At work we have a friction stir welder. I believe it is one of three set-ups in the US.

Best. Internship. Ever.

I made it here safely, and while the housemates are quite the characters they don't seem to be harmful in any way.

Lesson of the weekend: Don't be so proud as to not ask someone to help you put sunscreen on your back before going to the beach. If you are, the result is a large, odd-shaped sunburn on your back (that corresponds with the area you can't reach yourself). Hopefully it won't peel and become a permanent reminder of this little folly.

First day of Spacex commences in less than an hour, so I better get going.

Oh man. Please, please, please don't let my housemates be crazy.

Driving south tomorrow. I'm freaking out right now. Up to this point, I had been distracted enough by other things in my life that I hadn't really thought about work or housing for the summer too much, beyond getting the logistics taken care of. However, now that I'm moving tomorrow and starting work on Monday all that overdue anxiety is kicking in, and it's one hundred times more intense since my mind is cramming over at least a month's worth of worry into the next twenty four hours.

So *not* ready for this, but I guess that doesn't matter. Life isn't going to wait, you know?

Focus on the positive:

• Moving to LA in a week


• Only an (easy) take home exam and essay stand between me and summer


• Who cares about the bad weather? In a week I'll be at the beach!


• Laptop died, but I got the new hard drive only 2 days after calling Dell


• I'm no longer homeless for the summer


• A bottle of white awaits me to help celebrate tomorrow.

Focus on the positive. Don't think about the negative.

I don't want to be here, but I don't want to go home (to California). I don't know what or where I want to be right now, and it's really bothering me.

All I really feel like doing is sleeping all the time.

Nothing is going to be the same again.

The sequence of events over the past 24 hours definitely qualifies for the List of Utterly Stupid Things Caroline Has Done:

Moved on a booth at 11PM last night
Got back to my room at 1AM
Went out with a friend at 1:30AM
Got back to my room at 4:01AM (at which point my alarm had been going off for 1 minute)
Went to buggy at 4:30AM
Drove a friend's car to West Virginia from 9:00AM to 12:00PM
Played lacrosse games with no subs at 12:00PM and 1:00PM

Needless to say, I feel fast asleep on the ride home- fortunately, I didn't have to drive on the way back.

Note to self: stop doing stupid things.

The ASME RSC (and more importantly, the Student Design Contest) is over, and I believe this weekend is the last or second to last day of lacrosse games of the season. These two facts mean that hopefully I'll be able to calm down a bit and get caught up on all the other things going on in my life, like research and classwork and such.

These past couple of weeks were (arguably) the worst that I've had at CMU. There was a lot of classwork, exams, lab reports, extra-curricular activities, family issues, and planning for the summer/fall in terms of housing and such all crammed into the last 14 days. I can handle each of these things on their own, but all of them at once was too much. Luckily, things are calming down (relatively), so life is looking up.

This whole blog thing isn't really as good as it used to be. I intended it to be a way to keep in touch with people from back home and post interesting notes and pictures, but I hardly have the time or energy to keep it up anymore. Maybe it's time to move on.