  I moved out of my university apartment and dumped all my crap into the apartment I am subletting from a friend for the summer.  Then rushed back to help my lazy roommates pack…which consisted of me just packing more things into my car (I have a car now, on long term loan from my mom) and ferrying people to and from the storage facility.  After all was said and done I went to bed (after fully unpacking my stuff which was an ordeal unto itself) and woke up early to meet my advisor.  But Steve, you may ask, why would you have to meet your advisor early in the morning?

 

Well, I’m house/animal sitting this week for my advisor. She has chickens (which are probably the easiest animals to take care of out of the lot of them), chinchillas (which are cute and fluffy, but try at nothing to escape their cages when ever you get near), and her dog (who is super playful and I feel bad every time I’m doing work or eating and say ‘I can’t play now’).  Now that I take it all in as a whole it is not such a bad gig.  Free eggs, puppy to sleep with, doing a friend a favor, but the mornings are a little...shall we say: brutal!

 

The little doggie is pretty much my alarm clock, which is just really annoying when you haven’t had a full night’s sleep, and most of the chores take place in the morning.  The night time is easy, but oh god these mornings.  Especially because it has been cold and wet, it is just down right dreary…but I do love New England.

 

The Old Friend left for her summer adventure(s) Tuesday night.  I’m really going to miss her.  She has become such an integral part of my life that I wish there was some way we could be together more over the summer than not seeing each other.  But such is life right?  She’ll have fun doing her things and I’ll have fun doing my things.

 

One issue I have with house sitting: communications dead zone.  I have no cell phone service and I can’t connect to her house wireless.  Now this wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for the fact I am like 5 minutes from campus: close enough to stop bitching, but far enough away that you don’t want to walk in the middle of the night.  I am mostly up set about the internet.  If she had no internet I’d be cool with that, but the fact that it exists and I can’t figure out how to make it work erks me.  So I’m writing this post in a word doc and going to transfer it over to the blog at a later time, so though I am writing this on a Thursday, it might not be until Friday that it is up, but hopefully I’ll be able to get to my apartment tonight to get this up.

Finals are (have been) over!!!

Now that finals are over and graduation is behind us it is time to move into the summer.  Which means of course....SUMMER THESIS RESEARCH HAS BEGUN!!!!!!!!

Yeah, that and just a crazy couple of weeks.

More details to follow...eventually...soon-ish.

FINALS!!!

Here I sit as finals week is about to begin.  Since the whole shooting thing professors have reduced finals so that they won't be as rigid and terrifying as they would have been.  That being all well and good, I still have to do them.

Now for the plan:

Monday: Geochem final, probably take it in the afternoon.  It's take home and open book.  Not too too worried about it.  At night I'm going to get together with my partners and do a Lab presentation write up.  And if that doesn't take too too long study a little sed.

Tuesday: SED SED SED!!!  Study until my eyes fall out and then either take it at night (since it's take home) or...

Wednesday: Probably take sed final in the morning or early afternoon.  Then at night I am going to work on my Silent Spring paper so that I have all my sources read and an outline.

Thursday: Write the paper.

Friday: Finish Silent Spring paper in the morning if I some how was unable to the day before.  Write Geochem research paper (5-7 pages about algal blooms and nitrogen in southern California, not too hard).

That's the plan, now let's see if I stick to it!

Movie Review: Star Trek

To answer the esteemed Musical Daddy: it was awesome!  This movie cleverly repackaged Star Trek for a new generation.  First thing's first: all the famous one liner's were there, and they didn't feel out of place at all.  All of the personalities of the characters were spot on for how young rambunctious versions of themselves would be.

That being said, this movie had a very different feel compared to the series or even the past Star Trek movies.  The Star Trek series tended to lean more on science, ethics, morality, politics their episodes, while the movies were usually vehicles for exploring more grander philosophical questions.  This movie was able to do both, but leaned less on the philosophical.  There is one scene...which I won't spoil too too much, but there is one scene in the movie in which all the characters pause to consider the grander philosophical question...and then we move on.

The movie was very fast paced, and I feel like the director used it more as a vehicle to pay homage to the previous movies, while wanting to do something bigger or more different with the series in the future.  There were several scenes that were reminiscent of the past movies: Wrath of Kahn and The Undiscovered Country in particular (I felt).

The new theme song is a little brassy, but it doesn't take away from the movie.

This movie is not the original series.  If you go looking for the same thing, you'll find that it has been revamped with a couple extra doses of realism and is significantly more fast paced.  If you go looking for great science fiction, with special effects and space battles: this movie does it best.

It was Star Trek, but it was newer, fresher, and gave a great background for what the next movie will hold.

Safe again!

So this week was pretty crazy.  It was the last couple days of classes and then the annual spring-fling and then reading period.

Then on Wednesday one of the students here at university was gunned down while she worked at our bookstore cafe.  The killer then fled.  Campus was shut down.  People made a mass exodus; leaving for home or anywhere that was not here.  Those who could not leave, or those (like myself) who chose not to leave stayed.  

Then tonight, as I was leaving the movies after seeing Star Trek, we got the news that the killer turned himself in!  It was a great way to end a truly epic movie.  Now things will return to some assemblage of normal, though we will grieve for the loss of our classmate.

I, for one, always felt safe here on campus.  The local police and the campus security really made me feel safe during this troubling time.  

Though this event has shaken our university to the core, I feel that it is important to rise above the situation.  An act of violence always reminds us of how fragile life is in the grand scheme of things and we should take some time to reflect on the things and people that are dear to us.  However, we should also use this as an opportunity to live life to the fullest.  Though one of our own has been taken from the path laid before us, we should walk on and honor her memory by treating each day a little dearer, and appreciate the gifts that we have been given.

I believe that the best way to honor the dead is to keep on living.  There is a time to mourn, but they would not want us to mourn forever.  I feel this quote nicely sums up what I am trying to say:

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears.  We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.  ~David Sarnoff

Rest in Peace Johanna, I never had the pleasure of knowing thee and the world is a dimmer place without your light.

Sunday field trip to the beach

Why sleep when there's coffee?

Why sleep indeed...

This week I've woken up earlier and gotten less sleep than I have during any equivalent week.  Mostly due to procrastinating, but there was work in there also!  I've found that waking up early to finish work is really awesome.  Get some coffee in me and I am there!

We has our last lab field trip for my sedimentology class this week and I took some pretty good pictures.  I was finally able to get a close up of something with the object in focus, and the background not.  I was really proud of myself and now I am looking forward to taking more photographs of things going forward.

The work is starting to pile up, but I've got a plan: do it.  Plain and simple, but first we are going to present our data to the town from the frozen lake project that we have been doing all semester for my geochem class.  I had a run through today with my partner in front of our professor and he was impressed that we were so prepared so far in advance of our presentation.  We still have a few minor tweaks to make, but we are all set to do a great job next week when we present in front of like 100 people.

The Old Friend and I are going out for Mexican tonight and then to a show that her former roommate is in.  I am looking forward to it all, I just hope the rain doesn't get too crazy too fast.  Lots of rain will make it very much not fun to walk down Main Street eating ice cream.

This Sunday my sedimentology class is going to the beach to do look at some coastal processes (pictures to follow!) so I am really looking forward to doing that and learning about beach forms and such.

I'm brain dead from sleep deprivation.  More on how the weekend went in my next post.