Wow! it has been a loonnngggg time since I last wrote a post. I guess I’ll start off where I left off 4 weeks ago. On Monday of finals week, we had a crazy storm; 80 mile/hour winds and sleet/snow. That was the one night that we had snow, which started falling around midnight. Naturally, all of the California kids ran outside (including myself) while anyone from elsewhere in the country sat inside and laughed at the amount of joy that came from…snow. We were outside from 12:30am until about 3:00am, which probably wasn’t the best thing to do on the first day we had finals. Here are a couple pictures:

Unfortunately, I was stuck at school 3 days after my last final since my flight was Saturday. I was able to hang out with the few people who were there and Saturday rolled around soon enough. The flight started well; we took off from Prescott on time and, after flying for 20 minutes made a stop in Flagstaff to pick people up. That’s where things started going awry. After we loaded our extra passengers, the pilots soon realized that with the small amount of ice that had built up while we were there (there was a lot of snow in Flagstaff) was making the plane overweight. After recalculating the weight and balance sheet, the captain decided that we would need another thousand gallons of fuel. After the adjustment was made, the plane was again too heavy, so we needed to ditch nine passengers. After nine reluctant people stepped off the plane for the hotel, travel, and extra $300 bonus, the plane was de-iced and we were on our way. At that point, our flight had been delayed by a couple hours and I missed two of the commuter flights from LA to San Diego. I was lucky enough to make the last commuter flight home and arrived in San Diego two an half hours late, but there none the less.

Last week, I didn’t do too much except visit my high school and hang out with friends here in San Diego. The few productive things I’ve done here so far include ordering a replacement shell for my Macbook Pro, having my Mac repaired, ordering a replacement remote, and…well, I guess playing PS2 doesn’t really count but I’m throwing it out there. Since Saturday, however, it’s been pretty busy. Our church does a Christmas show each year and we go all out. We already have about 10 moving/color changing lights, but we rented about 8 more of those and another 10 LED fixtures. I’ve operated a spot light for every show since they started doing it 5 or 6 years ago. This year we had rehearsal Saturday, shows on Sunday, one show each yesterday and today, and then three tomorrow since it’s Christmas Eve. I took a few photos with my phone so far, and here are few:

Last week was my LTAV competition and a Matlab exam, both of which were very nerve racking beforehand. Luckily, both of them went fairly well in my opinion, although I won’t have my Matlab score for another few days. I first started this post 4 days ago, so I found out my Matlab score was an A

I guess I’ll start with the LTAV competition, which tested the emotional limits of our group for the past week as it continued to produce new flaws. Last Wednesday, for example, it had low batteries so we switched them out rather than waiting to charge the ones that were being used. Our LEGO “bricks” (control module) then proceeded to literally destroy any battery packs that we put in, rendering them all useless. Finally, we put the originals back in and flew around as best we could. On flight day, we forgot that we still had a bad battery in so for our first run we couldn’t get the machine off the ground very well. Instead of flying over the bucket to drop the ping pong balls, we backed in next to it and dropped them there as best we could without having our props fling them in all directions. On our second run, however, we put in a different battery pack and adjusted our ballast which ended up giving us full points and extra points for completing the course in under 4:00 mins. We forgot to film our real run, but I recorded one after…here’s the video:

LTAV Video

Today my friend Brenton and I took a free course here at the school covering CPR, AED, and First Aid skills. I wasn’t too keen on the fact that it was supposed to last from 8:30 am until 4:00 pm. Luckily, we got out by 2:30, but it was fairly interesting the whole way through. We covered a couple of hours of CPR with the dummies and then about one more on AED (Automatic External Defibrillator) usage. They are actually really neat and advanced devices…they deliver specific amounts of energy in each shock based on a computerized analysis via the shock patches. We were told that on one charge, an AED can deliver several hundred charges. After lunch, we covered first aid skills. The teaching covered many categories of first aid, each explained fairly briefly. We got to practice a few things such as changing positions of someone who may have a damaged spine or neck, or of course bandaging wounds. I’m glad I took the course because now I’m certified in first aid and CPR/AED for two years and I learned some neat skills that could help me in many situations.