Enjoying home

Well I made it back to Kentucky, where temperatures are upper-40's to mid-60's... and raining. That's right, it's rained every day since I got here. Not necessarily a change from Houston where it rains nearly every day some seasons... but really I was hoping to enjoy some snow during this trip back to the midwest. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it will (as the weather channel says) snow on Christmas day. I've been reading C.S. Lewis' book "Miracles", so if the rest of this blog entry sounds like his writing, I apologize. You, the reader, should just be happy I'm not reading Hemmingway or Ayn Rand.

Upon arriving back in Louisville, I've been put to a good amount of work: fixing things here, rewiring the new lab, writing some software applications, and giving input on experiment design - it almost seems odd that I feel more useful here than I do at my "regular job" back in Houston. I also got my grades for the semester, that was a nice little pick-me-up. Graduate school grades (for those of you who don't know) are a bit different from undergraduate grades. In grad school, getting good grades is easier in the sense that you are studying something that you are very interested in. It's also easier because most classes have a curve to the exams, so you're not really judged by how well you can remember the third footnote in a chapter and how it might have implications on modern day society, instead you're graded more on whether the rest of the class remembers it. There are of course things to be said about trying to convince your classmates to go to the bar instead of studying, but that's probably another blog entry in and of itself. There are just two other things about grad school grades that I want to mention. First, a "C" in grad school is failing. That's right, C is for cookie and that's about all you'll get as they kick you out for getting a C. And second, if you're interested in doing research for a living (which I am), your grades go on a number of your early grant applications, thus influencing whether you get money to help you do that research you're excited about.

Tonight I'm going on a "progressive dinner", whereby people begin eating appetizers at one house, move to a second house for dinner, and a third house for dessert. It's a lot like trick-or-treating, except that it's really not. Although now that I think of it - having costumes would make it very entertaining!

Sunday we'll have dinner with my friend Kevin's family. Kevin is my arch-nemisis in Dance Dance Revolution - by which I mean that we both started playing at the same time, but then he went off to West Point, bought a Play Station 2, and practiced insane amounts to the point where he's actually good at it... and well, we'll just say that I'm not doing hand stands and flips, while getting every step right.

All and all, it's good to be home.