The end is near...

Except for not really. My second year talk is coming up. I know I made the right choice in attending graduate school in a place where they don't require qualifying exams or a masters' thesis, but this talk thing feels just as terrifying. I shouldn't be so worried. I presented this stuff back in the fall to my lab. It's a piece of cake right?

The hard part is getting it all to flow together and make sense to everyone. I need to be able to make a convincing and thought out argument for my research. Have I ever made a convincing and thought out argument? I feel like I usually fold like a napkin. I'm sure that once it is over I'll wonder why I was freaking out so much in the first place. I give a practice version next week. Which means I will be crazy for the next week. Then my actual talk is on the 18th. Has anyone discovered how to slow time down yet?

Also it has been brought to my attention that I left Rachael Brinton's fabulous chocolate chip cookies off my list of things I miss about Michigan. So if you could please add them in your head I would appreciate it.

April was my adventure month. Rachael and Tony's wedding. Jeff's graduation. I've already posted all the pictures on facebook so I'm not going to put them here. I will say that the weekend of the graduation was insanity. Jeff is headed to Australia/New Zealand in about a week and decided that it was necessary for him to get scuba certified before he left. Normally I'd say whatever, but it threw a little wrench in our plans for him to drive me back to California after the weekend. He ended up doing his last dive on Monday morning after which we loaded his car and left Provo at about 3:30pm. It's ten hours (driving fast) from Provo to California. You do the math. And lucky us his car was having issues, so when we tried to leave St. George we had to return to his parents' house and take his little brother's old car. Sadly for Jeff, the car is a stick shift and I can't drive manual. Jeff drove the entire way from Provo to Irvine on Monday. The icing on the cake was when about ten minutes from my apartment we got pulled over for speeding. I think the policeman took one look at us and heard we had come from Utah that day and had pity because he only gave us a warning.

Now I'm back in Cali for at least two months. I'm not promising anything after June. Anyone want to do a road trip up the coast? I have a feeling I'll need to escape again after this quarter is over. Here's a picture from when Jeff was here.