Twosdeh

I thought I'd write a bit about this week so my next post isn't another behemoth. However, if you're like me, you'll look down, see a couple paragraphs, and be disappointed. I almost always like reading long blog posts, especially when they're about SOMEBODY, not some external issue. Which is why I allow such massive posts in my blog.. I guess you could call it doing unto others as you'd like done to yourself?

Today was strange. I keep being unwilling to accept that I have to get up early again tomorrow. What is normally my 9 o'clock sleep-in Tuesday was instead a get-up-at-6:40-go-to-work day. Two aspects of this were good, though: I woke up on the patio with Daisy radiating warmness down under the blankets, and in the time I would have been sleeping or working on a beer pasteurizer transfer function model I made $60 and got a bunch of new assignments from my boss Tom.

..It was in the 50's last night, which is why I slept outside. I didn't collapse in a drunken stupor or anything that :-P

Symphony was good, but I found out I missed one point on my midterm. :-P I listened to Beethoven's 5th all day in the car, and I pretty much love it right now as much as I loved Death Cab for Cutie earlier this year. Which is a LOT.

I had two cans of Dr.Pepper today, but they didn't make me happy. The second one was while working on the Process Control project down in B72. We've been assigned the filter and pasteurizer in a beer microbrewing process, and I banged my head against the problem for an hour or two with paltry results. A cheesy Aspen simulation, some basic assumptions and variable specifications, and a lot of gaping questions.
Then I turned to Process Control, wherein the rest of the afternoon evaporated. It was 8 o'clock by the time I printed off the last plot (showing the instability resultant from a difference between the process model and the control model used to create the proportional controller that stabilized the open-loop-unstable system). I enjoyed once again the fact that it was mild outside as I pushed out the door by the basement loading docks of Benedum, but in general I was in a strangely pissed mood. I HATE that word, but it's honestly how I felt, and I hated how I felt, so it conveys the point well. Don't really know why I was in that mood, but like usual, it passed soon, and now I sit on the couch with shorter hair, no beard, tired muscles, a mostly-eaten plate of food at my left hand, PFR playing at my right hand, and another blog post almost finished. Jonathan's out playing basketball, Mom and dad are long asleep, Daniel's off in Grove City, probably asleep 'cause he's a good boy, Ken is in New Jersey doing who knows what, Grandma and Grandpa are plugging along in Chicago, doing well last I heard, Grandma Sweetie's down in Texas carrying on like the astounding trooper she is, Uncle Keith is in crazy crowded Orlando with his Mustang, his (relatively) new girlfriend, his strange half-dying job and his sweet sweet gadgets, and...

Daisy is curled into a tight ball up against a fleece blanket in the crook of the huggle chair.


Here's the view to my right,















And here I am!













Something I see a zillion times a day. Set to play from my laptop. Everly Brothers, which I'm randomly loving at the moment.















And here's Daisy again! Don't you wish you could just flop down in the blanket with her? Aye, that'd be the life, for a day or two at least.


















Have a peaceful night!

--Clear Ambassador

I remembered to put a title in this little box!

Well, this may be the last homework-free day for awhile (I really don't know), so I figured I'd write up some stuff.

This week was going to be crazy ridiculous. Dr. Enick had 3 progress reports due - Monday, Wednesday and Friday (normally there's one a week, and that's plenty) - so I called off work and Charlie and I battened down the hatches and worked on Sunday to prepare for the storm. And then we finished the Wednesday one, Enick moved the Friday one (finished now) to Monday, and... and.. I didn't know what to do with myself!

Lessee.. so what did I do this week? Hush, Johnny Cash, I can't think. I wish my feet weren't so cold! I can sit on the hearth and get my rear end sore and my back hot, or I can sit on the couch and be comfy, but either way my feet sit on the floor and get icy. Um...

Sunday I went down to Pitt after the Steeler's game at the Harvey's and Charface and I worked on the distillation columns progress report. I wrote about Monday and stuff. Tuesday...I don't remember. My Fall Fitness Challenge Log sheet says I did an hour-long tough workout at home, so I guess I did that. Oh yeah! I did crazy hard stuff on the Elliptical and got my heart rate up to about 180, which is faster than the heart rate monitor can measure, and I was breathing so hard my throat was torn up the next day and I thought I was getting sick. I know I did other stuff Tuesday.. gosh, I can't remember! The day is lost! Seriously. That's why I started this journal - so I wouldn't lose days, or worse, whole seasons and memories and mindsets, to "the faulty camera in your mind," to quote Death Cab for Cutie.

Wednesday was sweet 'cause I worked out for an hour and twenty minutes with no cardio. Which means it was all lifting, which means it was pretty much my longest workout ever. It felt so good to have plenty of time and just get to work whatever I felt like, come back for a second round, and thoroughly work everything. And I wasn't even too sore Thursday, which was quite encouraging. After working out me and Charlie hit the pipes report and I wrote down all the info from our styrene plant simulation to be able to write the detailed description at home.

I didn't write it that night, 'cause.. I think I just got home sorta late and wasted time or did something.. Nate couldn't get together with me and Jonathan, so we just hung around like usual I think.
Thursday was wonderful! My facebook status, posted at 9:04am, was "John is going back to sleep! NO LAB TODAY!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh." I indeed sorta overslept, and before fully rousing and rushing to leave by 9:30 I decided to check courseweb on the off chance that I wasn't remembering correctly and it was team set II's lab, not team set I that day. I really thought it was set I, but there was enough of a grain of doubt to make me check.
Ohh, how glorious the feeling when I saw "Team Set II" on the 26th! I could sleep! I had nothing till history of the symphony at 1, and no homework for that class, and no huge load that demanded I rise and work at it! So I slept till 12:15 and barely made it to Pitt in time for HotS :-) That was nice, though I always hate it after I've slept in so late 'cause half of the day is just gone.

_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_

I have returned from my expedition to procure a coat from the basement hallway with which to mitigate the onsetting chill tempered weakly by my white "Life. God's Gift" T-shirt. I have returned bearing snacks: Gruesomely splitered chunks of bulk dark chocolate (and by bulk I mean big honkin' 1-inch-thick blocks that stubbornly resist cutting, breaking or in any way fragmenting), an 8oz. glass of whole milk, half a tube of Pizza-licious Pringles (3/$3 at Walgreens baby!), and violet-flavored candies. I still haven't turned music back on 'cause I'm thinking quite well right now and I think it would just distract me.

Class was good Thursday--typical. I am greatly enjoying the pittance of knowledge I'm gleaning from this class (relative to the breadth and depth of the genre, not the quality of instruction. Dr. Nisnevich is actually fantastic - I like to just "sit at her feet," so to speak, and listen to the knowlege she spits out off-hand as she talks about different composers. Her Russian accent is sweet too), and the XM Radio lets me apply it, since I know the composer and title of what I'm listening to. Hah, bet I threw you a little off guard there with that massive parenthetical section. Eeheehee I'm an evil text genius! Anyway, this chocolate is good and so is History of the Symphony, and after class I barely got symphony tickets in time and then I picked up the CSA farm basket, ate an apple from it, and got home kinda late in the afternoon.

The rest of that afternoon and awhile after dinner I wrote the detailed plant description, which actually went really well. Given my paragraphs and tables, you could fully recreate our plant simulation in Aspen. Yeeah meean, bully for us! Thursday night I worked out, even though I didn't feel like I had to 'cause Kayte was at least 2 days behind. But I did.

Friday I skipped though, 'cause I was gone from 7:50am to 1:30am. I had 5 hours of class plus 30 minutes of watching me and Charlie's Health & Safety presentation with Dr. Murphy (Pretty helpful. I wasn't prepared enough), then 45 minutes drive to work, 4 hours of work, and an hour to pick up Katie Caldwell, hit Sheetz for an energy drink (No Rockstar Juiced! BOOOOOO and waaaah) and find a parking garage near Heinz Hall. Yes folks, we were going to the symphony! Shannon was alllmost late, but barely got there in time, and we plopped into our seats wayyyy up in the gallery 30 seconds before the lights dimmed and Brahms filled the hall.
I followed along in the program with his three choral pieces, trying to pick out enough of the Mendelsohn Choir's German to track where we were and read off the English translation to the right. They were "heathenish" German poems about the ancient Greeks and gods and stuff, and knowing the words really made the music cool and fitting. Pretty miserable view of life though: The god's have it great, and everybody on earth is hopeless and pretty much screwed. The end. Pfft. Yay for Christianity, man. Yay for Jesus! as Steph would say :-)
After the intermission the lights dimmed again, we dutifully clapped for the conductor, and they launched into Beethoven's 5th - a moment I'd been looking forward to for weeks. It was amazing listening to the music with some knowledge (just enough to be dangerous :-) ). I truly enjoyed every second of the symphony, and even arrived at a few critiquing conclusions (like I thought the violins were too quiet in general, especially in the beginning)--a sign to me that I'm listening and processing at a viable level. I marveled many times at how perfectly Beethoven constructed the whole thing--every variation of the themes and motifs, every instrument, all the progressions and blossoming storylines of sound...
Bah, here I am falling into the same grandiose language to describe Beethoven that everybody else uses. Phooey that. It was great music. Just like Jars of Clay, Switchfoot and Relient K's latest albums: so good you can just sit back and marvel at where they take you and how they take you there.
I.. mm.. I was both happy because of the music, and quite happy because I was actually happy from the music; music which before meant little if anything to me. [I have my own convention for semicolons, so don't whine about it please :-P]

I was quite happy to applaud long and loud when it was finished, though I would have preferred the orchestra to take a few bows instead of the conductor walking out again and again and acting like he was all the schnitz and he'd done that all and we were all clapping for him. I don't think he was actually that proud, but that's sort of my reaction to the convention of focus on the conductor. Somebody (Shannon I think) said our orchestra is the 6th best in the world, according to somebody, and that made me pretty proud of our little city.

After the concert we got back to the car through the soaked and gleaming streets and headed to Oakland for some chillin' action. The coffee houses were closed, and all I could think of was Fuel & Fuddle, so we headed there, got some beverages, and hit up the half-price Flying Buffalo pizza after 11pm. Sooo goood! I obeyed Dad's care group exhortations and headed up some conversation about what God's doing in our lives and where we seem to be headed, and that was really nice. Shannon and Katie are great girls, and it was nice to have some time to talk and mull over life. Oh yeah! Before I thought of F&F we swung by Benedum and I gave Shannon and Katie a quickie tour of the ChemE classrooms. That was fun to show somebody else these central parts of my life right now, and maybe it'll help Katie as she evaluates the possibilities of engineering and Pitt. Good times.

OK so.. speeding up 'cause I've made another HUGE post for crying out loud, we come to Saturday. Slept till 11:15 'cause it was rainy so I couldn't mow the back like I was gonna. Did some minor yardwork for Mom, ate some brunch, arranged for Mike and Matt and Jonathan to come with me to visit Heather and Waynesburg, and then did that. Yay for finally getting to visit Hezz! It was a lot of fun goin' on a road trip with the brothers Q and the brother Hughes, and even though it was cold, rainy, soaking wet and lots of people were gone from campus, we had a pretty nice time. Heather's dorm and room are sweet - nice and homey feeling, which is unusual for dorms IME*. We flopped about there for awhile, walked around the hillside campus for awhile, and kinda killed some time sittin around like the vultures in Jungle Book. Eventually we hit up "The Lamb Garden" for dinner in *woooo* Downtown Waynesburgh!! :-P It's a funny tiny little town. But the General Tso's was good, and we had some nice talkin' amidst the raucous humor :-) After din din we hung around the lounge in some cool building and played pool and watched some MIB and generally lolled around by ourselves in a place that would normally be full of people, which is always fun and funky. We ended up rolling down the dark wet roads to Sheetz with 7 people crammed in my car--pretty much the thing to do in Wburgh :-) That wrapped up the evening, and Hezz, Brian and Doug walked back to campus while we headed off into the night watching Strong Bad emails on my iPod. A pretty unusual day. I might be back to Waynesburgh in awhile to play for a coffeehouse if Heather follows through with her idea, which would be SWEET SWEETNESS. Gaaah, that'd be perfect! Hopefully it'll work out.

Today, Sunday.. I played electric guitar at church and many people said afterward that it was great, and most said that it also helped them worship, which is always amazing and gratifying and hard to believe God would let me do something so fun and actually have it serve His people in a nontrivial way. Joel preached an excellent sermon on 2nd Peter 3, continuing our series on Heaven and eternity. Mr. Calano is done leading children's ministry now, which is amazing since he's been doing it for eight and a half years. That's really cool that he can be freed up to lead his care group, and also that Mr. Graham is leading children's ministry now. He'll do a great job :-) It's cool to see people stepping up in new ways in the church--Tim McCullough is taking the function support team, Rob's taking children's ministry, Joel's got a team (including me!) for the upcoming college ministry.. Good stuff.
Mom, Dad and I swung by Iva Mae's to give her some CD's and got to catch up on her post-op condition. She is doing quite well now, and literally seemed to radiate light from her face. She is such a woman of God, and so full of genuine, simple joy in Him! She's a foshizzle saint :-) And Lisa is definitely a sweet pea, as Iva called her :-)
Then it was to the picture framers, where I got a short, deep nap in the car. Then, at last, to Taco Bell! Cheesy Gordita Crunches, talk about eternity, and sunshine on our shoulders all made us happy. And the Mountain Dew made me high. Yes, it's a Baja Blast Mountain Dew hi-igh. I've seen it rainin' soda from the fountainnn... oh nevermind, I can't make this fit with John Denver.

Steeler's game at our house with Mike, Shannon, Steve, all 3 Hugheses, Nate Sarah and Katie. Terrible loss to the Raiders. Loss of hope, but still fun times with cool people. Now I'm tired of writing, I've made another monstrous post, and it's gettin' close to 1am. The Pringles are good, and I still haven't had a violet candy.

School starts back up, and the week moves on. They're goin' fast man, and graduation is I think only 6 weeks or so away. Yikes.

Have a good week all yous peoples out dere! Big up yo'self, future self.

Scratch that bit about the violet candy. Mmmmm . . . .

--Clear Ambassador


*In My Experience

Addendum

As usually happens with learning problems, things cleared up the morning after. We just finished Process Control for the day, and I clearly understand what he was talking about yesterday. There's one last question in my mind, but I think I could figure it out if I wanted to think hard enough, and it's not necessary for implementation, just for thorough baseline understanding (something I'm a big fan of).

Now to sleep, eat, repark, symphonize, exercise, homeize, and finish-progress-reportize.

--Clear Ambassador

A Day

Today was a day.

At first I was going to type "Today was a great day," based on the last half. But then I remembered missing the alarm, missing the bus, sleeping through a class, and the frustration of not being able to comprehend the control setup for a system with delay. But I certainly wouldn't write "Today was a pretty lousy day," 'cause I read some of the Bible (!!!), slept for almost 2 hours after eating a delicious sandwich, worked out for more than an hour, and spent 5 hours of wonderfully balanced homework and fun stuff up in the computer lab doing tomorrow's process control assignment with Charlie and Joam. Does anybody else realize how wonderful relationships are when you're working on something with other people? It's like you can just interact, joke, hang out together, and not be concerned with any of it 'cause you have to do it 'cause you're working. The focus isn't the "relationship," it's what you're doing. Charlie and I have been having a blast this semester doing process control, safety and design together. But if he just came over to the house to hang out, we probably wouldn't have much to do, and it would be kind of strange. Last semester with Jenna as my homework partner was great, too. Sports are like that too: they're great for getting to know people and building some familiarity without sitting around talking - every word having no purpose but conversation, every action having no escape but to indicate something about yourself, the other people, or what you think of them.
More generally, being forced to do work can be quite nice. It removes self-reflexivity. You have to think about less. You have no choice! The more free time, and the more free your time, the more culpability you shoulder as to your use of it. This may not be coherent to others, but it's one of those I feel rather strongly and have been enjoying a lot at an elemental, "I wouldn't do this voluntarily" level this semester.
Oh, and today was good day too because I hit up Fuel & Fuddle after the computer lab at 11:30 and got a Magic Head and a Flying Buffalo, both of which were exquisite. It's hard to believe how good their pizza crusts are.

In other news, I'm gaining weight.. but my waistline is shrinking. I'm staying over 145, but I keep wishing I had one more hole in my default belt (thrift store, baby!), which used to fit perfectly. So I guess that means I'm gaining muscle weight, which is sweet. I noticed an improvement in my karate kick height, too, which means my hours of hamstring stretches are paying off. Today I walked up the stairs from the basement to the 12th floor of Benedum twice (282 steps, 2 at a time) and it wasn't that big of a deal (whereas typically I'm sucking air in like a positive displacement vacuum pump by the 10th floor and my quads feel like stiff, burning steaks). I'm putting 2 45's on each side of the bench press machine, and I can do three sets of pullups without weight assist. All of which is to say, it looks like there's some progress on the exercise front. Which is thrilling to see, 'cause exercising is basically like throwing a bottle out on the ocean -- you do what you do, but you have no direct control over what actually happens. It's an amazing thing to see your body actually responding and getting more able to do things. Muscle growth is the coolest, because it's adding to your very frame - the limbs you carry about everywhere and see in every mirror. I could never *will* my body to make more muscles or lift more weight, but it has come about to that effect on its own, due to the conditions I have imposed through working out.

As I was riding the elevator down from the computer lab I was thinking about this general (yes, we're making a bit of a jump here :-) ) topic: I just love it, way deep down, when I find myself arriving at a conclusion that I read or heard about elsewhere before or when I find myself experiencing something I heard about and couldn't really imagine at that time. Like when I get to know a piece of music enough to reach criticisms in my own opinion that I read about somewhere. Or like when I found myself wishing I had a multiband compressor to de-ess vocals in my recordings after reading about de-essing dozens of times in my compressor research. Suddenly it was right in front of me, not because I read about it but because I needed it. This semester is like that. Whenever somebody talks about being "Oh man, soo busy!" I just don't know how to picture that. When seniors talked about living down in the computer lab for design, I just couldn't imagine it. But here I am. I drove down to Pitt Sunday after the Steelers game at the Harvey's and spent a couple hours down in B72 with Charlie working on distillation columns (and Walker Texas Ranger clips on YouTube :-) ). I spent 5 hours in the computer lab tonight, and I spent something like 7 hours down in B72 a couple weeks ago. It's happening just like they said, but not 'cause it's what's supposed to happen, but because it has to happen. Not because it's what seniors do, but because it takes that long. And as long as I'm sitting here in a sea of deep black with the screen filling my view and the fire flickering to the left, I might as well get REALLY abstract and deep (And also make some declarations and generalizations beyond my solid knowledge yet held firmly by my mind and thus representative of my thinking, flawed though it may be):

I really really like it when things come about naturally. That's part of what frustrates me about modern America, and much of the modern world. Why do we have a State of the Union Address? It's not 'cause we need the President to tell us what's happening. Everybody knows way too much already. It's just an old tradition that we do 'cause the Constitution says we're supposed to do it. When we're forced to function at a level different from that dictated by basic principles such as survival and, shall we say, "primal" desires/needs, I just find it frustrating. Which is one of the reasons I'm getting fascinated by football.
Step back and look at it, people. The entire nation of America, from the time its children are old enough to understand words, is grooming them for football. From pee wee football on through all the years of childhood, the thousands of schools across the country are a giant farm training almost every guy how to throw and catch, and gradually lifting up those who are good at it, till in high school and college thousands of kids spend most of their life for football--lifting, practicing, playing, and watching. And all for what? For a few teams scattered around the nation and among them a handful of stars that get most of the glory. Nobody is telling us to do this. It isn't something like a Fourth of July parade that's sorta just done for form and not many people come to and you almost feel sorry for the veterans and avid community people out there on the street. It's a vibrant, "primal" system that literally engulfs our entire nation. Traffic was drastically light Tuesday morning after the Steelers' Monday Night Football appearance this season. See how cool that is? The nation is acting as one, not 'cause somebody's tyring to convince us to all get together on this football thing, but because we all love it and it has the vibrancy of a successful, popular thing. (We are sheep, after all). The football stadiums of America, with the cars gathering and parking for miles around, the pulsing roar of the crowd, the blimp floating overhead, the dozens of TV cameras hovering around, the coaches and trainers and docters and beer sellers and painted fans and uniformed players are no different from the Coliseum and gladiators of old. It's just that now things are clean and we watch it on TV, and it's all run by ad money and team owners instead of Caesar and soldiers.

I didn't really intend to write about all of this, but it's one of those things that occupies my thoughts fairly often and that makes me sit and wish for a different life in a different time sometimes, and those are the kind of things I want to record and remember, so I can see how I change and recall how I was and thought during these years.

Today was a good day. Regardless of the rough morning (I was truly unhappy for a few minutes in process control class as I was falling asleep despite my frantic efforts to follow Parker's lecture and desperately trying to understand what the HECK he was doing and how it all fit together), when I walked out of Fuel & Fuddle at 1:21am I felt on top of the world. I had slept far far longer than planned in the afternoon, but I had used that rest to work out long and well and get the process homework all done before coming home (where distractions make work very hard). I stepped out of the door and into the cold breeze coming down Oakland Avenue, and just loved it. My cold tolerance has gone quite strangely high this year; I'm almost trying to keep summer going on by not getting out the huge clumsy leather jacket of years past. I let it blow into me and relished the crispness. There were snowflakes falling thinly in the light of signs and streetlights, melting on the windshield. A few people walked along the sidewalks. I had read the Bible and worked out, and the time in the computer lab sat in my mind as such an eminently pleasant time--sipping perfect Dr.Pepper from the can, munching some snacks, dealing with Charlie's quasi depression and intensity over the homework (in his always good-natured Charlie way), helping him and Joam with the homework, doing snippets of Facebook and AIM inbetween making real progress on the problems, finding them doable but not trivial (unlike health & safety), and looking with satisfaction at the as-expected plots turned out by my complex Simulink process simulations. Jenna was working at F&F and we got to catch up a bit when she wasn't busy waiting tables. I had been gone since 9 that morning - 16 and a half hours. One of those things I used to hear about and not even be able to imagine doing. It was fall, headed towards winter and the warmth and richness Christmas, and the cold felt good. It was a good day. It's a wonderful life :-)

Thank you Lord! I should and could be happy in an unpleasant and difficult life, but You've given me rarely-disturbed bliss. I don't expect it to go on for the rest of my life like this, so I'm very grateful for every day that continues so pleasantly, and I pray that when true trials come, grace will come with them and I'll take it.

And here, relative to this entire post, is the thought and prayer of last night, as I paced the famly room and laid sleepless on my bed battling the thought of eternity:

Another insipid masquerade
Another deceptively pleasant day
All of the trophies on my shelf
I'm tired of looking at myself.. and all of these boring things

So open my eyes
Open my eyes..
Blow my mind
I want to see God..
(I want to see God)

I want to see miracles today
I want to see change I can't explain
There's got to be more to life than health
More than just looking at myself.. and all of these boring things

So open my eyes

Get the balloons and ticker tape
I'm having another self-parade
Look at all the floats I've made
Is this all my life can say?

..open my eyes
..blow mind
..I want to see God

--Clear Ambassador

Well, if it's better to show rather than tell in your writing, then I suppose I've done some awesome writing this past month to demonstrate the busy-ness of this semester :-) But it hasn't been true business that has kept me from writing. Most nights lose an hour at least to Facebook, and many times when I've had the opportunity to write here I've shied away from the overwhelming task of tackling all that is unwritten. It's hard thinking, too, and that hasn't been the most attractive thing.

SO. This semester. What's it like? How should I remember it when all that fills my attention now is gone from my memory but a few defining points (probably from the last week of the semester)?

I'm driving a lot. Pretty much 9 out of 10 days. And rarely paying for parking. But twice paying tickets, which cost far more than meters, yet somehow feel different than shelling out three bucks a day in shiny silver coins. There are four legit places that I know of that have no meters, two of which also have no time limit (the reason for one of my tickets). Every day I dance the dance with the law, weighing risk against convenience and time, and occasionally landing a sweet spot like a busted meter or a Mazda-long space just tucked in behind a sign.

I sleep a lot. Not a day goes by when I don't find at least 15 minutes to doze somewhere. There's something about facing an entire 18-hour day with no prospect of releasing the pining tiredness that drags at my eyelids and weighs on my chest that just isn't tenable. Sometimes I pay for it by getting delayed or not being able to work out at the Pete. Sometimes I step back and think how odd it is that I'm sleeping all the time during the days and wonder if it's a really bad thing to give in to my tiredness and not push through it and get used to being able to function while drowsy. But even 15 minutes of release can make a world of difference, so on I go. The quiet reading room in the engineering library is the best spot, though at times the floor of the basement computer lab has served :-) That place is seriously my second home. Well third, after the Hoffmans. yay!

I am working out, though sometimes it's crammed in odd places. I'm making the Pete about half the time, but my home workouts are usually pretty solid. I'm stretching every single time, and today I did some kicks and it appears that there is some progress in flexibility, which has been irritatingly lacking so far. My left hamstring is stupid - it seems to just get torn or something, not stretched. Which brings up the point that my legs on the whole are lousy - my knees never quite chill out and become normal, and my hips feel weird sometimes. Quite irritating from a lifetime perspective. Overall I haven't seen a ton of improvement or growth from working out so far, but I'm just starting to pass the 6-week point, beyond which Ryan says new muscle tissue starts to form. I'm kicking it up a notch, too--going for more weight and fewer reps, trying not to be easy on myself. Every time I work out I feel great, which is nice. The Pete is sweet. Or swete, as the case may be :-)

I feel like saying "classes are hard." But everybody says that, and I want to get it a little more meaningfully. Ummm, the work I have to do for classes is throwing me around like a bucking bronco. Last week I just barely held on. Process control can be difficult to understand sometimes, and the homework can take confoundingly long. The average on the first exam we just had was 49.5, which really got Dr.Parker concerned. I got a 75.5, so I was pretty happy. Plant Design is...unlike any class I've had before. In a way it's very open and easy--no "homework" per se, and Dr. Enick tells us basically every little thing we have to do. But practically it's getting extremely hard. Not usually by difficulty of work but by volume and persnicketyness. "Homework" consists of progress reports--roughly one a week--that each cover a step or two in the design of a styrene plant (that is our ChemE senior design project). Heat exchanger networks, Aspen simulations, reactor sizing, plots, tables, discussions, descriptions...each report is a mini-monumental task, and Charlie and I spend lots of hours (like, 6 or 7 straight, 2 or 3 here and there) to get them done. Often the directions are unclear or the enabling information was blustered by us in class and nobody remembers. Then it really gets hard, and the minutes, quarters, halves and hours slip away and you're looking at the clock and it's saying 9:07 and you still haven't worked out or eaten dinner. Such I heard about design ("Ohh man, you live in the labs!"), and now I look and see that so I am indeed experiencing. Um..process safety, compared to the big two, is negligible. Except the honkin' lecture summary report thing that took hours upon hours upon hours of time and is just regurgitating all his lecture notes ad nauseum for only slightly more points than the homework which takes 15 minutes before class in the 10th floor lab. Arg. Yet another poorly-thought-out class. Another reason I'd like to be a professor. But boo grad school. yech.

It's 2:35am, and tomorrow I need to get up at 8:30 and get down to Pitt to listen to a bunch of music and write out essays for the history of the symphony midterm. So I'll can it. I'm dried-sweaty from a short but fierce workout downstairs, I'm un-hungry 'cause I had a roast beef-pear sandwich (Go protein! Go into my little muscles!), and of course, I am not tired in the least. I'm bright-minded, open-eyed, and ready to hit the world. This bio rhythm never ceases to confound me. Even with plenty of sleep (like, 9 hours), if it's before noon, and often in midafternoon, if I'm not doing something actively with mind or body, down I go. Then, after about 8 or 9, I'm up and ready to go. Grr. Stupid body! Or maybe it's all my fault and if I would just do things right I'd be tired at the right times. Whatever.

I've gone to Akron for a concert at the Orange Street, Steph came to town and we visited Grove City, Mom and Dad were gone this weekend and I recorded in the basement, Daniel's on fall break so he's home right now, and I'm in general fairly disconnected from God, church, friends and normalcy. But I pray often and honestly, and I'm not ultimately deserting or ignoring (I don't think) the truth of the Gospel, who God is, and who I am. I don't think. I think reading the Bible more might show that my thinking has changed more than I realized from God's mindset.

Enough for now. I hope to write more this week to catch up a bit. We'll see. Oh yes. Next week we have THREE progress reports due. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Plus process homework. Go ahead and shoot me why don't you? Geez.

--Clear Ambassador