Midterms

Well, it's midterms here at the University of Idaho. As a graduate student, this means realizing my conceived research schedule is deteriorating and I'm starting to pull my hair out. Maybe this is a result of shock at being in school for the first time in over a year; acting as a teaching/research assistant for 20 hours a week; and trying to balance writing, analysis, and keeping it real in what always ends up being a very short week. Midterms also means cold weather outside, and the shock of discovering it is indeed fall at school and not summer in Yellowstone.

Alas, my hard earned tan, good posture, and muscular bod from summer in Yellowstone are wilting away. As a graduate student, my office is a windowless box in the basement of (ironically) the College of Natural Resources. And, since I'm a graduate student, try as I might, I spend entirely too much time in the office and too little time breathing the fresh fall air. As a result, I am slowly turning into a wraith-student - one of those pale, huchbacked, squinty-eyed, skeptical graduate students.

But, I try to keep it real by busting out work at the coffee shop, doing yoga in the mornings at the Yoga Center, climbing, and going to the gym. It's my attempt to keep my posture from overly-eroding, my muscles from shriveling, and my mind from deteriorating into the matrix of mathematics. I think it's working.

With that, it's back to life at the fast pace in a slow paced town: spssspssspssspssspssspssspssspssspss (aka: statistical analysis).