Quick Catch-up

OK, OK. So I haven't written anything for quite some time. Well, now I'm in South Africa, and I want to write about that, but I thought I'd do a quick summary of everything else that's been going on first. I'll probably flesh this out a bit later, but for now I'll just put the bare bones.

Winter Quarter after I got back from China was hectic and stressful. I was in a lot of Product Design and ME classes. I really enjoyed them and they helped me decide that I'd really made the right choice for my major, but they were also a lot of work. Trying to get back into rugby and my on-campus job also didn't help my work (and stress) load. In the end, I got everything done but I was exhausted.

Spring break I went to Maui with Shiyan and some of her friends for almost a week, which was really amazing. I'll put up some of the pictures from that later (especially from surfing!). The second half of spring break I went to rugby training camp in Monterey, which including lots of hill sprints and taking "ice baths" in the freezing cold Pacific water to help our muscles recuperate, supposedly.

Spring quarter I was still taking quite a heavy class load, including E40, an electrical engineering class for which I hadn't completed any of the pre-requisite courses. Luckily all of that turned out well, or I at least got through the quarter in one piece.

Spring quarter we also won our second straight national championship in rugby! The final was against the same team as last year (Penn State), but the score was much closer. Last year we won 53-6, and this year we only managed to squeeze by them with a last-minute try to win 15-12.

Over the summer I was working as a user interface design intern at homestead.com (a company that helps small businesses build their own websites). I learned a whole lot in the process and the work environment there was very relaxed and pretty amazing - the summer ended with a company talent show in which my whole team did a bollywood dance number. I was also taking two classes (one math and one computer science) at community colleges to get some of my engineering requirements out of the way before senior year. That added up to a pretty packed summer, but I got a lot accomplished and wasn't too incredibly tired.

And now, I'm in South Africa! Which I'll write about in the next post...

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