When even my lab partner turns to me and asks if I’ve updated recently, I figure that means it’s time to raise a little flag out there in Internet-World at least to say, “Hello, yes, I am still alive.” These past couple of weeks have been pretty busy and full, as I’ve been working (almost) full days in the lab. It’s been quite the learning experience but a lot of fun at the same time. I would say that Stephanie and I have become fairly comfortable and independent when it comes to working in the lab with our hot-wire anemometry. The highlight–apart from getting to play in the wind tunnel–has probably been learning to make hot-wire probes because nothing says, “I’m awesome” like managing to solder a ~80 micron-thick wire underneath a microscope. When you accomplish that with two wires on one tiny probe and then manage to etch the wires down to about 3 microns in diameter, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that you rock.
Fortunately, the older grad student in the lab and our advisor seem happy with our progress and our work ethic thus far. I really can find no substantial reason for complaint. (I mean, I could say something about the lab being dirty, but then Stephanie and I did some cleaning earlier. Or I could be annoyed about having a weekly half-hour meeting with my advisor late on Friday afternoons when my class ends at 11, but I’m going to try to get that changed anyhow.)
Today marks the beginning of my second semester of classes. I’m holding out hope that classes will be better this semester, but we shall see. I’m really going to work at establishing some better work habits when it comes to classes. I’m only taking two, which will hopefully make that a bit easier. The first one is a course on turbulence taught by one of my profs from last semester. Again, his classes lack graded homework, so I’m going to have to motivate myself to spend time doing exercises if I want to avoid some of my sillier mistakes from his class last semester. The second class I’m taking–High Reynolds Number Flows–looks like it will probably cover a lot of the material that I covered in 453 and 454 at Case. So I’m planning on fishing those notebooks out and hauling them up to campus to use as references.
Outside of work and school, life goes on as usual. Winter has finally discovered us here in central New York, so the snow is accumulating, though we still haven’t had very much of it.
I spent Friday evening bowling with some of the other first-year students. It was tremendous fun. We had three first-timers and no one who was much good at it, but everyone performed respectably. I found that taking my own ball helped my performance a lot; even though I haven’t bowled in ages, I got a 124 and a 115, which were pretty good scores for me back in my senior year of high school when my family played in a league for fun. I got teased some for bringing my own ball, but I can never find one at the alley that’s light but still has holes large enough for my fingers. Oh the challenges of having unusually large hands for a female!
I think I’ll end this for now and write something separate for my recent trip to the theater…
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