A Little Breather....

I finally have a little time to write something in here. I swear, ever since I got back here from Christmas at home, I've been pretty much swamped. First, studying for the candidacy exam, then starting to reacquaint myself with the research I'm doing, and recently starting the application process for a fellowship Ray wants me to apply for. It's a wonder that I even get any down time.

Of course, my body has been rebelling a bit by causing me to be very, very exhausted when I get back home after work. I told this to my doctor when I went to see him on Friday because of some jaw pain I have, so I get to have blood drawn tomorrow. Yay. I'm not a big fan of needles in general, so getting blood drawn is always such a fun experience. So, we'll see what the results of that are. Hopefully everything is normal and I'm just tired because of the depression.

I've also decided that I probably need to try some new anti-depressants. The ones I'm on currently don't seem to be working. It could be just that I haven't been on the "theraputic dose" for long enough. I'm not sure, though. I'd just like to feel like a normal human again. I was doing good on Prozac, but I also got the shakes from that. Although, now that I think about it, I've always kind of had a natural shakiness to me, and I think the increased shakiness was due to sitting directly next to my grandmother during both Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. She's not the easiest woman to deal with on the best days. I'll probably talk to the psychiatrist about this and see what he thinks.

Let's see. What else is new with me? I've sent the first draft of my fellowship proposal to Ray today. Hopefully he'll have some time to give some feedback to me, so I can get it ready to be sent out next Wednesday. I think it's pretty good, but I'm sure I should include some stuff in it to more broadly coincide with NASA's objectives. I'm just hoping I won't have to do too much to it before sending it off. At least I'm not as panicky as I was about it anymore. Things are starting to work themselves out. The only part I'm a bit worried about is getting my transcripts from Carroll, because their mail system is less than efficient. Hopefully I will be able to get them. I should probably do a search of my apartment to see if I have a copy of an unoffical one as a backup.

Not a whole lot is new with me lately. I've been making progress at work, which is a good feeling. For a while there, I wasn't making much progress at all because I couldn't figure out what I had done before. But, I finally figured it out early last week, so I'm redoing some stuff that I already did. I'm doing that for two reasons. One is just to familiarize myself with the programs I'd already written. The other is because the criteria for the depth levels over the continental shelf has been changed to accurately depict the same levels the rest of the team is using. I'm also changing some variable so they're not as cumbersome as they originally were, but not too much so that they're not descriptive of what they represent. I'm also putting more comments in my code, because that's the one thing that bothers me about other people's code. So many coders don't give enough explanation to their code. I had that problem with the radar analysis programs I used for my master's work. There weren't enough comments, and many variables had similar names (for example, n, nn, nnn, nnnn, nnnnn), so they made no sense to me. It also got quite confusing when I was trying to search for a certain variable, like nnn in the above example. That's just irritating.

Apparently we're supposed to get 3-7 inches of snow overnight. I'm sort of excited about it because this has been the weirdest January I've ever seen, with it being so warm at all. I'm not complaining, but I've been thinking that it's just wrong to be able to go outside without a coat in the middle of January. However, I won't be thrilled if it ends up being enough to cancel or delay classes. I'm supposed to teach a lab tomorrow that's already behind because we got Martin Luther King Day off. So, I'm really hoping I'll be able to make it out of my parking lot tomorrow. In any normal parking lot, this wouldn't be a problem. Mine, however, has a rather steep hill to go up to get to the main road. So, I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Speaking of labs, sort of, I'm pretty impressed with the quality of the work being turned in by the two labs I did teach last week. Most of the people did really well on their labs. No one got a perfect score, but that's because I'm rather picky when it comes to grading. Most people who lost points lost them because they didn't label their isopleths. Without labels, they are just lines on a map that have no meaning. So, I'm sure a lot of people will be pissed that they got points off there, but they'll just have to deal with it and do them better next time. But, even with that, the averages for both labs were pretty high, approximately 43/48. That's pretty good from me, because I'm very anal. So, they should be proud of the work they've done so far, at least most of them. Some people didn't work as hard as others, and hopefully they'll realize that after this lab.

Well, I guess that's about it. I should probably cut this off here before it gets too long. Plus, it's almost time to watch my Sunday night shows. (I have my priorities.) So, I'll end with that, and then see if it starts snowing before I go to bed.