It's Been a While

Oh man...I kind of gave of the ghost on this blog a while ago...but it's time to get those ol' brain wheels a turnin' again and pretend that I have things to write that interesting enough to hold your attention ;)

I finished out the mountain bike season with a blaze of glory... well, actually not at all. I crashed a few times in my last race, rendered my legs, hip, and elbow into bloody pulp, broke my chain, and sprinted across the finish line pushing my dilapidated steed. So that's all done...

Classes start up at Ripon next week, so I'm trying to get myself geared up for that. I'm feeling rather indifferent at this point...school could start, or it could wait a while...whatevs. I'm excited to get back and to see my buddies, though. We've quite a bit to get caught up on! This coming semester I will be enrolled in:

• Biochemistry
• Physical Chemistry: Thermodynamics
• Advanced Laboratory
  
• Organometallics Seminar
• Chemistry Senior Seminar (for which I must write my chemistry thesis on research I've done)
• Glassblowing
• Introductory Anthropology (the token gen ed that I missed somewhere along the road)

Course-wise, it's going to be a brutal semester. Any one of those chemistry classes would be a challenge on its own, but I haven't made my college experience easy to this point, so why start now. I've applied for grad school in chemistry at a bunch of different universities, and will hopefully be finding out within the next few months who wants me. Here's the list, ranked by interest:

• University of California San Diego
• UC Irvine
• University of Southern California
• University of Washington Seattle
• UC Santa Cruz
  
• University of Oregon

I'm really trying to spread my wings and get out of the Midwest for a little bit...it's my time! I've actually already been accepted to Oregon...but as you can see, it's the bottom of my list, so I'm hoping to get into some of the others as well...and then difficult decisions will be ahead of me!

As I am writing this, I am sitting in the kitchen of my brother's house in Los Alamitos, California, a town in the greater LA metropolitan sprawl. I've been here the past week, and will be going home on Saturday. I've had a great time with the family, chilling with the nephews, and playing with their 3 month-old boxer puppy, Ginger. But that's a blog post for another day!

Adieu,
-Jon