My poor blog. I've neglected you, again. I can make excuses all day long...but I 'll just tell you life has been busier than ever. Good news, though - everything is starting to come together.

First, I finally finished my off-campus interviews. I'm really lucky I got a chance to travel to the different locations and see what the companies have to offer. I haven't heard back from anyone yet (including Delta), but hopefully the offers/rejections will be rolling in within a week or two.

In school-related news - my semester long projects have been wrapping up with some pretty nice results. The project on the natural convection chimney produced excellent results - I'm not bragging but I think we had the best project of our lab section. John did some sweet animations with his CFD code - but you can't post those in blogger so you'll just have to take my word for it. Here's our results (including experimental data, CFD results, and THREE different analyses I performed... I'm not going into how much time I spent getting the equations right for that). Just the fact that five different data sets all have more or less the same magnitude result for velocity is AMAZING!


Also - not an hour ago we finished testing of the prototype toy for ME 444. I don't think I ever really explained the idea, but it's supposed to be a toy plane that hangs from the ceiling and has enough power to pull itself in circles around the room. WELL IT REALLY FLIES IN CIRCLES!! Wow. Jubilation. We actually had a group bet on weather the thing would work or not - so someones buying me a couple of drinks on Thursday when we open Jake's immediately after class:



So - It's not perfect, but it does what it's supposed to do and that's great! I have my final Women's Studies paper due Friday morning (which I haven't started yet) - so I need to work on that. After that, it's just finals week. My schedule is actually quite nice. One Wednesday, one Saturday. Plenty of time to study. I'll be really mad at myself if I don't excel on both.

The best way to summarize my end-of-semester attitude is this: I feel like I've put in a LOT of work, and I've really enjoyed the work and gotten a lot out of it. My grades won't be anything amazing, but I've decided that my personal satisfaction should be independent of how well my report card is. I feel like I've worked hard enough for straight A's, but I'm not going to be the least bit disappointed when the results are less than that.

On a more personal note - I'm more than excited about the holiday vacation coming up. This is probably due in part to the majority of my X-mas shopping already being DONE! We're actually staying in Houston this year (instead of driving to the G-parent's house), plus I'm flying home. So, my vacation will include a lot more enjoyment and a lot less sitting in the car. And like last year, I'll be flying back to Indy early so I can spend New Year's with Stacey! But 2 days isn't nearly long enough...and I have another week of vacation after that.... so I'm going to ride down to Huntsville with her and spend another couple of days before I have to be back at school.

So... I just have another week and 3 days here in the WL before it's over for this semester - and on with THE LAST SEMESTER. Wow. It's been five years and I feel like everything is right.

Peace.