Spring!

Well, spring has officially been here in the northern hemisphere for several days now, and now that I attend a school whose terms align accurately with the seasons, this also means that spring quarter will be starting Monday. The ice and snow are being replaced with more savory things, like flowers and pollen and ants, and apparently our office building isn't going to have the air conditioning ("cooling systems") turned on until April 10, so it'll be like going to a tropical non-breezy treeless forest every day.

Now, the most important aspect to remember about this upcoming quarter is that I will be taking my Last. Class. Ever. Sure, there might be some set of exams I'll have to take at the end of the quarter, and they're probably going to even give me another degree, but such things are inconsequential when we consider the raw facts of no more classes. See, classes and I, we just don't get along. I'm not a big fan of sitting still for extended periods of time, let alone having time taken out of the middle of my day for sitting still. We used to be pretty close: I took classes and they gave me good grades and everything was hunky-dory. Then in 10th grade it happened: I did my first research project. I had a couple of magenta liquid crystal cells I hooked up to a battery and some switches, and I spent hours and hours heating them up and freezing them (my first fun with dry ice) and watching how the impurities in the material affected the phase transitions. I was hooked. What's the point of taking classes when I could be having fun instead? So for the last nine years (yrrgh! that long??) I've been rather impatiently waiting until I could quit wasting my time on all these silly sit-and-take-notes and then do-these-everso-enlightening-problems classes, and start doing real science.

And when I put it that way, I'm not quite sure I've entirely internalized just how exciting this is going to be.