Growing Older or Growing Up

I am now officially old. Sometime in this past year or so I magically turned into an adult - a legal for most purposes adult. The problem with that is that I still feel like a kid, like I know nothing and everything is exciting and new and strange. I am no longer on that magical age border that separates the girls from the women (legally, anyway), and seeing that feels weird. The honest truth is that I still have no clue what I'm doing - I've just gotten better at faking it.
So this week has been pretty eventful.
For one thing - it's national Engineers Week (eWeek for short) which means tons of activities and stuff going on through the College of Engineering. The big flick is the eWeek Competition, which is kinda like Revenge of the Nerds Homecoming competition except it's for clubs and not frats and everything is strictly alcohol free. So that kicked off and I got a cool shirt, and I've been competing mostly for UA Rube Goldberg.
The first event I went to was the Mr. & Mrs. Engineering Pageant - the Rube president won Mr. Engineering by cross dressing and being generally hilarious. I actually competed in "Engineer that Masterpiece," where we were given a bunch of random stuff and told to recreate Edward Munch's "Scream." This is what it ended up looking like:

   The winner of eWeek gets bragging rights and a little extra funding. But really, everyone's goal is just to beat SHPE (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers), who have won for three years running. The friendly competition has been a ton of fun.
In other Rube news, we've had one run with one intervention (someone touching the machine to get it restarted) and one run where everything worked, just not in the right order. I don't have videos, but the machine looks like this:

And I probably spent too much time making a cup say "Bear Down Arizona."

Classes are going okay. It's midterm season, so I've had a couple of tests this week, but they haven't seemed too terrible. My MSE professor has been out and back again. He's working with Hieronymus Bosch's paintings, and what he does is really cool. He takes photos with different wavelengths of light and compiles the images into an interactive viewer so that the actual painting can be compared with the drawing, which can be found here.  

And in more news, I have a boyfriend (I know, I can't quite believe it myself) . His name is Clayton, and he's super sweet and nerdy. He lives in my dorm and is also studying engineering. He likes Firefly and anime and long walks on the beach and whatnot. He's also very punny.

That's it from me this week. And in famous quotes, "Happiness is a state of mind. It depends on how you look at things," said by Walt Disney. And as seen on campus:

EDIT: A perfect run of the Rube Goldberg machine has been achieved. More pics and videos to come!

That Time of Year

Another week has gone by, another cycle of beautiful sunrises and sunsets and lab reports and greasy student union food. It's been a good week, and fairly productive and pretty fun.
To start off, last Saturday I became an elf ranger with a deadly longbow and a wolf named Snow in the first episode of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I started with a bunch of guys from my dorm. The dice were on my side that day as we battled soldiers and frost giants on our way to take over the castle. It got really intense and was a ton of fun, and we're planning on undertaking the next part of our campaign tomorrow.
Benefits of going to physics class - last week a guest professor came in to talk to us about how pulleys distribute force and distance traveled - by hooking himself into climbing gear and spending ten minutes hanging from the ceiling while having us calculate his weight and the tension in the rope and such. Our actual professor was also wearing climbing gear, but said he was to scared for his life to actually go up. However, during the next class, he demonstrated how rockets work (Newton's third law) by sitting down on a rolling cart and using a fire extinguisher to propel himself across the room. It was crazy seeing how many phones went up in the air to capture that, and it was kind of annoying how the people sitting in front of me kept replaying it during the rest of lecture - with sound. I definitely won't forget either of those lessons. The demos in class are much more fun and exciting than the labs. I mean, bouncing marbles is okay, but it gets boring after a while.
I actually tried out for Comedy Corner, and had a ton of fun playing the improv games and doing skits. I made the current members laugh out loud a few times, which I am pretty proud of. I didn't make it in, but one of my friends from church did and did an awesome job at her first show. If I have time, I'll probably try out again next semester.
Next week is E-Week - a national week celebrating engineering. Clubs compete to see who has the most spirit and most engineering knowledge. Rube Goldberg is hosting, you guessed it, the Rube Goldberg regional competition, and is expected to win it by a long shot. Society of Women Engineers is hosting the "Mr. and Mrs. Engineering Pageant," in which couples selected by clubs will compete in formal wear, talent, and cross dressing competitions. Other clubs are hosting things like Jeopardy competitions, bridge building races, and grilling competitions. The traditional drilling rock is in the zone that is blocked off for the construction of Old Main, and so there is not a drilling competition at this time. I'm super excited because this seems like it will be a lot of fun and there is free food involved.

 Happy Valentines Day to everyone (or Singles Awareness Day, if you're the pessimistic type). May love and happiness fill your lives. Also, for all you guys,

More news next week or whenever I feel like it.

Meanwhile...

I know I missed a week, and I apologize. I'll make it up with a rant or something later.
So what have I been doing?
I've been to a couple of basketball games and figured out that the U of A basketball team is largely affected by the crowd (the Berkeley game was probably one of the first where most people weren't in red).
I have helped decorate the Rube Goldberg machine, which no longer looks like a bunch of plywood and metal bits thrown together. Specifically, I helped dimension grass and paint a park ranger falling down a waterfall, which looks pretty awesome.

I have messed around in AutoCAD, making stuff like this:

And also like this:

I've explored more, got lost, and found my way again.

I've volunteered at Ben's Bells, a local charity which promotes kindness by the distribution of clay bells throughout Tucson area, which was a ton of fun. We painted clay beads for use in education programs.

 

I found a cool app that's a game that also helps crunch data from cancer cells.

I had an interview for a position as a Resident Assistant next year, and I was good enough to move on to the second interview, which is this Sunday. I'm pretty excited about that.

I went to a Super Bowl Party at the Newman Center. There's a guy there who's in training to be a priest, Brother Kevin, who is a huge Seahawks fan. Watching him was almost more fun than watching the game. I'm kinda disappointed that the Goldie Blox commercial wasn't the same as the Rube Goldberg one that was floating around the web. The game was a blowout, and the commercials were okay, nothing to write home about.

I gave a presentation in Spanish about a guy who says he was lost at sea for 13 months, which went okay. 

My mind has been blown with Schrodinger's equation, which gives the probability of an electron being somewhere, and Maxwell's equations, which prove light is a wave, in MSE 110. The professor is finally back from Europe, where he does research on paintings in the van Gogh museum and elsewhere.  

I have gone off and around campus, found some soccer fields, and finally actually used my scooter (and got plenty of flak for it).

That's about it for now. Rant on something opinionated to come.   

Oh, and also, this is my roommate, Carly. She's from Hawaii and likes random scifi and fantasy stuff, too. She's an Electrical and Computer Engineering major.