Almost 4 months now...

It's a few days shy of 4 months since I've written anything at all in this blog.

I'm sorry.

I don't have any real excuse for not writing except I've been: 1. Busy 2. Lazy. I can't explain the lazy part, but I can explain the busy part.

Since April, I've been busy with research, trying to continue it and trying to write up some results for a paper. May and June included 3 weeks of traveling. I had a wedding in Minnesota, a couple days off, a wedding back home in TX (my brother!), and finally a conference at Penn State.

I'd never been to Minnesota before, but I was able to go from Thursday to Sunday. It was a decent drive and Minnesota turned out to be very pretty. The Best Buy corporate offices are apparently located in Minneapolis and Store # 1 is across the highway from the offices. Friends told me that VP from corporate were always surprising this store and trying out new stuff, so they had the BEST Best Buy in the nation. I didn't get to go, but if I take another trip, I'll definitely stop by.

My brother's wedding went well. It was a small affair, just her parents and little brother (from Boston College - boo! hiss!) and my dad, my sister, and me. The judge ended up knowing my brother, turns out he had DJ-ed an election party for him early in his career, so the ceremony was very pretty and not your standard JP wedding. It was followed by dinner in a local restaurant complete with mariachi's.

The conference in Penn State was really good. It was a small conference but several big names in my field were in attendance. My boss's advisor when he was a post-doc at Penn State was there and was one of the organizers. We were able to visit his lab on Thursday and meet several of his students and on Friday, he took us all out to eat, along with some people we all cite in our work. It was awesome to sit next to some of the bigger, or rising, names in surface science. One such person, currently from U. of Houston, whom I sat next to, found out I was from TX too. He went on to invite me to visit his lab whenever I was in the area - which will be in October for my friend's wedding. So, I am definitely going to go visit him in case he is in need of someone with my skills when I finish. :)

In the middle of all these trips, the big semi-annual faculty meeting was held where faculty discuss the progress of their students. My boss came straight from the meeting and told me that I need to finish my candidacy proposal and submit it before we went to Penn State. 10 days after arriving from Penn State, I defended my candidacy proposal amidst having 2 people in lab, forcing to me to do research for 9 hours a day instead of working on my proposal.

Fortunately, my defense went well enough that I passed - yay me!!! Now I've spent the rest of the summer working steadily with a local high school teacher and high school student (not from the same high school).
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Working with the high school teacher was... interesting. I'm 28, she's 58, and I think it was the source for some insecurity in her dealings with me. I like to think that I'm pretty easy-going, but she managed to be condescending enough to really make me want to... scream. She was perfectly nice, but seemed to always want to question whether I knew what I was talking about. She felt she should know everything I was trying to teach her, how could she? She'd never worked with my research before. She felt she should catch on faster than I had and doing a better job than me. It was all very frustrating, and the fact that I had to give her a "pep talk" was difficult for me. What was worse for me was her terrible attitude towards the students she is going to teach this upcoming semester. She was convinced that they were basically dumb and didn't know anything and any discussion about them involved her comments, "Well, if they were REGULAR chemistry students, they would know that, or would learn that easily, but THESE students are going to struggle with that and you shouldn't even try to teach them that." What?? You are telling me that they shouldn't even bother trying to learn it because they aren't smart enough, are you serious? I visited some of her classes and I liked her "dumb kids" better than her "smart kids." They had less attitude and tried harder. Anyway, we'll see how the semester goes working with her students.

The high school student has been such a joy to work with. He is super bright, really goofy, and such a nice kid. We are playing with a green laser, using it to heat up my samples and blah, blah, blah. But who could forget this?

As of now, I'm done doing research with the teacher and the high school student is "officially" done. However, I'm going to be working with the teacher in her classroom throughout the year - hopefully that will go better when I'm on her turf - and I will working with the high school student through the semester as he submits entries to the Siemen's Westinghouse Competition and whatever else he's submitting it to. He wants to get into MIT, so that gives you an idea of how smart he is. One of my friends from when I started grad school is teaching chemistry and physics in a private school and I'm also supposed to work with him some this semester by bringing a portable version of my instrument into his classroom. All in all a busy year to come.

The last month, I've been fighting with my instrument. It is acting funny - my signal is picking up something not normal - and I have to figure out how to fix it. So far, I've found out that there were screws loose - not mine thank you - and I'm hoping that I've taken care of the bulk of it, but I guess I'll find out on Monday.

It's been a crazy summer and school is right around the corner. I'm sorry I having been blogging, but I will sincerely try to keep all of you up to date more often.