A return

Yeah...its been a while.

I set this up for Nikki and I to keep in touch and I haven't really kept my side of the bargain. Although I have no real excuse, school has kept me busy.

How is life in Toronto? Its good, good. It was a crazy move here, from the chaos of packing and actually moving our things to the new apart, to getting sick my second week of school with the plague.

Things have calmed down and we've settled in. How does life with Fred feel compared to before? The same. Living together hasn't provoked arguing or tension between us. We've developed a small rhythm to our weeks and just relax most weekends. I've tried really hard to contribute as much as possible - doing our laundry (which can get rapidly out of control as our washer is 1/5 the side of a regular one), cooking dinner (Fred likes good food and budgets for it, so needless to say, I eat well here - very well ), cleaning, and running errands.

My classes are interesting and challenging.

Intro to Modern Astrophysics - I enjoy this class the most, but its also the most challenging of my classes. Its been so long since I took regular astronomy, so I've had to do a bit of reviewing. Also, the class draws upon physics and calculus, so its nice to feel my education coalesce.

Linear Algebra - This class was ridiculously simple the first 3 weeks, but now we've moved onto vector spaces and I'm realizing my ability to write proofs is perhaps not as high as it should be. I scored quite highly on the last quiz, but that was just manipulating matrices, no proofs.

Fundamental Physics Lab - Oh my, this class. I'm not sure what to think of it. Its a half credit course stretched over a year. It consists of 5 intro exercises that you do first which teach you to use various lab apparatus such as oscilloscopes, wave generators, vacuum systems, etc. We're set in pairs and nearly every exercise has had problems. The lab write ups have also been weird and strangely graded. I grew up being taught that write ups were to be formal and outline-like. My TA likes a more freestyle fashion that's different from what I naturally do. The experiments look awesome tho. Lets hope that they involve more reliable equipment.

Soc of Religion - Mom would love this class. The thing I like about it is that the prof doesn't strongly focus on each religion, he more so forces you to think critically about the role religion plays in society and while its so prevalent in human culture. This class is my break from all the science and math. Its a complete 180.

What else is new? Well, Purple for one. UPS shipped my computer and broke the hell out of it while. Fred gave me his old processor (Core2 Duo) and upgraded his. He also picked me up a new mobo and a video card, and in a bit of mad irony, I got his Zalman fan. (A loooong story involving him needing to RMA his Striker2, and Asus sending him back a revised mobo where an additional heatpipe prevents him from clipping this crazy, 70$ cpu fan. He now runs stock cooling ) Purple's been upgraded so wildly, he doesn't feel much like Purple anymore. I'm sure once I Hello Kitty the shit out of the new case door, it'll feel more natural.

Its incredible tho, to finally have a running tower, with access again to my data. Makes it finally feel like home.

Dinner tonight? Mango chicken with coconut ginger rice.