So, Jessie and I are sitting here, right here, right now, debating on what we should do with our time. Both of us have a lot of homework. Both of us need sleep. Both of us are always hungry. What to do... Well, we haven't written to everyone on the blog for a while, so here we are. Everything else can wait for a little bit.
So, I'm sitting here, looking back on where I was this time last year. I was starting my Junior year of college as a Mechanical Engineer. I was just starting classes being fully accepted into the Mechanical Engineering program at BYU. The plan was to graduate April of 2009 and head straight into my Master's possibly at Utah State (I may have been an Aggie on paper, but I will always be a Cougar at heart. I BLEED BLUE!), going there to pursue a degree in Aerospace Engineering. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with the classes I was taking. Up until that point the classes had been hard, but I could easily work 20 hours a week while still taking 17 credits and get the grades I wanted. So, in my reckoning, taking 18 credits while not working would be a breeze. Life, it seems, can be pretty cruel. School drained me of any type of energy that I had. To make a long story short, I learned a lot and definitely got every penny's worth of college. Oh, and did I mention I was single...still the oldest cousin on the Griffitts side not married. haha.
Things now are a bit different. I now have a wife, here at my side, almost asleep on my shoulder as I type. After that, everything else I type isn't all that important. But, to appease all you blog hungry folks out there, I will continue. :) School's going well. As Jessie wrote earlier, I am working on my senior project. My group is doing a project for the train company Union Pacific. Are goal is to design and manufacture a nose fairing for the front of the locomotives to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. So far it's been great working for them. We've already made a trip out to one of their train yards to examine the locomotives up close, and they are huge, monstorous beasts. Union Pacific has been doing everything they can to help us out and has given us everything we need to get the project done. By April we should have a full scale model ready and Union Pacific will begin testing at a test track in Colorado. As of right now, I'm in charge of wind tunnel testing. BYU owns a wind tunnel that is housed in a huge building, almost exclusively built for it.
Along with that project, I am also working in a research lab for the Neuroscience department here at BYU. I work for Dr. Scott Steffensen doing all sorts of tests on the brain. As of right now, because of my lack of experience, my duties are limited to doing the brain surgeries on the rats, opening up the scalp and drilling the holes in the skull, as well as preparing the microscopic electrodes used to measure the activity of individual brain neurons. It's pretty exciting, and I'm glad to be doing the work. I'm almost completely done with my pre-med classes, and now have to shift gears to start getting timelines and paperwork figured out for medical school. In all honesty I am very nervous about the whole ordeal. I have no idea what I'm getting myself into, or how to even get started. Talk about another head first dive into the unknown. Along with all this, I'm working 20 hours a week. Things are very busy with all that and classes in between. Jessie and I are literally on campus at least from 8 in the morning until 8 at night, if we are lucky to get out of there by then. Needless to say, if Jessie and I get to see eachother on campus for half an hour it's been a good day. But life is great, and we love it.
Jessie is just as busy as I am. She's working a ton at the library, teaching classes and leading research sessions. She is so good to wake up with me early every morning to head to school, sometimes when she doesn't have a class until hours later. She's works her cute little tail off. I swear that she has two new papers due every other day. She's going to get carpal tunnel, I just know it. Luckily, despite previous patterns of breaking bones in the fall, she is broken bone free. Although, fall has only begun, so anything can happen. We're crossing our fingers we make it through to spring. We have a class together this semester, but I'm pretty sure she knows everything that's being taught. She loves her history. She recently changed her major to history teaching and she is loving it. But this class we are in together really is way below her, and anybody could tell if they saw us in the class. It's a long, two and a half hour, once a week class, and Jessie is partly ADD already. haha. She doesn't sit still, keeps fidgeting, and we write more notes to one another on our papers than we do notes. One particular Wednesday Jessie and I hadn't got much sleep the night before because of late night homework. Jessie, being bored, promptly laid her head on my shoulder and fell asleep. It wasn't long until I laid my head on the back of my chair and was out myself. Now, normally, this wouldn't be such a bad thing. It's a huge class (about 200 or so) and there are a ton of seats. Two things, however, made this not such a relaxing situation. First, I like to sit in the front two or three rows of the classroom. It helps me to concentrate, my eyes got bad on the mission and I have a hard time seeing the white board when I sit too far back, and normally it helps to keep me awake if I'm tired. So here we are, Jessie is asleep on my shoulder and I'm asleep, head back, mouth open. To make matters much, much worse, I promptly woke myself up because I was hearing a noise in my sleep. I turned to the guy next to me, mind you, Jessie is still asleep on my shoulder, and asked him if I had been snoring. He had a huge grin on his face and said, "Oh yeah. Big time." So, here we are, both asleep, on the second row, and I'm snoring. There's a story for you all. :)
Anyway, weekends are pretty much taken up by football at this point. My #9 BYU Cougars are rocking the house! It's so fun to watch them play and do well. It took Jessie a couple of weeks to get into the swing of having college football on starting early in the morning, heading to the stadium for 4 hours to watch the Cougars play, and then heading over to Meagan, Brent, and Mike DeMotte's place after to watch even more football. Either she's beginning to like football now, or has given up trying to stop us from watching it. I think it's the first. :) I love her so much! We were able to go up to Logan last Friday night to watch BYU play Utah State. It was a really good time. We went up with Mike DeMotte and his kids. We had a blast. Afterwards, we were able to stay at Tawni and Ryan's new house for the night. They have such a beautiful house. I can't believe that my little sister owns a house, while I'm stuck in an apartment about as big as our living room back home. But we do have an amazing view of Provo. :) Tawni and Ryan are awesome! Anyway, it's getting late, and Jessie has gone to bed. I better do some homework. I'll make sure Jessie fills you in on her part of the family life as soon as possible. Also, we have a lot of pictures to put up, but our friend has my digital card reader for the camera, so, still without new pictures on the computer.
