Today, I woke at a good earlyish time and got ready for my lab. I haven't been running lately, because my left knee hurts a bit. I don't think it is a major problem, but it just wouldn't be comfortable to do too much exercise on it. Anyway, I ate my fruit of for breakfast and then headed to the lab room a little early. First, our lab director guy gave us some handouts that will only be given to us this time(the other times we will have to print the lab info out ourselves). Then, we took a test. It was just a test to see what we knew about physics and it was quite easy. It dealt with Newton's laws mostly. Actually now that I think of it, it was all Newton's laws. There were lots of problems about equal and opposite forces, and also some one about inertia and the path an object would take if it were released immediately and all outside force was removed. Also some questions were like the cannon on a hill shooting a cannon ball off the cliff, what would the path look like...
After this, we broke off into our own groups of two and began to do our first lab. It was a very simple one and we only measured a piece of wire with various tools. The tools included a meter stick, a digital caliper, and a digital balance. We did 5 trials for each run and then took the mean and standard deviation of each set of data. One cool thing about the lab was the fact that each station had a computer at it. We opened up Excel and then inputted the data into a table. My lab partner's name was Jordan Jackson. He was in the military for 9 years and is now getting his postback or something like that. He had a much larger vocabulary than I, so the answers for our results were better sounding than I would have done. The nice thing about the computers is that you can have them do all the work for you such as the averaging. Then, at the end of the lab, you just print out your data sheet and away you go.
I think I will like Physics and Calculus the best, because the other classes seem to involve a lot of lateral thinking and just making up things, which I'm not so good at. I have a lot of classes again tomorrow, so I think I should go to bed. Say hi to everyone there that isn't reading this. I miss you all. Goodnight!
Yesterday afternoon I returned from visiting my aunt and uncle and cousins in Charlottesville. It was really great to see them all, but I was also feeling a bit antsy to get back for the start of my school. Travis came and saw me after his classes and it was wonderful to be back with him. The two of us went to the nearest metro stop where we met my dad who had just flown in. We all went to Chris’s apartment where he got in soon after from work. We sat around awhile, chatting and catching up. I think my dad really enjoyed seeing Chris again. We all walked over to Eastern Market in search of dinner. The first restaurant we stopped by the first one Chris knew of, but it was going to be a long wait, so our search continued. We ended up at a unique pizza place with all kinds of specialty pizzas. We decided on a chicken pesto pizza and a hotter, chipotle one called Fire and Smoke. They were oh so very delicious, and I look forward to when I can go there again. We also ordered some dessert which was a menagerie of some gelato, homemade doughnuts, and some molten lava chocolate cake that we all shared. I am getting re-hungry just thinking about it! After dinner we all walked back to the apartment and I had to pack up all my suitcases from the past two weeks. My dad and I went to our hotel and Travis went back to his dorm. I can’t believe I’ll be in my own dorm by tomorrow!!
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