Back on the Wagon

I just finished breaking in my new red KitchenAid mixer (Ginger chocolate chip bars. I can't begin to tell you how amazing they smell.) and thought I'd take the time to greet the world wide web. It's January 8, first day of classes for me. I've got plenty going on, so there is plenty to talk about. I guess I should start with a rundown of the past semester...

Classes went well. I got an A in Kinetics (Part 1) and a B in Thermodynamics. I have to maintain a 3.2 to stay in the program, so I'm set (as long as I don't fail this semester, which I don't anticipate doing). The lab I was teaching went well. We've got new materials (more to work with) this semester, so my section in particular should be more interesting to the students. We have the challenging task of entertaining both Materials students and Bioengineering students. The BioE students are in a materials concentration, but none of them seem to understand why a basic understanding of materials science is important. Thus we've given them a goal of applying the materials to their choice of a set of medical applications, selecting a material based on the results of their experiments. Hopefully they'll all realize that it's a trick, as none of the materials are remotely close to medical grade.

I went up to visit Amy over fall break. We went to Philadelphia to see Coldplay, which was one of Amy's life goals. I guess you could say she was pretty happy about it. We went up to NYC one day, which was a surprise to me, since Amy didn't hand me my ticket until we were on the train platform. It was a 3-hour ride that was pretty smooth, all-in-all. We put on our headphones and zoned out for most of the trip. By coincidence, it happened to be the morning of the ING New York City Marathon, which (of course) Uncle David was running. Our train came into Penn Station, so we took a cab up to the Metropolitan Museum and spent the morning wandering around and seeing what we felt like seeing. There's a marble statue in the slideshow called the "Hand of God" by Rodin. It's worth noticing. My new favorite. After lunch in the museum cafe, Amy and I headed around to the back of the building to watch for Uncle David. We managed to end up right across the course from Aunt Melissa. Once we yelled and screamed for Uncle David, we wandered to the road under the park and met up to wait for him with Auntie M. We never got to see him, because the exit chute took a while and we had a time limit on our day, so we gave up and headed downtown, to the corner of the park, for some shopping. We shopped our way down 5th Ave that afternoon, then wandered over to Times Square to take some pictures. Amy haggled with a rickshaw driver and managed to get us a ride back to the station with plenty of time to spare. Some pictures of this, then I'll talk about the rest of the semester...



The rest of the semester was fairly uneventful. We had Amy home for Thanksgiving, so I got the task of carving the Tofurkey (pictured in the slideshow). I came back to Clemson on Saturday for the Carolina game, which we actually won! Yay! Here are some Thanksgiving pictures...



We finished out the semester a week later. I have been home for the entire break. It was nice to be there for that long. I'm certainly ready for school again now. I've got another slideshow for you now...Christmas pictures...



That's all for now! I'm working away on plans for a conference I'm going to next weekend. I leave on Friday and I'll be gone until Wednesday. I'm sure I'll have some pictures from Florida when I get back. Until then...