Home Sweet Home

So we made it home from our crazy Christmas traveling in one piece!  For those of you who don't know, we decided to drive home to Washington for Christmas... it was a lot of driving!   We were really lucky though and hit very little bad weather, and didn't even have to use our chains once.  I was going to post some stuff on here over the break but I didn't want to post  the fact that we would be away for three weeks on the internet... it's like hanging up a sign that says, we're gone, please rob us, and since I couldn't fit all my shoes into the car, I wanted to make sure they'd still be waiting here when I got back... our T.V. is kinda nice too. But anyhow, since I really haven't posted anything this entire semester, I'm gonna catch you up on our lives before Christmas break in this post and then I'll write about our Christmas adventures over the next few days.

We survived this last semester, but just barely.  Dallin took 17 credits, was working 20 hours a week (for free...) and is in the J. Reuben Clark Law Society Presidency so he was super busy. I was trying to wrap up my research and do all my classes.  I also had a conference to go to, but more on that later.  So we had a really hard time finding time to do anything fun, like eat and sleep.  And since blogging definitely comes after eating and maybe after sleeping, I have had to put this on the back burner.   We are really sick of eating out of Tupperware and of not seeing each other so this semester Dallin is taking only 10 credits and will not be working at the ITC anymore after he finishes up this last case he is helping with.  I unfortunately can't make my schedule any lighter as it is (hopefully) my last semester, but since Dallin will be able to do things like grocery shopping (our usual Friday night or Saturday afternoon date) we might be able to go do some fun stuff again.  Hooray!!

As I type, Dallin is putting finishing touches on his JLEP article.  We are so happy to have that done.  He has been working really hard on it since August, so hopefully he gets it published.  He is also going to be in a moot court competition in a week or so that should be pretty fun. His grades haven't been published yet (it takes forever at law school) so we're not sure how he did, but he is happy to have one more semester done.  He is now officially half way through law school. 

I had a pretty good, but extremely busy semester.  Both of my classes were project based and they took up a lot of time, but for the most part I enjoyed them.  I also made some good progress on my research.  I was hoping to have all of my data taken by now, but I still have a few more experiments to run.  Hopefully in a week or so I will be all done taking data and I can finish analyzing it. Yay!  In November I was able to go present at the American Physical Society's Department of Fluid Dynamics conference.  It was my first time presenting alone at a conference and it was kind of stressful, especially when my computer didn't work during my presentation!  But, I survived and since it was in Long Beach right before Thanksgiving, I was able to spend the holiday with my mom.  It was lots of fun, I ate way too much and shopped way too much.  I've also been accepted to present at another conference which will be in Canada this summer so I'm now busy working on the paper for that and a few others.  I'm also hoping to graduate in May which means I need to finish my thesis... ahh!!   I'm a little bit scared about all of that but I'm really excited to graduate.

Other than that we are just looking for jobs.  If anyone knows of an engineering job or a patent attorney job that is available this summer let us know.

Christmas news tomorrow... probably.