Hawaii was a ton of fun this year, more team drama than usual, but I guess that is normal. I met Corries' brother, he is really cool and the exact image of a white Hawaiian surfer; board shorts, bleached hair, tanned skin, always late, in touch with nature, flip flops, sells surf boards, infectious smile and all. Too bad I know that he is really from Montana. Also, i got to hang out with ryan's brother mike a bunch, he is super cool and he showed us a great time and drove us around a bunch even though he probably wanted to be with his girlfriend more. I didn't shoot that well, my hold was really good but I was thinking about the beach more than the shot, and it showed. The senior team coach put together did okay but we still got beat pretty good by our normal air team. Lots of sitting in the sun, boogie boarding, eating, playing pool, listening to the ocean, and enjoying the warm air. Too bad I had to come back to Reno, setting the thermostat to 65 used to seem nice, now it is just freezing.
I do have to say I am glad I am almost done with shooting this year. Oh sure, I will miss it and wish that i had focused more when I was doing it, but I think there is always a time when you have to say you have done something long enough, when the people have changed, when in this case the team has changed, when what is expected of us has changed, at a point you no longer fit in and serve a purpose there. I am the last person on the team who was there when we shot in shorts when we went to Hawaii, when it wasn't serious, when we weren't good and we didn't have a chance of making nationals, so we just went and had fun. I am the last person on the team who was on the team when we weren't good, and i think that is reflected in my attitude toward it. I am not there to go to nationals and try to be all American and want to try to beat Alaska, I just kind of like shooting and was good enough at it and consistent enough to keep getting put on the team, so in a way I don't think I am helping the attitude of the other people, they need another person who is really committed. All I could do was try to instill my outlook and attitude on some of the younger people so that they don't get too caught up in all the razzle dazzle (did I really just say that?). I want to make sure that first and foremost they remember to always have fun with it, and if they aren't having fun, stop doing it until you are ready to enjoy it again. It isn't life or death, and the good memories are worth far more than anything else. Also I just hope that they remember that the good stories can be just as much fun as the good times.
Andrew sent me a couple of links that I thought were pretty cool, so here they are:
So, i am off the land of the sweet wahini, or something like that, in one hour i head off for the airport to fly to the most perfect place you can fly to in the middle of february. It will be nice to relax, take a moment to forget about school and work and just be. I hope everybody is having fun, i figure going to hawaii makes up for spending spring break in kentucky.
Oh yeah, i think we qualified for nationals, and coach put me on the team so i have to go back to kentucky and compete. I am kind of bumbed because i was hoping to be done with shooting and focus on school and maybe start climbing again, but not yet. But it will be good also, because i would like to have a chance to break 1150. We qualified 2nd in air gun, and 8th in smallbore.
Okay, new semester same as the old semester. Classes are going well. My circuits and systems class is really cool, mainly because the teacher is really funny in that weird kind of middle eastern way that means he laughs at himself at weird times and gets a really high voice when he is excited and gives you a really great "are you a complete and utter moron" look when you ask a stupid question.
Meteorology is pretty good, it is only a 100 level class so it has been a lot of filling out work sheets, drawing in the pressure lines on a weather map, going up to the National Weather Service building, stuff like that. The best is there will be questions from the book we have to answer, so the first question would be something like “what would cause the nighttime temperature to stop dropping and possibly increase” so instead of taking the time to look up the exact answer in the book I decide to read the next question and it is “if clouds move in to an area at night what will the temperature be likely to do”. Nice.
Fluids 2 is killing me, it is only the third week and it is killing me, we just learn all these equations and vorticity and circulation and flow patterns and a bunch of other really cool stuff, but it is hard. I am kind of sad, it will be my last class with Snyder, and he told Sara (the super smart girl with the 4.0) not to take the class if she wanted to keep her GPA, so what should us mortals do?
What else, lets see, advanced mechanics is going to be pretty easy I think, but it might also come around and bite me in the end since I don’t pay that much attention since the first few chapters are all review, I just need to make sure I am there when we get to the new stuff.
Last, my senior design class is really cool. We form teams of EE’s and ME’s and we design, manufacture, market, and sell a product. We did good on our proposal and our idea got accepted, but it was a bummer because it was actually our seventh idea that we wanted to go with. We want to develop a device for motorcycle riders that will automatically open their garage door as they approach and close it once they are in, likewise it will open their garage when they start their bike and close it as they drive away so they don’t have to fiddle with pressing the button and operating the bike at the same time. We originally were going to do it just for cars, but we found there was a lot more interest from motorcycle riders. It shouldn’t be too hard to build, but we are going to have to change our design quite a bit I think to get around some other patents.
I might have gotten that job at china lake, not really sure, mostly informal kind of stuff, and I think taking it is the right thing to do, but there are a lot of other factors involved in that decision, as some of you might guess.
Shooting is going well, we have qualifying for nationals on Saturday and Sunday. I think I will shoot well, practice has been really good the last few weeks, but I am not sure if we will qualify, there are a lot of good teams and we still need to come together as a team, something it doesn’t really seem like we have done.