So it's been a while - sorry about that. The semester is quickly coming to an end, which means everyone goes nuts for a month.

Anyway, I'm sure everyone has heard the phrase "if you don't like the weather, just wait 10 minutes" in regards to Minnesota weather. While it is true about Minnesota, it's almost more true of Oklahoma. Take for example this past Thursday. The sun was shining, but we had a 20 minute rain/hail deluge:









No joke - it was like somebody turned the faucet on full blast. One minute: no rain; next minute: so much rain we can barely see. Crazy Oklahoma weather!

I'll be heading out to California next weekend for a friend's wedding and then we go into the home stretch of the end of the semester. There are 3 weeks left and I've got a ton to do. Where did the semester go? I'm still trying to figure out the paradox of how time can go both very slowly, yet very quickly. Once the semester ends, I have about a month off before I begin research. Yea! I'm not sure if we'll be heading up to Minnesota yet - it will depend on what the hubby finds for summer work. We hope to take a long weekend to visit some friends up in Boulder, but we'll be flying there.

And to end and just because they're cute:





Hope spring is coming to everyone!

Well, I finally know what classes I'm taking and what I'm teaching this semester - and all 5 days before it all begins! I'll be taking Math Methods for Physicists, Classical Mechanics and Stellar Atmospheres for classes and I'll be teaching General Physics I lab. We had our first TA meeting this week and I can tell right now that teaching this class will be a breeze compared to the Astronomy labs I've been teaching for 2 years. We're given everything we need to teach the class, from the "this is what you need to lecture on" to the actual solutions to the labs. It was suggested we go into the labs the day before we teach to fiddle with the apparatus, but we don't have to do the labs ourselves, though I probably will. The syllabus is done for us, there are no office hours and we only have to proctor the final. I'm only teaching 2 sections, so hopefully I'll have plenty of time for my own classes and to study to pass the sections of the qualifying exams in January.

I also got into my office! There are at least 8 of us in there and it's a lot more minimalistic than I was anticipating (I think there was one computer in the whole room), but the one person I met was a 3rd year grad who was super nice and a woman to boot. :P She's the graduate liason and her desk is across from mine, so I can see not much work getting done. But she did mention that she has all the notes, work, whatever I could possibly need for both my classes and the exams. So now my building nervousness over not knowing what was going on has lessened significantly and is now just isolated to the nervousness of starting at a new school - 2 weeks earlier than I'm used to. But I'll manage, I'm sure. :D I'll see if I can snag any decent pics on Monday.

We had an adventure at the Department of Public Safety this week, which the hubby blogged about here. The car is know Oklahoma-fied and so are our licenses. The cool thing is that they print your license up right there, so you get it right away instead of waiting for it to come in the mail.

We're currently getting the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin and the meteorologists say that Hurricane Dean will hit us sometime next week - they're just waiting to see what path it takes. So far Erin has been more noise than actual rain, so I'm interested to see what Dean does. Considering they're predicting he'll hit Category 5 by the time he's projected to hit the Yucatan, it will be an interesting week...