Beauteous

It's March and the sun is shining like the middle of July. The sky is cloudless, the mountains are sharp in the distance, and the stars shine clear in the night. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Not much of excitement has happened recently. There's been the pre-Spring Break crunch of midterms and projects, so I've been studying a lot. Pretty boring.

It's been nice, though, so I've been reading outside a lot lately when I get the chance. I've rediscovered Vonnegut (who is seriously funny), finished Kite Runner (which is heart wrenching but really good), and started again on Divergent (the next movie book). It's been delicious.

Lent's started here. I went to Ash Wednesday mass on the stage by the student union, which was a cool experience. There were a ton of people there for such a small space. Ash Wednesday is one of the few times a large group of people publicly, quietly declare their faith, and it's interesting to see people's reactions. It's a sign of solidarity, if nothing else.

Another really interesting thing about Lent here is that almost everyone seems to be giving something up, even if they're not remotely Christian. Maybe it's a second chance at a New Year's Resolution, or just an excuse to make a goal, but all I know for sure is that cussing in the dorm has gone down dramatically. Me, I'm giving up soda, ice cream, and fried food, and have made an effort to run more.

This weekend is the Tucson Festival of Books, so, once again, flagged white tents have taken over the Mall. This is huge. The likes of Lois Lowry, Cornelia Funke, and Sandra Day O'Connor will be in attendance. This looks about three times the size of the festival of books we used to go to at Goldenwest College and everything and anything seems to be represented.

I'm officially going to Ohio for the Rube Goldberg Competition in April, which, if I can stand 30 hours in the car both ways, should be a ton of fun. I'm really looking forward to it.

Hoping for a good week to come. I've got to get better at posting on time :-/

Finding Adventure

I found a unicorn yesterday. It was small, hidden away where you couldn't see it from the street, behind a wall and out of the way. Because this is Arizona and no sane white-skinned animal would live there, it was copper. I really like that there are magical things like this to find around here. It makes going places more interesting.

Also, thanks to unseasonably warm February weather (snow and rain? HA! It's hot enough to complain about here), the lizards are back after their winter hibernation. There have been a couple of times when I thought I saw tree bark move, but it was really just a little lizard. They're funny little things.

We hosted a Rube Goldberg competition last Saturday for all the Engineering clubs. Society of Civil Engineers, who share our room, won with a really cool machine that showcased what they did. We also ran the big machine, which, for being "on stage" for the first time, ran really really well. Everyone was really impressed, and we were pretty proud. We also got cool shirts last week and took official pictures.

Rehearsals for the "NOT a Doctor Who Musical" have finally started. It's a completely different group of people than I normally hang out with. but they're all fun people, just the same. The show is probably going to be the last weekend in April or the first weekend in May, and it should be pretty good.

I did okay on my midterms, but I know next time, I am going to have to study more.

I went to go see the newer Thor movie with Clayton last week. It was a decent movie, lots of explosions, little plot, lots of big names. The funniest thing was that Christopher Eccleston, who played the Doctor in Doctor who, was playing the bad guy, and pretty successfully.

This weekend, my roommate and I are hosting high schoolers again. I like doing that, but it's always strange remembering that I was in their shoes less than a year ago. Apparently, there are girls coming from all over the country this time and not just from Arizona.

Also, Dungeons and Dragons is still going strong. This is a candid shot of the group (minus our monk):

That's also been a ton of fun.

All in all, it's been a good week.

P.S. I'm sorry I didn't get this posted on Thursday. I hit the save instead of the publish button. :-/

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.

The Fun Starts Now

Classes are officially starting to teach actual new things now that syllabus week(s) is over and we all have been told repeatedly to show up, do work, do well on tests, and not to cheat.
Now the real work begins. Time to get down to business to defeat homework and an increasingly busy schedule. Clubs are starting up again, and so is everything else. I trying something new to help e manage my time. It looks like this:

 I've covered my mirror with post-its so that I know my weekly schedule and can actually see when I'm free and for how long. It's color coded and I see it every day. It would be perfect if I could keep the post-its from falling off... but I'll figure that out.
My classes seem to be really interesting. My MSE professor proved light last class (or more exactly, that light is an electromagnetic wave that perpetuates itself), which was pretty cool. Spanish is almost all talking and not much writing, which is nice, and is the only class I have where girls outnumber guys by any margin. My physics professor is willing to play with bowling balls and basketballs, and it's really cool to see how the equations I learned in high school are derived using calculus (I'm crazy that way). The computer aided design class is pretty much all online, but the TAs are nice and it's fun to learn how to properly doodle electronically - in 3D! Labs haven't started yet, but I'm looking forward to them.
Rube Goldberg has started up again, and now we're down to painting and making it look cool. If you're on Facebook, like this page for pictures, videos, and updates - https://www.facebook.com/uofarube  - and yes,  it gets crazy.
I now have a camera, and as I'm not yet in the habit of remembering I have it, I don't currently have pictures of people yet. I do have friends. Anyway, here's some of the latest pictures from my explorations of the U of A - enjoy.

Beginning of Spring semester

Hello to all my loyal readers. I know it's been a while, but I had a fantastic winter break where I actually got to talk to a lot of you in person. Christmas Eve was awesome, as always, and Christmas week vacation to Ventura was a ton of fun. It was good to relax and see people and be barefoot for a few weeks.
But now it's back to the grind. School is back in session, and I think that this semester is going to be really fun. My wing in my residence hall has rethemed from Hunger Games to Finding Nemo, which is pretty cool, and there has been some room shuffling as people come and go. I'm still where I was which is nice.
I am really excited about my classes this semester. I have been to at least on lecture session of every class I am in, and most of them are going to be a ton of fun. My MWFs have the big lectures on the other side of campus, and my TTh have smaller sections on the near-side of campus (and the foreign professors). All the professors seem nice and open to questions.
I'm still planning on staying involved with Rube Goldberg, SWE, and Hall Council, as well as the musical. I still have plenty of time because most days I'm done with class before noon (the upside of taking on 8 AM class).
As I go through school, I've noticed -

• As I get older, the desks get taller but the writing space is smaller.
• As classes get more advanced, there are way more males teaching than females
• As I get more specialized, classes seem to favor one gender.
• As I meet more people, they seem to get stranger
• As I get out more, I am usually the one saying hi

Side note - I now have a working camera and thus am obligated to actually post pictures. As of next week, I will try to post at least one picture. As of right now, the most exciting picture I have is of one of my shoes. Also, Thursday will still be the day, although I might post random stuff throughout the week if and when I feel like it.
P.S. Click Here to see the Rube machine at the end of last semester. This semester will be for prettifying it and making sure it runs all the way through on its own every time.