Well, it's been a while. I blame this almost entirely on my professors, they seem to think that there are several more hours per day than I am aware of having. I'm almost through my first round of exams though, and overall they didn't go too badly. I'm really rather sad about rushing though this so fast though, as a graduate student you're supposed to have time to really dig in and understand things, and I don't. I think that if I was taking the usual two years for this, I'd be able to do a much better job. On the bright side though, I am more and more convinced that I really like engineering, and might really be able to enjoy doing it for a living! What a relief!

In other news:
I just got back from a weekend at home. Robbie bought me plane tickets home for my cousin Nils's wedding this past Friday for my birthday. It was a nice wedding, but I still can't quite believe that they're married! It seems so strange... I'm happy for them though, and looking forward to getting used to having a new cousin, and eventually little people :). It was great being home and getting to see everybody, both at the wedding and then today at church. Also got plenty of good home cooked food... yummy.
Only thing of critical importance to do this week: test in Photonics on Tuesday morning - and we've got Thursday and Friday off for Fall Break - no 2.5 hour lectures this week, hooray!!
Robbie is back in the Azores :(. I'm happy for him, because I think he finds it much more interesting being there, but it makes it that much harder for us to talk on the phone (costs money, and there's a time difference to worry about), but he now has internet access in his house, so we can chat and I can leave him messages whenever, which is great :).
Finally, I really like my job at the ARC. It's a great place, the people are great, and I really have fun figuring out how to explain things to the students who come in, it's such a challange to present things in a clear way that helps them to really grasp what's going on. Plus, it's great practice for me, I'm much better at even simple circuit analysis than I was at the beginning of the semester, and I don't think I ever understood op-amps or diodes as well as I do now. Now, if I could only figure out how those differential amplifiers worked again... (actually I think I'm even starting to remember that thanks to 425).