Accomplished

So I have spent the past week worrying about a paper I am writing for my Applied Climatology class here at school. Im looking at spatial continuity problems associated with pittsburgh coop site. To most this would sound boring but I find it intensely interesting. The first draft of my Literature Review was due today however, and I have been stressed to no end about it. I spent hours reading articles and writing and then rewriting paragraphs, moving things around and then reading more constantly worrying that it wouldn't be good enough. I finished it tonight.

I feel so accomplished that I was able to finish it, I know that it will come back covered in red ink (figuratively of course as everything was done digitally, even the submission) but I am excited to get it back and make it better. however more than that I am excited to start working with my data. This is the first project I've done with actual data, doing actual work that I can find no evidence of someone doing before. Though it's a small project, it really doesn't effect much in the grand scheme of things it sets me up to continue research in Seminar and further afterwards. In addition to this I would love to present this as a poster at AMS or even NWA.

I dont think I have ever been this excited about a 30 page paper, back in high school five pages seemed impossible, but now i can do five pages in just an hour or two. I enjoy writing, I like the challenge of putting thoughts down in a way that everyone can understand, the process of simplifying complex thoughts and processes into a way that someone with basic understanding can work with. I cant wait to dig into my data and start looking to see if my hypothesis is valid, or if i need to re work it into something else.

Ive finally found my niche in meteorology, I can work with engineering, weather and computers all at the same time. Im excited again about school, I can finish this semester and I can enjoy some of it. Life may have handed my lemons this past summer and fall but I have found out how to turn it into lemonade.

Favorite Sayings

So while I was growing up, my parents, like most, had a plethora of sayings to get me to be a good child, only two really ever stuck with me: Piss Poor Planning Promotes Piss Poor Performance, and my mom's favorite: Your lack of Planning does not my emergency make. Out of this I have come to be pretty self relient. If there is a big project I know I will need help with I tend to plan ahead of time to get that help. I leave time for things to go wrong and never ever let myself believe that my project is the most important thing in another persons life.

Unfortunately this does not hold true for everyone. Some people still think that I should drop whatever I am doing and focus on their problems. While I know this will continue to happen for the rest of my life, it is very frustrating. I was under the impression that we were in college here, and that perhaps you knew that presenting something of this magnitude in front of possible future employers was a very big deal. Waiting until the day before you leave to finish it is not a great idea, waiting until the afternoon before you leave to get it finalized is an even worse idea, expecting someone else to finalize it for you the afternoon before you leave is possibly the worst idea I have heard in a long time. So when I give you attitude about doing your stuff for you last minute, you have no room whatsoever to give me any attitude back, ever, because looking back I should have said no.

Sigh of Relief

So it's been a while since I have written a post, I've been a tad bit busy. between school work that is starting to pile up and activities with the club beginning to roll I have had time to gain many topics for a post but no time to write one. That said this is a sigh of relief for a while.

All of the crap that's been getting me down seems to have just melted away, I'm not sure what caused it to happen but I do know it happened sometime when I went home last. Perhaps it was because I was able to have a really great evening hanging out with Em, or maybe its because I made a friend in one of the freshmen. It could be all of the above, all I know is that I finally feel like I can stop worrying about all of that stuff from the summer and move on with life.

This relief comes as a doubled edged sword however, as now I realize how much work that I have ahead of me in just the next few weeks,  lit review for one class, a test next week in another, and two papers to write by the end of the month. Oh, and did I mention I will be leaving for a week in the middle of all this to attend a professional conference in Birmingham? This should be a fun month...

In all reality though its nothing I cannot do, I have had workloads like this in the past and come through them stronger than ever before. This is what college teaches us besides the actual facts, time management and stress management as well as giving us the knowledge that we can do things we think are impossible (such as doing a billion assignments in two weeks....)

On a closing note I have found two great new time wasters (no you know why my workload is so high for the next few weeks). the first is a game called Sugar, Sugar on addictinggames.com. the idea is you need to fill cups with 100 grains of sugar, sounds easy but it gets hard very fast. The second game is called Glitch. It is a MMO where you are a little person called a Glitch (or Glitchling or Glitchlet or whathaveyou). You learn skills and collect money and experience. you can mine rocks and turn them into other things. There is cooking and farming and exploring and its all very very easy to do. It is rather mindless and is a great way to unwind after one of "those" days. There is currently about a one week wait to get an invite after you've signed up, but I have 3 invitations to send to friends if any of you are interested.