Ninety minutes of red tape later, I’m registered for the fall semester. It’s a little weird not to be taking 3 classes for the first time in half a decade, but it’s somehow fitting that there’s still a chance I might add a third class for fun. I really wanted to take General Relativity (Einstein’s theory of gravitation), but I have to take Nuclear Physics for my research. Kind of a bummer, but as I said I might take GR for fun. Maybe I’m homesick for the workload.

Oh… and I’m taking Field Theory, finally. So psyched.

While we were on vacation with Mike & Kirsten, I got super lucky and managed to snag a sweet new office — one on the second floor with an actual view!

These people crack me up… great group of dudes in the music department.

New software update released with the Magic Trackpad — heaven!

I came into the summer not exactly certain of what I was supposed to be working on over the break. I knew I had an advisor to work for, and I had something of an idea of the focus of the project, but there was no real explanation of what the actual work would be.

So far, there has been some amount of physics, but the majority of my time has been spent coding — a wonderful development, all thing considered. I worked in web programming all throughout high school and college, writing the back end structure for a handful of projects including a prior version of Port City Community Church’s web site, so programming is pretty natural to me. It’s also given me a chance to expand my programming comforts a shade to include Python and Fortran 90. I quite like Python as it gives me a great new way to write scripts to run locally, but Fortran is the devil. Why must physicists still use languages invented in the 50’s? It makes sense, but it is truly inconvenient.

However, despite the nonsense of Fortran it’s been a pretty good summer so far. I’ve gained a new appreciation for OS X (as if I needed one), mainly because it gives me a great UNIX platform. Half of my job is writing Fortran, the other half is working in command line, so I get all the goodness of UNIX with a UI that doesn’t suck. Some of my fellow students are stuck on these awful department-controlled Linux boxes which are truly terrible, and I am grateful to have a laptop I control that can do everything I need to do and more.

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I haven’t really felt like I was doing anything worth writing about, and I don’t particularly like reading blogs whose owners write simply for the sake of writing.

Having said that, there has been a bit of news that I’ll share.

• Martha and I celebrated our first anniversary this past weekend, which is crazy and exciting. We celebrated by leaving the apartment at 5 in the morning to go on a pair of trips (her to Atlanta, me to Wilmington).
• My love for football (soccer) managed to scale up to full-on obsession with the passing of the 2010 World Cup. Spain defeated the reckless flying Dutchmen (with spikes up) to win their first Cup, which was pretty exhilarating. Now I wait for the start of the Premiership while catching the occasional MLS game on ESPN2.
• On a related note, Martha & I became obsessed with the wonderful Off the Ball Podcast produced for ESPN over the last month. Truly a class podcast and we were terribly sad to see it go — only to hear that it may indeed resume for the English Premier League season!

Additionally, I am still working with a professor in Chapel Hill on some nuclear physics projects. All in all I still don’t know that I want to do this kind of thing (research) for the rest of my life — it has the distinct feel of settling. It is a good opportunity, though, and I’m getting paid to learn new programming languages (Fortran, Python) so that’s fun.

Finally, I’m still playing music a bit which is bittersweet. I play a couple of times a month at The Summit Church, and my homies at Port City Community Church are nice enough to let me jump back into the rotation every now and again. This is sweet because I like playing music, particularly at Overflow. This is only bittersweet because I underestimated how much I crave a sort of total immersion into playing; trips to Wilmington these days are a much-needed shot of class and a diversion, not the norm.

Still, it is indeed summer time and the weather and general mood have been quite good (as I write this, of course, my weather widget reports storms the next six days). Looking ahead, Martha & I have her birthday coming up (!) a sweet Paramore show, a music date at the Summit Church, and a week-long vacation getaway extravaganza with the Paschals! Oh, and then I get to kick off the new semester with the Overflow crew. Gonna be a great month. Except for the weather, which really is unbearably humid up here.

I can’t think of a more boring and unenthusiastic way to convey a student’s success in continuing toward a Ph.D. and never having to go through that hell again.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. That email, received while lounging in the green room at Port City Church last Sunday, means I instantly graduate from sorry first-year student to fatherly second-year student. Of course, such a transition is not without responsibilities such as updating the wonderful incoming student handbook.

“If Jesus is paying LeBron, I’m paying Dwyane Wade.”

Awesome.

If your church’s staff men’s restroom contains 2 brands of pomade and a big bottle of hair gel, your church might be pushing the contemporvant category.

I feel old — we have a cat now. It’s name is “Cat” because we thought it was clever. In retrospect, that may not have been the case. Still, we’re pretty stoked about having him around and he likes being fed so it seems to be a win-win-win.

Special thanks to Kirsten for helping Martha pick him out.

Three and one-half weeks of studying 10-12 hours per day and it’s finally over! It’s still hard to believe, it feels like it lasted so long, but I have finished my first year as a graduate student. I was able to take most of this week off from school & am incredibly fortunate to have the oportunity to go home and play at Overflow and Port City Church several times over the next two weeks.

I also have a backlog of posts from this last semester that hopefully I will be able to publish over the summer. Here’s hoping this blog turns back into a useful way of updating how Martha & I are doing and what we are up to out here in the Triangle!

Tom

Hopefully I’ll be able to write soon.  For now, though, this has wrecked our worlds in Phillips Hall 118.

Today I spent the better part of my afternoon in Barnes & Noble working on class schedules and trying to resolve scheduling quirks that have me teaching and sitting in a class simultaneously. While the similarity of the situation is comforting (it reminds me of those 4 years of school, music, and work), it also reminds me that the workload of a graduate student is about to come back.

I don’t think any of the eleven of us would say we’re ready for this.

As much as I knew going in that I was going to be busy this semester, I don’t think I was quite prepared for what was going to ensue. I’m still pretty much perpetually behind, but I’ve realized I need to make a concerted effort to keep up with things that are not strictly logical (read: writing, art) to balance out the logic or I’m going to go crazy.

I miss writing music like crazy, but I’m hoping things will all even out in the next few months.