I am the Master Laser Oscillator. Fear my wattage.

Hi everyone!  Now that my crazy week has passed and I'm in the home stretch, I have a lot of other stuff to worry about (like finals and that "PhD" thing), but none of it has a hard deadline, so I can write to you guys again!  (For anyone who cares, the "master laser oscillator" was the topic of one of my big presentations Wednesday.  It's actually the smallest in a series of 3 lasers used in some fancy detectors around the world, but it controls the other, bigger ones.  Basically, it's a beast.)  As much as all the work I/we had to get done over these few weeks has been difficult, I actually enjoyed what I was doing a lot of the time.  (It still feels strange for me to say that about school, but I guess it's encouraging that I enjoy what I'm doing.)  So much of what I did as an undergrad--no, all of what I did as an undergrad--was the physics of very limited, very fundamental, situations, so the thought process of building a system, thinking about how all the pieces fit together and affect each other and have to work together for a specific result, is new to me, and I discovered that I enjoy it very much.  I also discovered that laser design is not my thing.  Definitely not what I want to do my dissertation on over the summer, which is a good thing to find out now since we just had our first meeting about summer project selection this Friday.  I'm less worried about that than I have been, although it sounds like it's going to be a lot of work and a big responsibility, since I'll effectively be a real employee of the company I'm doing the project with, in addition to being a student doing my dissertation.  But I'll be making decisions about that over the next couple of weeks while I'm on *gasp* CHRISTMAS BREAK!!  My Dad sent my Mom and Sammy's travel itinerary to me this morning, and I'm SO excited to see them and Erin in just a few weeks!!  (Holy cow, I just realized Christmas Day is 2 weeks from yesterday...when did that happen?)

Heh, all the people reading this just jumped and said, "Agh!  No!  It can't be that close!  How did it get here so fast?"  I know how these things work.

But for discussions of Christmas, pirates, and an excess of lard (not necessarily together), I defer you to my subsequent vignettes.