Just My Imagination

I swear I am going to post interesting things and not be so bloggy soon. This was not supposed to be a LiveJournal. But I wanted to say Arizona is growing on me. I finally found a proper park on Friday! It's called Kiwanis Park and has ducks and water and trees, which is good enough for me. Also, batting cages which are more fun than I expected (basically you try to hit baseballs that are launched at you by a baseball-collecting machine). My camera ran out of charge before I could get any pictures, but I'll steal some from the Boy (who was more together about the whole checking the batteries thing) and put them up.

In other news, I think I am going to Canada over the break. It's going to be cooooold, but I am excited to do baking and crafty things with my friend Raven, who is good with that sort of thing. I miss making Christmas presents. I should not be thinking of this now, though. There are eigenvectors to find, hash tables to implement, and parallel Linux filesystems to understand first...and that is just tonight. *sigh.*

Seriously though, I'm so happy these days. I'm going to have to try harder if I want to stay properly cynical.

I swear I am the most contrary person ever. The moment I have to do something I don't want to, but I am uber motivated to get stuff done that I don't have to do. I spent last week working on a volunteer robots project and this weekend tutoring C++ stuff I didn't know and which was harder than the assignments I did have to get done. When I did work on the projects I had to do, I did them in reverse order of urgency. This is both silly and rather obnoxious: it's a bit spoiled of me to ask for freedom in order to fulfill obligations. I'm nonetheless counting this among one of the best weeks of my life. It was the week after an absolutely insane bout of midterms and project deadlines, and I unexpectedly had time to go to office hours, to really learn rather than cram, to do work I enjoyed, and to spend time helping and working with classmates. The storm resumes in 7 minutes (the start of Monday morning), but the hiatus was wonderful.

Placeholder for a proper post, but I'm really excited: my robotics curriculum team is making progress programming our robot! Yesterday we made it navigate an obstacle course of boxes and trashcans.

I'm really enjoying the process of working in a group. That combined with the fact that I'm only doing this on a volunteer basis this time (the similar project I worked on last semester I did for course credit) makes me much more productive. I'm not sure why this is, but it's good to know.