Wow, so... I'm back in the motherland, South Dakota. The last week or so really flew by, between the studying and the other studying and the slacking off when I should have been studying and all. But now another phase of my life is over. I ate my last dorm food meal ever--ever!--on Friday evening before moving out of the residence halls for good on Saturday. It is probably saying something about dorm food that I don't remember what that meal was... chicken something, I think. Or maybe I just had a salad.

Anyway, today's rambling:

After acing my summer classes, I think I'm officially committed to being an engineer. I had my first suspicions of this when I was trying to explain to a friend why I spent so much time doing homework. I think my answer was something about "taking a bridge apart and finding the tension in each strut, one at a time" followed by how it "isn't complicated, just that there are a lot of numbers to keep track of." Which is basically what my area of study--mechanical engineering--seems to be about; a glorified accounting system for... err... mechanical things. I guess the only trick is in not being intimidated by complicated-looking drawings like this one of a regenerative gas-turbine power cycle from the last day of my Thermodynamics I class.

They tell me that in Thermodynamics II, we basically study the same topics as Thermodynamics I, except instead of talking about energy, enthalpy and entropy we discuss other fun, made-up variables like efficiency, exergy and fugacity. Fugacity! I'm not entirely sure what it means to have fugacity. I suppose the dictionary will tell me it is a measure of one's fugaciousness, which sounds to me like some obscure break-dancing term:
"Man, you see that cat's kicks? They was fugacious!"
"Yeah, yeah, I saw 'em. He had some serious exergy going there, yo. It was isentropic!"
I think I might just start dropping engineering terms into everyday slang conversations. If it works, I will be able to talk about my future profession to people and just sound cool and irreversible instead of nerdy. Dig?

On that note...

Actual quote, uttered while moving a desk that started to tip over: "Damn you, coefficient of static friction! I won't have you inducing a moment about the y-axis!"