In with the Cool Kids

Probably the highlight of the last couple weeks has been feasting on our newly purchased Dino Buddies.  Apart from that, we had Valentines Day and I got accepted to both of the CSU schools I applied to.  Merilee has been baking some delicious stuff too.  I try but fail in my effort to not eat any of it.  Actually, I don't really try that hard.

So for Valentines Day I didn't buy Merilee anything.  It was our first Valentines Day together (last year we were broken up) and I didn't really know what to expect.  I've never had a significant other around this time and I didn't feel like doing the whole "buy a box of chocolates, flowers, teddy bear, balloons, and a fancy dinner" sort of thing.  It's nice and all, but it's expensive.  I told Merilee that I liked what my sister-in-law Melanie does.  On the 15th she buys discounted Valentines Day stuff (like plates etc.), and on the next family dinner they have, they do a "we love our family" sort of celebration without having to pay retail.  I like that idea for when we have kids. 

So I decided to make a box of chocolates for Merilee.  I've made fancy things out of cardboard before for class projects, so why not a box?  We had a recipe for turtles in our cookbook, so I could make those too (they're her favorite).  I also got little wrapper things for them to make them real fancy.  I probably would have broken down and bought some flowers or picked some if we didn't already have some from the week before when she passed her tests for her CDL.

So the week of, I didn't have any time to make the box because of my big homework load, which meant I only had Friday to do it.  I was even then limited on time after working out and doing some home teaching.  So, it didn't turn out exactly as I had imagined it, but it worked.  Maybe I can make her a better one next year.

The chocolates didn't end up exactly as I had hoped, at least initially.  There was a typo in the recipe.  It called for two tablespoons, instead of two cups, of half and half.  So in the picture you can see the fist sized candies that resulted from the chocolate not being completely liquified (I didn't want to burn it by increasing the heat so it just stayed clumpy).  When she got home and I gave her the box, we ate one then decided to try breaking them and melting the chocolate down again with more half and half.  The result wasn't photographed but let's just say that it worked a lot better.

That week I heard back from San Jose about my admission status.  I wasn't expecting to hear back from anywhere until April, so I was pretty surprised and excited because that meant that I might not have to wait to hear back from my other schools too.  Merilee didn't want me to get my hopes up because she thought I would stress more about it.  I didn't go around announcing my acceptance to the world because it's my back-up school and I pretty much knew I was admitted before I did the application.

The real excitement happened two days ago when I got an email from Cal Poly about my acceptance there.  I got in to my top school and didn't have to wait until April to find out!  Now everyone is sad because Merilee is moving away, but whatever.  She's mine people!  See this face?  All mine.

So things are wonderful and exciting here at our house.  We're enjoying our time alone together before we start making babies.  I'm very much looking forward to the new adventures that are in store for us in San Luis Obispo.  I'm so grateful for all the blessings we have, and for all those that have supported me and Merilee get to where we are today!  We'll miss you (but not until August), but hope you'll visit!

The Blood of Angry Men

So I had neglected to post my last post for a couple weeks because I thought I still needed to finish it.  I was wrong.  Racist and wrong.  It's not the first time.  Last night, in fact, I was wrong in assuming that not wearing red was okay.  I guess I should have asked first.  It was good though.  Merilee and I got taken out to dinner by the Schulls.  It had been a while since we had seen them, so it was great to catch up and talk about things.  They repeated the usual admonition to make the pilgrimage to Disneyland, to which we gave the usual reply saying that we would once we knew where I got in to school.

I won't hear anything back from the schools probably until April, which stinks.  I can pretty much assume I'm going to Calpoly based on my GPA and such, but you know what they say about when you assume.

It's been interesting in my engineering classes lately.  We've had several former Las Positas engineering student visitors talking about their transfer experience.  One girl got like a 2.9 gpa from Fresno State doing civil engineering and her first job is paying her 60k a year.  She had an advantage with her experience working on a special water drainage project at school that related to the job she was interviewing for with PG&E.  It got me excited, because if I reach my goal of getting a master's degree from CalPoly, I would probably be making more than that (and I'm kind of excited to make more than $8.25 an hour).

Another visitor was a San Jose student (my backup school) and he had a lot to say regarding the difference between a UC and a CSU when it comes to engineering.  Basically, what I took away from the visitors was the importance of projects, lab, and internship experience.

I've almost got a job at the Tutorial Center at Las Positas.  I've had to jump through various hoops in the bureaucratic financial aid system to do it but it should be coming together soon and I can start working again.  Until then I've pretty much just been doing school and working out.  Both are going well.  Don and I start week 4 of P90X tomorrow.  Then we're about one third done with the program.

Well everything is going really great.  Merilee and I are doing really well.  I don't have to report her to the police anymore for having a MO driver's license.

The Phoenix, Part 2

So Don and I are on week 2 of the program.  Yes, it's incredibly difficult.  I won't get too detailed about the program, but one thing I will say is that it makes you work out more than you think you need to.  You do exercise after exercise and when you think you're near the end, the video shows 33 minutes left.  My theory is that the human body has adapted to tell itself to stop at a certain point.  It's the point that, once surpassed, the body will no longer be able to defend itself from predators (or even hunt prey), neither after the workout, nor once soreness kicks in.  The body then does all it can do to adapt and get stronger for next time.

There's plenty of times that I've gone to the gym, felt the burn, and come home.  For me, the magic of P90X is having someone there telling you not to go home, but to keep going.  I think that's why athletes, who train as a group under a coach, usually get better results from their workouts than those who exercise on their own.  If there wasn't such an emphasis on completing workouts in P90X, even if that means longer and/or more frequent breaks, then it'd be so easy for me to do half the workout thinking that I'd work up to doing the full one.

Anyways, don't worry, I'll post pics for everyone after week 13.  Yeah right.  As hard as it is, I really like it.  It's hard to schedule sometimes because Don and I both have responsibilities (his wife just had their 3rd child in December!), and there's something scheduled everyday, but we've been doing alright so far.

The first week of classes has been pretty slow.  I'm trying to get a job in the tutoring center here at Las Positas.  I can't tutor at DVC this semester since I'm not taking classes there anymore.  This semester will hopefully be my last at community college.  I should hear back from the places I've applied to by April.  I'm taking Physics 8C (Oscillations, Waves, Thermodynamics, Light and Optics), Math 5 (Ordinary Differential Equations), Engineering 44 and 46 (Materials of Engineering and Introduction to Circuit Analysis).  It totals 15.5 units, which is the fewest I've taken since coming back from the mission.  Since I'm not tutoring yet, my schedule looks drastically empty compared to last semester.  Though I am worried about having time to workout once I do start working.

I'm hoping I can get enough hours tutoring so I can justify not working weekends.  It's not that I just don't want to have to work those days, but having a full school load and a weekend job makes it hard to take Merilee out to do things.  I just feel that we don't get to do enough fun stuff together because of all the school and stuff I'm always engrossed in.  She doesn't complain, but for example, I'm sure she liked that I was able to play Ultimate last Saturday.

Anyways, life is good, this blog is long. Six months of marriage down, the rest of eternity to go.

Woops!  I was supposed to post this like a week and a half ago!  My bad.