Happy Spring Religious Week Everyone

     This weekend Tad and I head to Albany to visit extended in-laws.  I'm impatient for the break because I will be working eight-hour days all week before this.  I get off next Monday though and I believe I close Tuesday.  I've been reading more and more this past week finishing another two books (ok just children books but still) and have made significant progress through one of the densest books I've started so far.  A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century is just under 600 pages long and filled with tiny print and details galore.  I have finally, after about a month and a half of on-and-off reading have reached the halfway point.  Usually a thicker book like this makes me give up but I am bearing through it gamely.  I've gotten through the three hundred pages of background story to the actual main area, the life of Enguerrard IV de Coucy.  I can't guarantee I spelled his name correctly since I don't have the book in front of me.  It's a good read filled with lots of significant details of the life and events of the 1300s.  It has been fun to read even if at times, to double check what I'm reading I only get through fifteen pages in an hour.

     I am sad that all my books end.  As silly as it sounds I really enjoy being led through the author's eyes and following their stories.  I also get distracted by a new story far, far too easily.  I'm mostly through Thoreau's Walden but it has a time and a place to be read.  How incongruous to read about forsaking culture and embracing nature on a bus in NYC! 

     This post is really very helter-skelter.  I miss studying mathematics.  I want a book on group theory (sorry Britt, I do want to learn it) and a text on either partial-differentials past what I learned in class or a good book on vector groups and tensors.  I feel limited by my surroundings and my lack of academic connections.  When Tad graduates this semester I will look into going back even just for night courses to finish up and all.  I miss stretching my mind.  I want to join in on volunteering activities and work with people on new and more expanding ground than I have now.  I feel my lack of movement forward.  I am under a blanket and cannot get out quite yet.  I also want a pet, a little kitty meowing and needing my attention.  Ahh, to know my limits and break them, that is what I want to start looking into now.  It may be the wrong holiday to start focusing on resolutions but I am anyways. 

     My next post will be a bit more organized and hopefully full of fun photos of the family together and hanging out.  Maybe I'll have finished Walden by then as well.  We'll see.

Iron Man 2: Tony Stark is an amazing jerk, part 2

     Name changing is hard work.  It's not like you just change your Social Securtity number or license and voila, everything is there.  There's the bank, the credit cards, car information and insurance, your job, any organizations you are a part of, blah blah blah.  Some of it just takes a phone call but my license was a journey in itself.  I needed my passport (or birth certificate), my social security card, my marriage license and two forms of residential identification.  Arrrg.  Because of the annoying living situation I am in I had to drag in my roommate and wait forever, as always at the government buildings. 

     I did see Iron man 2 last night.  That was amazing.  Since two-thirds of the movie has little to do with Iron man and robot battles I believe it would not be wrong to say that we watch the Iron man movies to see Tony Stark be a mad, drunken genius of an asshole.  Robert Downey Jr. pulls it off so well too.  He builds a particle accelerator in his basement.  Yea, that thing CERN built that was 12 km long? He did that in his basement using books and the freaking Captain America shield to steady it.  After accelerating the particle beam he shot it through a crystal matrix of some sort (a not-glass prism) and his a freaking triangle with the beam to create a new element!!!  That is the reason I got into science.  To make crazy tech that should break the laws of physics.  ::sigh::  If only I could do that.  You are my hero Tony Stark.

Visiting parents

     Time for car registration renewal and since it still comes to my parents I headed over there for a good 24 hrs or so of their love and care.  I actually used my laptop to listen to BBC's In Our Time for three separate episodes.  I think that catches me up although I am slowly wading my way through a few new podcasts.  Was able to actually do my partial differentials HW today, despite my total belief that I wouldn't understand anything going on in the chapter.  Now all I have due is three HW for my electronics lab and even more joy!! I have to finish a take-home test as well.  Then I have two tests on Thursday one of which is relativity.  Blerg.  Without a doubt that will be the worst test I take.

     In other news I started advertising the blog out to others.  I posted it on my facepage ((haha, thanks for that Meeples)) and gave it to a few friends.  I haven't decided my policy on using real names yet although I think I'd better soon.  Some people don't like to be mentioned on the internet and others completely take it in stride.  Hmm...  Will consult others and get a general consensus of all those whose name would likely appear in it at some point or another.  I should start worrying about pictures as well.

Oh well, not tonight.  Right now the lack of sleep has caught up with me.  Time for the sandman and his A Capella group to come.

Quantum HW Hell

It is 6AM and I didn't sleep.  I spent about 4 of the last 6 hours working on quantum HW.  I just don't feel comfortable working normalization integrals.  No matter what I do, they never look right and I feel awkward even setting them up.  I just need to do them and stop wimping out.  I have 3 problems left.  I have been instead rediscovering the amazing group The Freelance Astronauts.  Just listening to them makes me a happy, happy person.  Not going to type more because I still have HW due and three problems to do.  Only really nice thing is that I plan on visiting my parents this weekend and getting my car registration, a new Pur filter and I'm sure something else.  Alas and I'll drive with no sleep...  Assuming it takes me another 2 hours to finish this damn chapter.