dun, da-dun dun

dun, da-dun dun DONE.... aint got nothin to do! The bad thing about GA Tech is as soon as classes are over (ie when you finally have lots of free time) the rec center decides to have severely restricted hours, even weekends closed. Ridiculous. Oh well.

I'm going to drive back to MD for Christmas sometime later this week... probably friday. Gotta pick up a new car CD/MP3 player before then so I'm not just whistling to myself the whole 10 hour drive back.

In other Ben news:
New Years Eve in New York City
Ski Trip to Windham, NY in early January with 20 UMD people

If I don't update this in a while, it's because I can't seem to get the home internet working on my laptop. Not that anyone checks this anyway. Merry Christmas and Happy New Years.

I SURVIVED HELL WEEK

I don't know how I did it, but I managed to survive hell week, and the first semester of grad school (aka "boot camp"). Here's what I did in the last 2 weeks:

11/22 - ADM exam #2 (3 hours)
11/23 - IPPD exam #2 (3 hours), came home that night to a majorly leaking roof in my bedroom, threw a trashcan and some pots under it, hoped for the best, and then caught my flight home for thanksgiving.
11/25 - Pulled an all-nighter AT HOME on THANKSGIVING NIGHT to finish my powerpoint slides for next monday's ADM presentation.
11/27 - Flew back to ATL, got back at 12:30am.
11/28 - Prepared my slides for NASA presentation on thursday. Kenny stopped by on his way to Pensacola to continue his top gun training.
11/29 - ADM 1 hour presentation. Went really well. They video taped it so we can improve on our presentation abilities. Later that night met with the IPPD group until 1am to prepare for presentation.
11/30 - Woke up to find my car was broken into at my apt (see below pictures). Stole my cd player and sunglasses. Super. Went to IPPD final 1 hour presentation. Also went really well. Went home and got car window replaced. Came back to school to prepare for NASA presentation.
12/01 - Dry-run of NASA presentation with Doc. Gave us some advice and ideas. Was at the lab until 5am fixing up the presentation. Also made presentation slides for fridays ESTOL presentation.
12/02 - Hot water was out... had to take a cold shower. Did the NASA presentation. Went horribly (in my opinion). They seemed bored, one of them was asleep. Someone in our group skipped over the exact parts Doc (our advisor) said should have emphasis (which I spent hours on making more detailed)... that pissed me off beyond belief. Spent the entire night (7pm - noon, see all-nighter pics below) working on the ADM final paper. That one was a bitch, but we got it done (barely).
12/03 - After turning in ADM paper at noon, stayed around till 3 to present on the ESTOL stuff in our last class. Really hard to stay awake through that (3-6 of boring stuff, lights were off).

So those are the main events of my hell week. Many bad things happened, but I learned a lot about presenting and time-management, and how sleep can be easily sacrificed to meet a deadline. On a positive note, school is now over for me for this semester. That's awesome. Now I need to shop for a new car radio. Later!

Here's a collage of the all-nighter everyone did thursday night to finish our huge final paper. The bottom two were at 3am and the top three were at 7am. That's me in the middle at my desk.

My car got broken into the morning of one of my presentations. And they stole my cool color-changing CD/MP3 player. AND my oakley sunglasses.

Thanksgiving at home... that turkey was delicious. gobble gobble