Hey!

I am so excited! One of my companions, Katie, and I have booked a trip to Europe for the middle part of May. I am so excited! We will be leaving on May 6 and returning on the 22. We will be visiting London, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, Venice, Florence, Rome and a couple other places. It is going to be so much fun. This will be the first time I'll be going to another country (sorry, Canada doesn't count when you live in Detroit). So I am really looking forward to May and my first chance to see Europe.

Of course, this is a reward for doing well in school. So, I just have to keep it out of my mind until May and focus on my studies. That shouldn't be too hard...right.

So, the cool part of last week. Well after my semester off from working, I figured I had better find something to do this semester as it isn't cheap to be out here, and my experiments with the money tree haven't panned out yet. So one of my professors from last semester, Prof. Austin, mentioned near the end of class that he was hiring people do research fo him. Since I thought his class was cool, I would investigate.

I tried to meet up with him over the break, but he was never around or busy. This semester started and I have him for another class. So while we were doing introductions, I mnetioned I was not doing any research, but was looking. Well, before the next class, he came up to me and asked if I would be interested in working for him. So I talked to him about it, and the rest is history! I'm now a graduate student research assistant (GSRA) in the Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory (ACAL).

I'm going to be working on a software simulator of an iPAQ. Another cool thing is that my tuition is paid ($6,500 bill no more!) and I get a very reasonable monthly stipend as well. This si going to be a very interesting semester and it should give me some valuable experience on whether I want to go on for that"advanced" degree.

I hope everyone had a good holiday and enjoyed their time off from {work, school, other} (select one or several). It's been almost a month since I last journaled, so I applogize. However, I think I'll be doing it at least once a week from now on.

So, two really big things happened to me over the past week, hence the crazy and cool title. I'll leave the cool for later this week along with the updates to the web site that are in the pipline. I'll just focus on the crazy part tonight.

Why was last week crazy you ask? Simply put, my apartment building out here in A2 had a fire in it! Yes, that's right, a fire. I came home from school to find an entrance to the complex blocked off and 6-8 fire trucks parked in front of Mike and I's building. We had to wait several hours for them to finish putting it out and conducting their investigation, fortunately the damage was minimal and I don't think anyone was hurt. The fire damaged two apartments on the third floor at the opposite end of the building from where our apartment is. It would appear that it is always fun out here Ann Arbor. Oh, I'll have to remember to put the tire slashing incident up here soon, too!