My oh my time is starting to go by quickly. It’s been a week since I last posted, but I’ll be quick with summing up. On Friday afternoon I went over to the College View community room, which Carl had reserved for the entire weekend for the trivia contest. We got everything all set up just in time for the 5pm start of trivia, listening to the webcast of KVSC (the campus radio station in St Cloud) over the internet. Friday night it was basically Carl & I the whole time, with Cory & Seth also chipping in for big chunks of time. It was still a really small team though, so as a result we all got pretty tired and started going to bed one by one. Of course, it didn’t help that I was slammed by a massive cold and sore throat that came on after the start of the trivia contest. Seriously, it hit me like a ton of bricks, I was so worn out that I just had to take a break from 1am-8:30am. Carl finally gave up at 4 when he was the only one left, because one person just can’t do everything in this sort of a trivia contest, with 2-4 questions open at any given time for 5-25 minutes (depending on point value), having to research them on the net to find the answers (if they could even be found on the net, some of them were impossibly tough and obscure), and call in. You just need a minimum of two people to do it.
So we started Saturday off in 66th place because of taking a few hours off overnight, but Zach came over at 8:30am to join Carl & I. In the afternoon we had some sweet rounds (including a math round) where we totally cleaned up, so that by early evening we were back up to 61st place. Cory came back eventually, and then a couple other people dropped by to help for a little bit, but the lack of people just took its toll, as we all decided to give up for good at 1am. We were all just exhausted (and I was sick and miserable), had homework to do the next day, and couldn’t really fathom doing it for another 16 hours. From 5pm Friday-1am Sunday I’d already done about 24 hours of trivia. Ugh. So while our team, “Wee r ay grewp uv reelee smrt peepull,” finished in 66th or somethin in the final tally, we consider that we finished in 61st, since that’s where we were when we quit. It was still a fun time though, and there were 72 teams from around the country (mostly from around the Upper Midwest and Minnesota in particular) competing, so considering we only averaged 3 people for most of the time, we actually did pretty well. But it did feel good to go back to Wahlstrom and sleep in my own bed, and I slept straight through for nearly 10 hours without waking up even once, which is extremely unusual for me. I must’ve been tired!
Sunday was homework day. Hooray. And it was really crappy outside, raining and really cold almost all day, until it switched over to a couple inches of heavy wet snow. At least it meant that the observing portion of our Astrophysics lab didn’t have to happen that night.
My body is really starting to get sore from all the phy ed courses I’m in. I’m just not used to the 5-day-a-week exercise thing yet, considering I haven’t been in that sort of a routine since high school. If I can get my body adjusted to everything in the next week or two I should be doing pretty good. One thing I can say Monday’s 12-minute run in Conditioning though: it certainly helped lessen my cold. I’ve had that sort of thing happen before, so maybe every time I get a cold I should just go on a long run to get rid of it! It seems to be working. But it’s still weird how I always seem to get a cold in the second week of a semester… I went bowling with the roommates and a few other people Monday night too. Nobody was able to dethrone Ben this time either, and certainly not me with my two totally crappy sub-100 games.
Tuesday evening was the study abroad welcome home pizza banquet, and there were a couple representatives there from BUNAC, a group that organizes work abroad trips to various countries, including Australia and New Zealand. So now I’m thinking about possibly seeing if grad schools would be willing to defer my admission for a year so I could go back to Oz/NZ for a bit and work. Talking with an Aussie IFSA-Butler rep and a BUNAC rep who’d also been to Australia just made me realize how much I do miss Melbourne. I really do — A LOT — and I’d absolutely love to go back. The downside is that I could only work in Australia for 4 months, with how their work visas are set up, so I might have trouble finding anything meaningful or valuable, but I’m asking one of the weather profs at Monash to check into whether I could get into either the Bureau of Meteorology (think National Weather Service) or CSIRO (a huge atmospheric research organization). I’d really only be open to doing this in Melbourne, because I already know people there. I just wouldn’t wanna do it in Sydney since I basically don’t know anybody. But in the next couple of weeks some of my options there might crystallize one way or the other and we’ll see how things are going. It might turn out that it’d be better just to go to grad school straight-away like I’ve always been planning, and try to make it back to Melbourne some other time. And maybe by then one or two of my friends might be able/willing to either work or travel abroad with me for a bit, because that’d be just infinitely more fun. 🙂
I’m starting to hear back from more grad schools now finally. I was already accepted into University of Wisconsin-Madison, but now I’ve also been accepted into University of Colorado at Boulder and Florida State University! University of Oklahoma had invited me to a prospie weekend the last weekend in February, but it was kinda late notice and I had already committed to the Curriculum II retreat that weekend (which is something I’m actually really really looking forward to), so I just couldn’t swing it. Hopefully it doesn’t hurt my chances at landing an assistantship. But Colorado invited me to their prospie weekend the second weekend in March, and I think I’ll be heading out to that for a couple days, especially since they’re paying for my flight and accommodation. 🙂 Now if only I’d hear about assistantships from anyplace, and if I’d hear anything about my admit status from Oklahoma or Penn State…
Definitely time for bed. Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to getting the rest of my website back online, but my Schedule is up at least.