Ack! Ack! Ack!

Clinic presentation tomorrow! Meetings were useless because team members were unprepared. Doing well on this is very important to me.

Astro presentation tomorrow! Don't feel so good about this, but it's going to happen and it really isn't all that important to me.

E84 assignment due Wednesday. Wasn't worried about this until I sat down to try to actually do it.

Grading due Wednesday. It is only one assignment to be behind, but I'm really going to feel bad if I don't get their homework back to them before the test on Thursday.

E84 makeup class Wednesday. Due to some holiday on next Monday we wont have class then. We will have it this week instead. I don't really feel like I've got time for that on Wednesday afternoon when I was planning on taking my E&M test.

Archaeoastronomy due Thursday. Don't care that much about it, but it is just something else that should happen.

E&M midterm due Friday. Was going to take this Wednesday afternoon. Now don't know when I'll take it. It needs to be sometime when I am well rested. It scares me a lot. Doing it and doing well on it are very important to me.

Clinic Design Proposal due Friday. I'm not exactly sure what this entails, but when I dropped by the engineering department to see some examples, they were all about 1/4 of an inch thick. That really scares me. I'd like to do well on this too, but at this point (as we hadn't started because we didn't realize it was a big-ass thing) I think it would take every bit of free time each of us has and then some to do it well. And I'm not expecting to get much out of certain other team members.

I am so screwed for this week. It was intimidating before, but then I found out about the design proposal. I'm really scared now. I don't think there is any way it is all getting done. Can't we just assume I'm going to pass all my classes and let me graduate already so I won't have to deal with all the course work and whatnot any more?

Do you know how you know when you are really freaked out about your upcoming school work?

You wake up about 10 times during the night with various dreams about giving the upcoming presentations or being thwarted in the attempt to give them. Or about trying to talk to Saeta about the problem clinic student. I decided, since it is finally a reasonable time to get up, that I should just get up. I'm also not very happy about no one official (like Saeta or another prof) telling us that we had such a big paper due at the end of the week. I mean, I knew the proposal was out there to be written, but I didn't know it was a long thing rather than a short thing. I am now on the email list for such announcements, at least.

Digital Camera

My digital camera arrived. The jurry is still out on whether or not I like it. dpreview.com said that it had an optical view finder, and all the other cameras in the series (some of which I've used) have optical view finders. I could live without an optical view finder and just use the LCD. In fact, I tried it out today under the bright sun and I was able to see just fine in the LCD viewfinder to take the picture. My concern here is battery life. The specs say that the batteries should last for over 4 hours of just being on or should be able to take 110 pictures. Well, after having had the camera for about 4 hours (no it wasn't on all that time) and taken about 24 pictures, the batteries are dead already. I have a few theories on this: (1) the battery life for this camera just sucks and I should return it, (2) the batteries that I put in it weren't actually as new as I thought they were, or (3) the 20 minutes I had the camera connected to my computer through the USB port killed the batteries. The camera wouldn't take my nickle-cadmium batteries and I don't have any NiMH batteries of the correct size (AA). The manual does specifically suggest using NiMH batteries for longer life.