Back from Florida

I returned from Florida on Wednesday evening. Overall it was a great trip. I saw some family members I hadn't seen in 10 years, some I hadn't seen in even longer, and some I had never met. We all had a good time hanging out together, catching up, and celebrating my Great Grandma Grace's 100th birthday. Here is a picture of Grandma Grace on her birthday:

I am much less frazzled than before I left. I got my homework done and emailed with little incident (or likely correct answers but oh well) and the situation at work seems to not be a big deal.

I need to catch up on schoolwork this weekend. I have probably watched 1/3 of the lectures so far and didn't get much out of those. I can't stand when professors lecture from PowerPoint - it's so hard to learn when being talked at.

I haven't been too faithful about the faithfulness experiment - I started strong but didn't do it at all during my vacation. I'll get back to it tonight.

Frazzled

In preparation for our big trip to Florida for my great-grandmother's 100th birthday, I'm trying to tie up loose ends here. I have a homework assignment due whilst I am gone and realize that I won't work on it there. Thus, I must complete and turn it in before I leave. Well, this class turned out to be theory-heavier than I expected (I could rant about this for a while, but suffice it to say that I don't think USC's education is appropriate for practical engineers - it rather caters to the academic crowd) and I stared blankly at my homework and wrote mathematical nonsense for about an hour yesterday. It doesn't help that my professor lectures from Powerpoint slides and the book is poorly written. I am not in the least an auditory learner and don't do well reading engineering texts either. Blah.

In addition, I have a project at work that needs progress in the next few hours. It's rather silly - those that use what I provide will have complete radio silence for months. Then when they need something, it's suddenly urgent and I better get it to them yesterday, by gum. Oh well, at least it's given me something to keep my mind off how crappy this semester at school is going to be and postpone my homework freaking out until this evening.

On another note, Sanctify! has been doing a faithfulness experiment. Each of us (theoretically) journals our answers to John Wesley's Holy Club questions on a daily basis to see if consciously thinking about such things actually makes a difference in faithfulness. Although we are only "officially" carrying out the experiment for 21 days, I plan to continue through the end of Lent.