Hi guys!

Wow. It’s been like a week since I’ve posted! My bad y’all. Things have gone kinda crazy over here in anticipation of our yearly site review from NSF (National Science Foundation).

Not to mention, my little bro, Andrew, was up for a bit looking at colleges! Steve and I wanted to make sure he had a blast and so we did all sorts of shit we thought a 17 yr old would enjoy. BTW, I am so out of touch with what is and is not cool these days. He was here for 3 days and we looked at 3 universities. Not bad right?

He flew in to Charlotte (a 2.5 hr drive from Raleigh) Monday night at 10pm. We got back to Raleigh around 1am and crashed hard!

Tuesday was North Carolina State University, NCSU, tour day. Since this is where both Steve and I go to grad school, we were able to show him all the nifty engineering labs and the cleanroom.

I like to pretend I’m a wimpy astronaut in this getup. It doesn’t really work though.

Steve, on the other hand, feels right at home in his cleanroom suit since this is where he does research!

We also toured the Hunt library which is the COOLEST LIBRARY EVER!! Seriously, if you’re ever in the Raleigh area, try to check it out. Trust me on this. There are robots. And lots of cool chairs.

(Look Mom, he smiles!!)

We walked all over campus and got the campus ice cream. We were still pretty tired after the early morning late night return. So, after grabbing sushi at Sushi Blues (which I didn’t take a picture of since we inhaled 6 giant rolls) we chilled at home and watched part of Jurassic Park.

Wednesday was Durham day! Andrew and I grabbed lunch in Durham and my uncle gave us a tour of the Duke campus for the remainder of the afternoon. Even though Duke is a fairly small school, we walked for a solid 2.5 hrs. Ow. After grabbing dinner, Steve and I rushed Andrew over to the most fun teenager activity we could think of….go kart racing! Not the dinky go-carts that you see everywhere. These are outfitted with 200 cc engines and get some serious speed!

Why do I always get the pink helmet…whatever. Andrew’s fastest lap was around 33 seconds. Not shabby for a first time! (The super fast guys can do a lap of the track in about 28 seconds)

Thursday seemed to be Andrew’s favorite (I’m totally guessing here).  The lovely roomie, Lisa, took us on a tour of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill! While touring the physics building, we decided it’d be a good idea to see if anyone was around to give a tour of the building/talk about the program/idk. We lucked out and got to talk to the physics department head for a while and then his grad student gave us a tour of the physics labs! So cool. Like. OMG I may have chosen the wrong profession. Except for all the math. I think I’ll stick with my easy engineering math 🙂

After the UNC tour, Steve and I took Andrew to the other most awesome thing we could think of for a teenager. A pro hockey game! With fights! And crazy hockey fans!j

Except there were no fights (boo) and the area wasn’t super packed. BUT the Hurricanes won! 5-2 which was pretty sweet if you ask me.

Since we had to do the whole Charlotte drive thing again at 3am (WTF MOM?!?) we came home and got a quick 5 hrs of sleep before hitting the road.

We had a blast and it was a ton of fun touring all the campuses and eating all the food and doing all the fun things!

I’ll be back tomorrow with a training update (fair warning, it’s pretty embarrassing) <– also, I misspell this stupid word every time…does that happen to anyone else?

That’s basically grad school, one helluva crazy balancing act. You balance classes, research, sleep, prepping for last min meetings, outreach, professional development, the list goes on and on. Throw training for a half ironman in there and sometimes there’s no helping the circus that ensues.

The key is to remember that it’s ok. Some weeks are more grad school focused and training falls by the wayside. Other weeks, school is a little easier and training can pick up. It’s hard to not get upset by the loss of training time. But you have to remember that, as a grad student, we don’t work a normal 9-5 job. We don’t go home and leave work. It follows you everywhere.

This week, training really fell off. Why? Well there were due dates, and poster sessions, and just grad school. I did what I could in terms of training, but by Friday I was so exhausted I skipped both my workouts and was in bed by 9pm!

At least grand school was super productive! Here’s the progression of the armband I worked on all week

There was one more iteration after this last one but I was making it in a hurry and didn’t get a picture. Btw that last picture was taken at midnight when I had to stay late to work.

I also had a poster session that I was not thrilled about attending.

I was mainly there for the free pineapple. I was that person who stood by the fruit plate for a solid 5 min picking out all the pieces of pineapple and hoarding them like a squirell preparing for winter. Our director of grad studies even stopped by and asked if I had a thing for pineapple. He laughed a bit when I told him it’s usually the first fruit to go so I try to stock up 🙂

Gotta go back to school today for open house so we’ll see what training happens. I’m also typing this on my phone at the hair salon while trying to decide what to do with my hair.

Have a great Saturday!!