Week 1 - Relief

To truly start at the beginning, I must say that after a heavy rain blasted a drought-stricken Ohio, I woke up in the morning on a Monday, put on my suit, got the double windsor correctly on try number 3, packed up the car and sat down on a towel - because I had left my windows up and had an inch of standing water in my car. Ordinarily, I would've probably just left them open, dried the car out and stayed home, but this day was my Master's defense. Needless to say, my self-confidence was shaken, but the defense turned out pretty well in the end. I walked out of the room feeling like the idiot I knew I was supposed to feel like, and they walked out about 15 minutes later, shook my hand and handed me 300 pages of edits which were due by 8 am the following day. There's nothing a little Olive Garden can't fix, and so we went out that night, binged on pasta and breadsticks, and the next day I turned in my thesis, revised and properly formatted by 3.30 pm with 90 minutes to spare. The relief that I have felt from that moment is still sinking in to my core. I am grateful to so many people for helping me to that moment and I hope you will be able to enjoy the renewed enthusiasm I will bring back to the world around me.

Then began the boozing. I went out to lunch with the mother-in-law who so kindly dropped me off to turn in my forms, and then back to our department from which I briefly departed for the Varsity Club. A bustling bar on weekends, this Tuesday afternoon/evening reminded me of Bryan Adams as we bought each other pitchers of beer in celebration of the freedom we had been granted. Plans were laid and we went out later together, only to be reminded we weren't in undergrad anymore when we woke with the splitting headache of the unpracticed drinker. Not to let me enthusiasm be dwindled, I rinsed and repeated with orientation, then followed with a dose of 27 horde waves in Gears of War 3 coupled with homemade cider and my wife's homemade chocolate chip cookies. To say that we celebrated would be an understatement, and I knew it was at an end when I sobered up to our father's sermon on Sunday about loving and honoring each other in your marriage. It was time to get real and start treating her like the true heroine of my story. After all, nothing could be done without her around here.

I also learned some about my new PI: the man is a trivia whiz. We spent 4 hours at BW3s answering trivia questions and ended up nationally ranked #1 along with our winning competitor (almost 50,000 pts) which is something I never thought I would be able to say. The following night we went to see our friends' kids play in band and football. This was a great opportunity to practice my sports photography and I think we finally found a limit for the Canon Digital Rebel with basic lens. There's just not enough light, speed or zoom to do any better than what we took, but we still had a lot of fun watching a high school game and hanging out with friends. This is the second high school game I've ever gone to and it was hard to believe that was 7 years ago as I sat on the bleachers.

So over the weekend we put the house back into shape as well, and none too soon because she proceeded to host a Pampered Chef party Monday night. A skoch better than Mary Kay, Pampered Chef people are still just a little bit awkward and overbearing. The house survived (barely) and the dog didn't scare anyone off, so I'd say it was a success. In my own little way, I helped to add some homemaker to the house with clipped marigolds from the garden in a vase on an autumn tablecloth. But I was far away playing video games with the brothers and admiring Pop's new chicken coop for my younger brother's ill-conceived 4-H project.

Determined to diversify my educational experiences whilst my research perspective narrows, I enrolled in an interdisciplinary nutrition program that is highly regarded. I also expected for people over there to be a bit quirky and impractical. What I didn't expect was to meet a few very nice, open-minded and conversational individuals who are the shining stars in the group - I wish them the best. However, some people also have their head stuck in the clouds (or elsewhere) and it's probably mean of me, but while I watched them struggle with homework I did last year, I just let them struggle. Hopefully they will learn to fend for themselves or natural selection will send them to other callings, and they won't turn into intellectual parasites.

Another great feature of this, my 3rd year on campus, is my involvement in a technologically innovative class. What you can see here from this picture is me monitoring "Poll Everywhere". This is the questions component of our class which enables students who attend class remotely through Adobe to still ask questions. To put all questions in the same place and not interrupt the flow of a recorded lecture, students in class can also text their questions to this site. The instructor then can read off the questions anonymously and answer them for the whole class. It will hopefully encourage questions as well as enable off-site students, and is just one part of such a great initiative. If you didn't already know this stuff existed, brace yourself, these are the classes of the very near future.

That's it for this week. A huge shout-out to my cousin who turned 18 and started college in the same week, to my grandpa who brought over a tv stand for our new house and to my wife who will undoubtedly shake her head when she discovers this. I'm timing you! ;)

Welcome

When I first started blogging, it was less of a cool thing for everyone to do and more of a way that my friends and I put a funny spin on our lives. We’d self-congratulate on witticisms and compare followers, and I was very diligent through senior year and into college to document my activities, the love(s) of my life and my big moments in life. But then over time, I got so caught up in enjoying life that I didn’t pause and take time to document it. In my opinion, this was a good thing as I held up one of my rules – never let societal rules and expectations get into the way of life as it comes. Riding the highs and lows of life didn’t leave me time to document some of the greatest of times and I found myself wanting to return to blogging as a method of forcing myself to document life as I experienced it where I was held to responsibility by my readers. I didn’t want to focus on rewriting my history but instead wanted to share the moment with my readers so that I could return later and remember it more actively than reading a simple biography. This quickly descended into laziness as I pasted, embedded and truncated the news and my opinions into the blog. This eventually failed as I realized I didn’t like where my blogs were going and with a rising time commitment to my master’s thesis, this blog project also fell into severe neglect.

This leads me to a new juncture. Having successfully defended my thesis, I would like to return to the blog-world for both my own benefit and hopefully also to entertain and support others (probably by making them feel better about their own life). However, as I just began pursuing a PhD last week and would also like to dedicate more of my newfound free time to my wife, a daily blog represents a guaranteed failure. Thus, I have determined that I will pursue a long-term blog with weekly intervals. Despite obvious risk of posts which are too long for the average reader, I will focus on giving a weekly update of MY life from MY point of view. Since I am a pretty casual person who also overbooks and can’t keep track of my calendar, I pretty much live by the rule of taking things one step at a time; hence the blog title will be “One week at a time”. 

This blog is probably not always going to be hilarious; I have a dry sense of humor that often goes unappreciated. Also, while I love history, this will not be a strict timeline of the events in the world around me. Nor will I tell you about myself in some long description of my likes, dislikes, background and bucketlist. If you read my blog long enough, assuming the project survives the test of time, you will know me. I won’t bore you with my class schedule or what I ate for lunch (unless it gave me food poisoning). You can count on my account to be diverse and unpredictable as this blog records and must parallel my life. You might decide this isn’t worth reading and I’m ok with that, too. But, give it a chance and you might find you appreciate my point of view, can relate to my experiences or want to live vicariously through my randomness. I hope you enjoy this blog as I embark on the next journey in my life.