Nearing the end of the third week

Hello all. I have not blogged in nearly a week as things have been rather hectic. This past weekend I planned on staying on campus, but due to a very unexpected family tragedy, I felt obligated to return home for the weekend.

I came back to COSMOS late on Sunday night. Monday morning I decided to sleep in and forgo my usual morning run. We began the day with a lecture by our TA and professor, then we had afternoon lab time. That night, I played dodge ball, which was fun but rather difficult when playing with over 50 people.

On Tuesday I intended to go running...but my alarm did not go off. We heard a discovery lecture in the morning by a so called scientist...he seemed to have very little original research and instead tried to convince us all that selfish Americans are the cause of global warming. After the unsavory lecture, we had our Science Comm class. That afternoon we had more lab time to work on our final projects. Unfortunately I had to leave COSMOS Tuesday night for the same reason as this past weekend.

I returned Thursday afternoon... and I am here to stay until the end of the program. Unfortunately, I missed my cluster's field trip to the Sony Vaio manufacturing facility in nearby Rancho Bernardo. After dinner and study time, I decided to embark on a haunted campus tour.
While UCSD has been in existence for under 50 years, it still has its share of bizarre and sometimes scary tales. While I am sworn to secrecy, I can divulge that there is definitely a dark side to the usually bright and cheerful campus.

Today, Friday, I finally got back into running. I woke up early to run with a few guys around the UCSD campus. Later this morning, we heard from the San Diego iBotics team, a group of engineering students who will soon compete in a contest to test an autonomous underwater vehicle. After the demo and some statistics review with Shirley, we had lab time to work on our final projects. In a week the final projects will be finished along with the presentations...pretty hard to believe.

Now that I am somewhat back to normal, I want to thank all of the COSMOS staff along with my friends and floormates for their support and help during this difficult period for my family. Pat-thank you so much for driving me to and from the train station four times and dropping everything so that I could make the train on time and not have to worry about transportation. Thank you again to everyone!

JR