A Shocking Experience

So, today we started Engineering Physics studios...oh joy! (Can you sense the sarcasm there?) I was rather not looking forward to going to that, but I got to talk very briefly with Sophie before, so I was in quite a joyous mood. Actually, they really aren't all that terrible, just rather annoyingly time-consuming and they can be rather difficult to understand at times. Anyways, I have come to expect the labs to be rather crazy and they never seem to go as they are supposed to; however, today's lab was extremely chaotic considering we haven't yet had a lecture over any of the material, and it was dealing almost entirely with a Van de Graff generator, which is a device that produces loads of static electricity, and can produce some rather shocking results (hee hee) when no one really knows what they are supposed to be doing with it. The lab instructions are always rather vague and assume that you've already seen a similar sample experiment performed in the lecture, but since we hadn't had one yet, we were all quite puzzled, but being engineers, we proceeded to try things until we got the desired results. The first thing we were supposed to do was ground the Van de Graff to kee it from building up too much electricity, but no one, including the lab teachers, seemed to know how to go about this with the provided materials, so we just assumed that it must already be done. So, the first thing we were supposed to do was touch the generator and observe what happens. I volunteered to try first, knowing it would just make my hair stand up, and this was true, and that all went fine. The problem came soon after that when we attempted to turn it off. I touched the power switch and it zapped me. Then, it started attracting everyone's hair towards it. Finally I just flipped the switch to it using my pen. It was really quite comical, except now no one in our group wanted to touch the thing. Our group managed to get through the rest of the lab without any more incidents, but one group did manage to get some pretty large blue sparks shooting from their's, but I'm pretty sure they were doing it on purpose. So, it looks like this semester will be full of plenty more crazy physics studios, but most of these will be dealing with electricity and magnetism rather than liquid nitrogen and catapults. I'm not really sure if that is more or less dangerous.

Oh, and I get to read another Steinbeck book for my U.S. Geography class called Travels with Charley in Search of America. Hannah got a good laugh out of that when she heard. Not really looking forward to it, but at least it is much shorter than The Grapes of Wrath, so I can't complain too much. Really it should be a fairly easy class, and hopefully will be rather interesting as well. The teacher is a bit nuts though, but I guess it'll keep things interesting. I guess there's some big geography conference in Las Vegas after Spring Break, and he's going to that, so he's not sure how classes will work then. He also said something about possibly never returning from that trip and the possibility of free "A's" if that occurred. Anyways, should be interesting. And I'll be starting Differential Equations classes tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. It will be interesting, because that has a lab with it as well, so I wonder how a lab class works for a math class. Probably lots of boring computer stuff, but we'll see I guess. Oh, and Chi Alpha starts tomorrow night, so that'll be exciting! Really, it should be a pretty awesome semester--I'll be done with the math and physics department after this, so that is definitely something to celebrate about.

Oh, I should also add that I successfully fried eggs the other day. They were actually edible this time. My last attempt ended with me running outside with a flaming frying pan, so this definitely went much better. I've been experimenting with some new sandwich recipes recently. The eggs were for my ham, bacon, egg, cheese and pickle sandwich, though my new favorite is cucumber, cream cheese and bacon. Yes, as you can tell, I eat a lot of things with bacon in it...hee hee! It is very delicious though! So is cheesecake...maybe I'll go get some of that soon. Anyways, I guess that's about it for the moment.