The End of the Week, and Physics

Hey all, welcome back. Thursday was pretty low key at work- I pretty much just sat in my office rearranging things and looking through the massive piles of binders for useful tidbits of information. There were definitely some, like lesson plans for teaching basic comp 1 and 2 and examples of registration forms. So, I'm a little bit less scared now, and I got an idea to request a grant for a projector so I can lead classes by showing them examples on my laptop on the big screen. Should be cool.

That evening we had a massive undertaking to finish all of the lamb that was left (about half a gallon). We headed out to Trader Joe's (my first one!) to do shopping. That place is pretty cool, and has lots of really, really tasty looking things... like peanut butter filled pretzels. Totally started eating those as soon as I got home. They also have beer and wine, and a "make your own 6-pack" deal which I took advantage of. Despite all of these glowing aspects, I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of Trader Joe's. Sure it has a lot of organic foods and what not, but it also has one of the largest carbon footprints that I've ever seen, as everything is brought in from one of the two coasts. I mean, for the fresh vegetables and fruits I can understand as winter is coming (a moment of silence for poor Eddard...), but some of the other stuff just makes no sense. Where it really hit home was the beer. I'm generally the most eco-conscious when I'm buying beer and try to buy local, so it was with a bit of shock that I realized that all of the beer I had bought was from one of the two coasts. This probably wouldn't bother a lot of people, but it does for me. That and the fact that my pumpkin ale had "natural pumpkin flavor added..." bastards.

Anyway, Jason used the ingredients to make lamb green marsala (masala? I dunno...), my favorite Indian food, and it was good.

Friday I had more CTEP orientation, this time with our supervisors. It was actually really cool, as what we did most of the time was discuss technology issues and how they are going to change in the coming decades, as well as the ecological impact of these developments. Along these lines was a really cool video that we saw, which I provide the link to here, which gives glimpses of exactly how much technology is changing the world and what the future may bring. There is a discussion site for the movie that can be found here. I haven't checked the latter out too much yet, but if it's anything like our discussions after the movie it should be pretty cool. At the end of orientation we all said the Americorps pledge to "Get Things Done for America!", though about half of us read "persevere" as "preserve." Oh reading, what hast thou don'st?

That evening I took my first practice Physics GRE... and got about a 3rd right. Oy... yeah, there's gonna need to be a lotta studyin' before I can take this thing, especially in the memorizing of formulae and the refiring of my maths centers. I mean, seriously, is calc that hard that I can't do it reliably anymore? Oyveh Maria...

Well, that's about it. Until next time...

"We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years."
- Mark Twain's Notebook #22, Spring 1883 - Sept. 1884