pd day

yesterday i confirmed my proposal defense day. its going to be 11/12 from 4:30 to 6:30p. i'm not sure its fully hit me yet though. i decided to leave my program in hawaii before i got to the point of scheduling my actual defense, so i'm starting to tread in unknown waters, which is kind of exciting. if i pass, i will officially be abd (all but the dissertation). if i don't pass, i'll probably have to write a new proposal and/or take another class (noooo!). we'll see how it goes.

if it was possible to be on cloud ten (the one that comes after cloud nine), i think that would be what i'm on right now. school is good. dhaus is good. church is good. running is good. and i made a new friend named eric and he is great.

everything's amazing, nobody's happy

several people posted a video with the above title on facebook recently and i appreciated it, so i thought i'd share it here.

my last committee member confirmed that she'd serve on my dissertation. i'm now trying to find a date in early november that will work for everyone. i'm pretty excited to get my proposal defense done as it's the last major hurdle i have to jump through other than actually defending my dissertation itself.

my toe is feeling better. we had the haus cleanup day for my co-op last saturday and jack, emily and i dropped the island that's in our kitchen onto my toe. oops. i've never broken anything but it sure felt like my toe was broken. it hurt so bad. fortunately however, i can still run on it and the bruising is going away. i don't think i'll be sporting my sweet new 3" heels anytime soon though.

i'm excited for this weekend, and yes, i'm aware that it is only wednesday morning. happy middle of the week all!

31

i love engineering and how it keeps your ego in check. i got my mid-term back today. i scored a 31! in most worlds this would be considered low, but it was out of 50 points. oh wait, that's still low. lets try this: i got a 31, class ave. was 30 and apparently most of us were clustered around class ave. love it.

a very big hut

german haus, my co-op

"What is the desire to have a home, a hut, a land, of one’s own, after all, than the desire to have some space that will be filled with others, others with whom you can share something you love and want to share..."
~Russell Arben Fox

i've always wanted a big house when i grow up, but its always been so that i would have room for lots of visitors, which was why i appreciated the above quote.

my co-op in some ways is an extension of this. i believe there are 22 of us in the house right now. sometimes, it would be nice if the washer were free (there's only one washer or dryer), if the showers were open when i wanted to shower or if there were tomatoes left in the fridge when i was craving one, but somehow these annoyances pale in comparison to having dinner each night with 15 or more friends, hanging out in the kitchen chatting with people after a long day of adventures or piling 10 or 20 people into the tv room to watch the grinch. i spend a lot of time by myself when i'm studying, working or running (sometimes), but its nice to have the constant buzz of community where i spend a lot of the rest of my time.

conference and dynamics

Faith and fear cannot coexist...Consider it this way: our net usable faith is what we have left to exercise after we subtract our sources of doubt and disbelief. . . . If your faith exceeds your doubt and disbelief, the answer is likely positive.
~Kevin W. Pearson

i had a great conference weekend. a lot of amazing talks were given. between sessions i was trying to cram as much dynamics into my head as possible in preparation for my mid-term this morning. part a of the first problem seemed okay, but i really have no idea how the rest went. maybe i need to have a bit more faith (or confidence) in my ability to do dynamics...or at least in the curve.

i do know however that the professor for the class agreed to be on my dissertation committee (fortunately he had not yet graded the exams!). i like this professor a) because i think he knows what he's talking about, b) because i think he'll challenge me and c) because he and his wife did a 12-hour bike time trial two weekends ago and he told me i should have been there. my kind of committee member.

bridesmaid dress

well, the dress finally arrived. i donned it and the shoes i'll be wearing for julia and chris's wedding and had one of my housemates take pictures. somehow my eyes ended up closed and/or i'm making a very funny face in every one of the pictures...this is mostly because another one of my housemates went running around telling everyone to come check out the dress, so there was an audience for our little impromptu photoshoot. the dress is from jcrew. its super cute and fit perfectly right out of the box. yeah!

and its got pockets!

and with the heels on, i'm almost six feet tall!

apparently, my mom, julia's mom and julia's sister (the maid of honor) are getting our hair and nails done prior to the wedding. should be fun bonding with the girls! now i just need to find a little bolero or sweater to go with the dress.

puffiness factor

the last couple weeks have been one of those time periods in life where everything seems to happen all at once. there has been a lot going on at school, at the house and with training. this has resulted in much less sleeping than is ideal and a whole lot of sore muscles.

with respect to the latter, housemate jack and i are on day 11 of p90x. everyday something different seems to be swollen on my body as my muscles try and adapt to this strength training business (don't worry, the trend seems to be that the muscles go back to normal size after a couple days). i am questioning daily if its worth it. i'm doing it on top of ramping my mileage back up in preparation for the rocky raccoon 100 in february, so i haven't been able to swim or bike as much because there are just not enough hours in the day.

in addition to the physical shock to the system, being in front of a tv everyday is kind of weird, and there's no outdoor component to the workouts at all *gasp* (thank goodness i'm still running). the point of mentioning all this is that the whole experience is making me acutely aware of some of the aspects of my normal training that i take for granted. some of those aspects have to do with being outside, having fresh air, seeing the seasons, the day and the enviroment change, having whole coversations with training buddies. and i can run the exact same loop everyday, but everyday it will be different in some way.

i got to guest lecture yesterday on running biomechanics yesterday. it was awesome. i talked a bit about how your foot moves when it hits the ground, and i found a youtube video that showed a subject running with and without shoes which i thought i'd post. fastforward 1 minute into the video and you'll see the barefoot running followed by the shod running. without shoes you tend to have more of a flatfoot ground contact whereas with shoes you tend to have more of a heelstrike, and the woman filmed in the video showed this exactly without being told what to do.

and yes, i know i need to get more pictures up...hopefully there will be some soon. just got my bridesmaid's dress for chris and julia's wedding and need to show it off!