This past Tuesday was the first day of classes at UVa. It’s been fairly relaxed so far, mostly introductory material. I’m hoping it will pick up soon. All three of the classes should be quite interesting, so I’m looking forward to it.
My TA load isn’t too bad this time around. I’m in charge of the website for the astronomy department which so far seems to be a fairly straightforward assignment. I am also the head TA for the Astronomy 130 class (Intro to Observing). The nice thing about my assignments is that I only have one night lab a week! So I’ll actually get to go home before midnight most nights of the week.
A couple days ago I returned from my summer vacation. I spent two and a half weeks away. Most of that was spent in Idaho with my family. We did some hiking, waterskiing, and a dentist appointment! Woo! :p
I also spent 5 days in Alaska visiting Lydia. We had quite a fun time. Lots of hiking, and a bit of camping. I shot lots of pictures, especially from alaska. A couple examples are below. There’s a link at the bottom to my flickr page which has the full set.
Collection: 2008 Summer Vacation.
After a 6 year “retirement”, I went out yesterday and played golf with my family. In a typical fashion, I had excellent shots on the driving range, then immediately forgot how to hit the ball once we started out on the course. I managed to narrowly avoid a water hazard (with the ball skipping across the water and bouncing onto land), and most of the out of bounds areas.
As usual in golf, my game improved drastically on the last few holes, and I even had birdie chances! Enough to make me want to try again!
I packed my 20D along, so I got some shots along the way…
The rest of the pictures are available in: Idaho – (August 2008) on Flickr
Yesterday was my youngest brother’s birthday. As part of our celebration, we went to the ZZ Top concert in Nampa. Steve Richards was the opener, and other than constantly talking about the “new album”, it was a decent set.
ZZ Top took the stage around 820 and started with “Under Pressure”. It was a fairly good set. Lots of the classic ZZ Top songs, as well as some new ones. However, disappointingly, the set (including an encore) lasted just an hour. Way too short…
Well, for the first time since Christmas, I’m on an extended vacation (longer than a week). I landed in Boise on Saturday, after missing my flight on Friday due to traffic in DC. Bit of a rocky start to the vacation, but at least I finally made it.
So far have been mostly relaxing. Finally saw WALL-E on Saturday. Was quite good. Also saw The Dark Knight at IMAX last night. That was awesome. A five storey tall batman is quite impressive.
In addition to sitting around watching movies, I spent 4 hours yesterday in the shop with Dad working on my new coffee and end tables. We did quite a bit of sanding on the tops and legs and have started attaching the legs to the top on the coffee table. I’m quite excited to get a coffee table! It’s coming along nicely.
Plans for the next few days mostly involve hanging out with family and more relaxing. Although I may work on my thesis some… still lots to do with that.
