Done With Finals!

Well, I had my final final of 2005 back on Tuesday afternoon, in 501 (Atmospheric Phenomena). The exam wasn’t all that hard, just a bit on the annoying side, as around 70% of it or more were dinky little one-point questions asking for “typical values” of certain parameters, such as “the vertical vorticity at 500 mb over a developing extratropical cyclone is ___” or “the saturation vapor pressure at 650 mb in winter above State College is often about ___.” Talk about maddening. But it’s all over, and now I’m officially done with my first semester of graduate school! It feels so odd saying that…
So to celebrate being done with finals, a bunch of us went down to Beulah’s BBQ for a very tasty dinner, and then afterwards we all just moseyed on downstairs to Bar Bleu for a couple drinks. The lounge chairs were soooo comfy… 🙂 It was a fun night just to hang out and relax without having to worry about exams or assignments or anything, I wish more nights out could be like that.
Yesterday, even though I was free from my classes for the very first time since August, I still came into Walker. I had an appointment with Dr Brune, the department chair, to talk about me finding research funding for the summer and beyond. Basically he told me that I shouldn’t be panicking just yet, but that I should really pound the pavement in January and February in search of research opportunities, and that I should “expand my search horizons” a bit. I’ll definitely need to make time to do that in the first few weeks after break, I don’t want it to get to be April and not have funding lined up yet.
I guess I’m not quite totally done with everything I need to this semester actually, as Bill is having us TA’s grade all the final exams for the Meteo 003 students. Wonderful. At least a bunch of students decided to take the exams early in the conflict slots, so I got 18 of the exams yesterday and got a jump on those, finishing them today. I’ll get the rest of them tonight at 8 when the final exam slot is finished, and at least I’ll only have 29 more exams coming tonight. The downside is that Bill wants them all graded by tomorrow at noon. Oh joy, oh bliss. So guess what I’ll be doing tonight? On the plus side, I finally figured out how to get my laptop connected to the wireless network here in Walker Building, so that’ll make everything a bit nicer.
Yesterday was kinda also movie night. In the afternoon, after going downtown to buy my brother Aaron’s Christmas gift (no telling what I got him, in the off chance that he actually happens to read my blog), I met up with Vic, Frame, Robert, Amber, & Kerrie to go see an early evening showing of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.” Talk about an AWESOME movie, I absolutely loved it! Everyone else did too, and not everyone had read the books either. The movie stayed pretty close to the book, which was nice to see. The visuals and acting was really good, I thought, and all the talking, fantastical animals were realistic, allaying the late C.S. Lewis’s fears that any movie would make a buffoonery of the animal characters in his books. And while the religious allegories and symbolism weren’t exactly blatant, they were there in abundance if you were looking for them, which I was. The movie even brought a couple tears to my eyes at points, especially several of the parts involving Aslan. I’d be more than willing to go see “Narnia” another time or two in the theater, it was that good. Then later on in the evening Daniel & I got some pizza and watched “Hero” over at his place, since he’d never seen it before. That’s another film I love watching, it’s so beautiful visually. There were even a couple little details I caught this time around that I hadn’t noticed before, so that was cool.
We’ve got a nice little winter storm that’s whacking us today here in State College. Already we’ve gotten about 3-4 inches or so (though I haven’t been outside since lunch, so it’s hard to say), and it looks like we’re gonna get some sleet and freezing rain mixed in with the snow from now through tomorrow morning. Fun fun fun. I wish it would stay all snow, that way we’d get 10 inches of the white stuff and the roads wouldn’t suck quite so bad. Oh well.
Well, time for supper, Daniel & I are gonna try out yet another new State College eatery, hopefully we don’t pick a dud. Then I’ve just gotta wait around till 8, when the grading fun resumes. Almost there…