Steps to Having an Awesome Week at Mines

Having all my tests (well three) the week before break was great. I highly recommend it. Or not, thinking back to that week. But this week was pretty great. But it didn't have to be. There are a few things that made it awesome.

First off, there was no Lon-Capa due on Monday. Or Math worksheet due on Wednesday. Or CompSci assignments until Friday. I know, awesome. The only thing I had due were a few NHV readings and this stupid dumb idiotic Boulderish paper about me and the environment for NHV. I know NHV is called "Nature and Human Values" for a reason, but seriously? I hoped it wasn't too cheesy, because I wrote it at 3 a.m. But that was the only night I stayed up that late. It felt weird to get to bed early the other nights (1 a.m.). But it was nice. I even woke up early one morning to meet friends to get the Word in during breakfast. Yeah, awesome.

If you live around here and have a beating heart, you probably know that the weather this week was the best it could have been. Mid-70's....sunny....need I say more? It's impossible to be depressed when it's like that. It was a perfect time to go fly my kite that I got from Career Day... I'll have to find some time to do it this week. Most of my friends got some level of sunburn, except me (Thank you, genetics!). I studied outdoors a couple times. Yeah, awesome.

I got the rest of my scores back, and they turned out alright. Well more than alright: my NHV Synthesis paper received the highest grade I've ever gotten on a "test" thing at Mines. Which isn't saying much, but at least it gives me a mark to shoot over for my next Calc and/or Physics exam. Like I told you before, I made a lot of stupid mistakes on my recent Calc test though. Yeah, awesome.

But classes are going well. Kuo (physics) is great, telling us how wrong the two years of highschool physics I took were in a big booming voice. Mrs. Walker (Calc II) is great, and partial fractions and differential equations are kind of fun. Hellman (Intro to Computer Science) is great, running back and forth of the lecture room making CompSci fun, inserting bad puns, all while wearing a shirt with a binary joke on it. Even PA with Bhakta is alright- I'm learning not to cross my arms, and playing games is fun, right?

I picked the perfect day to go back to Chem Lecture on Friday. Racicot blew stuff up for a half hour and that's it. Oh here, just look:

He asked if there were other visitors and I raised my hand. "What are you doing here? Trying to get me fired?" "I...." "Just kidding." "Okaaay...". I hope and am almost certain he was kidding (or that's what I've chosen to believe). Why else would I come to Chem lecture besides to have fun and re-live old times of Racicot blowing stuff up? I know, right? Did you see the bright magnesium and then the huge flame hit the balloon that eventually exploded into a huge fireball? Yeah, awesome.

I officially started Capa on Monday and the math worksheet (due next Wednesday) quite early also. Which made my weekend pretty awesome to enjoy. Hmm, I should do that more often- start homework early. It would do me well, and I've been meaning to all of freshman year pretty much. But it works and I highly recommend it. I finished off my week with two hotdogs, three and one-half baseball games, adding in binary, and serving tacos to 75 Maplians.

Yeah, pretty awesome.

A Break (Or, "Oh Hey, It's Really Spring!")

It's my first Spring Break in college. Everyone asked me what I was doing, to which I replied "Going home" or "Sleeping" or "Baseball", which all ended up to be true, but there was a little more to it than that.

My first day back, my mom makes fun of my socks. No one at Mines ever makes fun of my socks, in fact I just got a compliment on my socks (from a guy, of all creatures), but really- I like my socks.

It didn't take long before I wanted to play outside. And it only took a few minutes before my right pinkie finger was twice as fat as my other one, because I was playing catch with my little brother and I was too stupid to wait until my other brother scavenged up a glove. Even though the old flat glove was awful (and I left mine at Maple), I concluded that I am just as unathletic as ever, being lame at catching, but my throwing skills took an upgrade since I'm so awesome at throwing dodgeballs by now (not really though). The grass, though mostly brown is starting to turn green. I love this time of year, and the weather this week was awesome.

The first few days were a little basketball-y. My mom likes basketball so after I took a nap on the couch Sunday (my bed was full of clothes...augh), we went to Mines basketball game in the NCAA DII tournament. Cool stuff, fun times. And I'm used to having to clean and make sure no one runs across the court, so it was cool to not have to do that. We won of course, and would face Metro Tuesday. So Tuesday my dad had tickets to the Nuggets game. I know, basketball galore. I told Brady to text me updates for the Mines game. At the end, the Nuggets won a supposedly amazing game by tying it with very few seconds left and going into OT. In short, as my dad said, it was "the most exciting boring NBA game" we had ever seen. Brady told me Mines lost. So I obviously wasn't so stoked about basketball. Besides, kids kept kicking and screaming and NBA players don't play defense and the players look so far compared to  me being on the court all the time. So whatever.

I ate Carl's pizza for the first time in forever (winter break). I also ate a lot of other good food. I realized I'm getting quite out of shape and need to exercise if I don't want to pass out during the Ore-Cart pull (I'm kind of joking but not really- I was sore all week from bouldering the Friday before- shows you how much I'm in shape.) But on a similar note, I'm really excited that there's only one more weekend after this until the weekend E-days takes place (and then Opening Weekend after that weekend). It's a good time to be alive.

I pretty much tried to sleep in until 1 p.m., and pretty much succeeded. Getting 10 hours in my old bed is nice, but of course I'll never be able to catch up on sleep lost this year and the rest of my will-be four years. But it was nice. It was also nice that a lot of my classes just had tests and everything due the week before Spring Break. This week, there was no math worksheets due, or homework, or NHV drafts (but a lot of readings that I have not done yet), or physics homework on Lon-Capa to do even if I wanted to, so it was a nice unstressful time. I did have time to fill out a couple applications though. But that's it for productivity.

I think a week was a perfect amount of time. Enough time to get my room messy. Get excited about the stretch run of freshman year. Realize that no one head bangs to TobyMac with you like your brothers (ha, well there wasn't really headbanging going on). Annoy my sister by serenading her with ukulele and making her mad that uke is way more easy than guitar. (Realize I didn't really learn any new songs for ukulele...oh well.) Stay up late, but sleep in 'cause I don't have to do anything. And eat hotdogs and listen to baseball (oh cool, look- a fake walkoff).

I really do love Spring.

They Said It Ain't Gonna Be Easy...

Hi people.

I've been really busy. I've been really tired. I've kind of been stressed. A lot of things go on and I don't get time to sit. But here we go.

(Dang I need to see when the last time I posted was and what I posted about....Oh that, haha.)

I'm already in the midst of "midterms" (which doesn't mean anything other than they are the second round of tests). Everybody's been freaking out. Especially those poor people who aren't Geophysics majors (or CompSci, or Math, or Electrical I think). I only have two tests this week plus my NHV paper (which I guess is a pretty major thing). I don't know. It's rough. I've had so much homework due so I don't study until late at night and as a result, don't sleep. I work my brain to mush for physics and then come out of the test dead. And I didn't even freak out during the test- must've been hard. Others concur. I reason that with the amount of guessing I did, I got a 55. The average turns out to be 57.

They said it wasn't going to be easy.

I knew that, but I thought it'd take a couple semesters for the average on an exam to be failing. It sucks, because I work so hard and now I'm sure of certain failure (which I now realize is repetitiously redundant). I feel like punching everyone I know that goes to non-engineering school in the face, which is extreme, I know but not as extreme as talking about assisted and attempted suicides for the kids that just took that test. Yes, it was that hard- some of you will not understand and I am glad for you. Lon-Capa takes forever to load and then finally does. I am never so happy to not fail a test.

And then I try to study two chapters of Calculus II material for the test today (this was yesterday). And then stay up 'til 4.

They said I'd have to work hard and late.

I never knew what that was. But now, I have to study everything before a test. Which reminds me, I have one in an hour and a half.

***

That test was easy. Way too easy in fact, that I know I screwed up and made a bunch of stupid mistakes and solved this one problem "The Physics Way" because that's the right way to. But it's over, and it was a big fat piece of chocolate cake compared to the physics exam.

We'll see. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. Like in Physics, I guessed three questions right out of six unknown with 5 different options each. Math you gotta know your stuff. So for luck you do your routine, maybe. My routine is eating dinner (I mostly have a post-test routine) and praying really really hard (it was only by the grace of God I got a decent grade on Physics). I have a CSM Department of Physics pencil I use for all things Physics. And for Math and CompSci I usually wear a baseball cap to the exam so I don't pull all my hair out- Physics assumes anyone wearing anything but clothes is a cheater and liar and out to kill people, so I don't wear a hat to that, obviously. Last Math test I wore my oldest Rockies hat, and tonight I wore my newest Mines hat. We'll see how this one performs- I gotta break it in. Anyways. I use yellow or orange colors of pencils for Math, because that's what color I think it is (Physics is blue, Chem would be red...).Water is good, but only sometimes. I like to be awake during my exams so sometimes I caffeinate up. And I don't look at the exam or try to read it turned over before we're supposed to. A lot of times, I don't even look ahead (especially for Physics) while doing it. And usually I have success with not freaking out.

It's weird having to think during an exam. There is always one (or 20) questions that will rack your brain. If you don't have a headache afterward, you're doing it wrong. And it's always funny when you score lower on the subject you work everything for than the others. But back to thinking- I don't think I ever thought or reasoned through any test in highschool (or kindergarten for that matter); they were just so easy. Formulas: memorize and bam. If I got an A-, I was doing it wrong. How things change. I guess it's good. I hope it's not too unhealthy. If it's not I have time to catch up on sleep for a couple days.

So the battle's half-way over. It was not easy.

They say the third Physics test is easy...

Time to study for an A in the class.