Chris' Updates

It was a busy weekend, I'll say that. Friday I headed down to Fitzsimons USARC, and through the morning we got our TA-50 field gear and our rifles. We got settled in at Ft. Carson, and after lunch chow we headed to the zeroing range. The object of zeroing is to set the sights according to the way a person aims. I had a little trouble with this. By convention, we would always shoot 3 rounds and then check where they went. A prerequisite of this method is that all 3 rounds hit in the same general area. Usually, I'd have 2 rounds pretty close together, and then one that was jerked way off. Needless to say, after 6 or 7 iterations of this, I was a bit frustrated. I did eventually zero the rifle to myself, but it felt like an ordeal. Saturday was our day to qualify. We drove back to the zero range to move all of our gear over 400 yards to the qualification range. A few of us privates were tasked with moving a good-sized tent to the new site. Someone had the brilliant idea of just ca...

Well, this has been a busy week. Tuesday night was the Physics midterm, which I thought went pretty well. Yesterday I stayed at school after my classes to try and study for calculus that evening. I got distracted with building a spreadsheet of my current grades, my last midterm grade and final grades, and my overall course grade. It turned out that I needed 75% on both the midterm and final to get an overall 60%. And judging from the old posted exams I was trying, I was going to get about 15% on the midterm if I had taken it. I decided it wasn't worth the effort. My study skills this semester have been really, really horrible. I'm trying to use my high school strategy of go to class, understand the material, do zero homework, and ride the test grades. It worked marginally in high school, and again marginally in community college. Unfortunately, university classes don't work at all for this strategy. I'm so lost in calculus right now that there's no hope for this sem...

Things have been going well lately; school's the same as always. Although, I am getting worried about midterms next week. Calculus has been rough, really rough. I'm going to keep trying, but I'm pretty lost at this point. Infinite series are just not snapping for me, there's just too many cases and too many techniques. Physics should be fine, I just need to keep up a decent work ethic. For Easter, I went to Mass in the morning with Ashley's family, and then had breakfast at their house. We stayed for a bit of the relatives showing up, and then Ashley and I headed back to Alcott to relax a bit. Good day though.

Well, I got back to Colorado on Friday night, and pretty much just crashed for the evening. Saturday I went and watched Jeannie's rugby games, and was very proud of her. She made a few great tackles, two of which were about 5 seconds apart. Ashley bought a few houseware items from the Habitat for Humanity thrift store. We have a new love seat, dishwasher, refrigerator, and a toilet and sink for the basement bathroom that's about to be built. All that for about $160. And everything's in pretty good condition too. Jeremey managed to install the new dishwasher earlier this week, and it works wonderfully. Spring Break ended quietly, and on Monday I headed back to school. I drove to the RTD Park-n-Ride and waited about 5 minutes for a bus, but none came. I realized that the RTD drivers were threatening a strike, so I drove to school and parked in the Euclid visitor's lot. Sure enough, RTD is on strike, and only a smattering of local routes are running. My regional route to s...