Thursday, December 22, 2011

Pleasant distractions.

My brachioradialis are hella sore from splitting wood all day. So now I'm sitting in front of a fire and contemplating the throbbing ache in my forearms. All of which is to say: I'm done with the quarter and not stressed for the first time in a long time. It's a welcome change of pace (and change of concern) from the usual during school.

Some moments worth capturing from the past week...

Fellowship for winter quarter! (w00t!) What a satisfying result for all that effort. I am now on the path to the Engineer's degree, and looking forward to another 1.5 years of school.

Received an A- in my Decision Analysis class. Go figure, right? This was the class in which I received a -0.43/60 on the midterm. I thought it highly unlikely to make it into this grade cluster, but there you go. Even after my decision to take it Pass/Fail (which was a good one), I continued to invest a great deal of time into the class. I don't mind that the A- won't appear on my transcript even though I worked my ass off for it. This was a tough quarter and it's entirely reasonable for me to take a class outside my department as P/F. (Even after falling below the median for the probabilistic portion of the final... I have no idea how I landed an A-.)

Submitted my NDSEG application on time, with all the necessary materials meeting the deadline. Talk about lucky! The whole GRE scores fiasco really had me going for a day... I did my best, now I wait until April to hear back from them and the NSF.

Almost finished with Fallout: New Vegas. Yes, I'm referring to a video game. I mention it because I haven't played a video game in something like eight months. It's mighty fun to enjoy a game from time to time, and this is a good one. It's also deeply satisfying to waste time and not feel guilty about it. Haven't done that in a while...

Listening to The Road by Cormac McCarthy on the way up to PDX. Holy crap that story is intense. Now I can empathize with Lauren, whom read it in one day because she 'couldn't bear to stay in that world for more than a day.'

No comments: