I would like to have it known that I kicked ass on my second Classical Mechanics homework. Our prof even wrote on top, "Excellent! Keep up the good work!" Yes, with the exclamation points. Yeah, baby!

And this demonstrates a funny consequence of being in school full-time. My sphere of what makes me happy and what upsets me has become so very focused. Of course, working in the Sili Valley is similar in that regard. Project went to build? CAD database released? WOOHOO! ProE crashed just one too many times today? ARGH! I am ready to slam my head into a wall!

I remember once when I had just quit my most recent job. I thought to myself with amazement, things that had caused me quite a bit of stress the previous week had suddenly become utterly, utterly irrelevant to my life. Sure, I had done my best to wrap up what I could before leaving, since I had grown to care personally about my colleagues and did not want to leave them a mess to clean up. But beyond that, I didn't give a rip about my former job. Suddenly, my new job became my big focus.

Although I have always been generally successful about maintaining work-life balance, I still obssess over things. But now I know that I can control what I obssess over. Sure, my personality will always make me prone to spending unhealthful amounts of time scrutinizing tree bark, but I can choose the forest! That's pretty cool.


In other news:

1) Classical mechanics is really cool, and why didn't we learn about Lagrangians in mechanical engineering? Just messing around with math the other night, I re-found F=ma, and Kepler's second law of planetary orbits! How cool is that?

2) I used four, count 'em, FOUR of my former textbooks to do my current homework tonight. I'm not sure what this means. Well, at least it means I have a pretty good library at home.

3) We had our first light dusting of snow early this morning (well, it will have been yesterday morning by the time I publish this, seeing as our network connection is down at home again). It was dry like powder. I am told that snow here is almost always like that. No snowmen or snowball fights. I noticed when I left campus last night that the temperature was 31 deg F, but I didn't feel very cold. People around here, when you say "It regularly gets to MINUS FORTY?!?" like to respond, "yes, but it's a DRY cold!" That used to make me laugh, because it reminded me of how people say the same thing when you gasp about summer temperatures in Arizona. "Yes, but it's a DRY heat!" I'd be like, yeah? But so what? Wet or dry, it's still freaking cold/freaking hot! But a fellow TA finally put it into a way I can understand. She said to me, "This is what 'dry cold' means. Would you prefer to stand in a tub of water at 55 deg F, or in a freezer, which is below 32 deg F?" And I went, "Ooooooohhhhh. Aaaaaaahhhh... Okay, I see now!"

4) I have a whole new respect for foreign students. Native English speakers struggle enough. ESL students have to struggle with language. Non-westerners even have to struggle with culture! First-year physics problems tend to be cutesy. They won't ever say "a particle is on a rotating disk." Nooooo, they say "a cat is snoozing on a merry-go-round." Seriously, this was a problem this Congolese undergrad brought to me today. I knew he was a bright kid, and wondered how such a simple problem about centripetal acceleration could have tripped him up. Well, it turns out that he really had no concept of merry-go-round. And what does this mean, to "snooze"? Re-reading the whole problem from his perspective, I laughed out loud. The "cute" physics problems are really quite silly. A particle on a rotating disk, okay? Geeze.

5) Millie is ridiculously cute. Look, she lets me hug her, unlike some other rabbits I won't name.