Classes start soon.  Every time I think about it, I get a feeling of dread.  Not like something bad is going to happen, just like I am not ready for it.  My classes are stressful.  I feel like there is so much information and I cannot absorb it in time.  In one of my classes, I have two projects and three tests.  Each are worth 20% of the grade.  In another, I have to have an average of 75% on my tests before anything else is factored in.

The thing that worries me the most is finding my own patients and the competencies.  It's a lot to ask of someone to take time off of work, spend 4 hours, and then pay for it.  I have to find someone three times a week.  I know when I get into the thick of things, I will be fine.  It's just the waiting that is weighing me down.

I feel like I know nothing and am not ready to see patients.

Iowa Blues

No, I am not sick of Iowa.  What this post is about is our 25 new Iowa Blue Chickens that arrived by mail today.  The place we got them from originally didn't have any available at the moment.  We got a call Monday saying that the place did have some available but we had to call by Tuesday noon.  We called Tuesday morning, they were shipped Wednesday and they arrived today (Thursday).  They were shipped from Texas.  What also makes this interesting is that they all arrived alive which isn't necessarily the norm.  We got a call around 7:10 am to come pick them up from the post office.  When we got there we noticed a sign saying that they didn't open until 8:30.  We knocked on the door to their backroom anyway and were quickly answered.  It might have been because the postal workers didn't want to listen to their shrill cheeping for another hour.  Anyway, they are home now and hopefully they will continue to survive.

Chicken Woes

So for those who didn't know, my family got some chickens over a month a go.  At first we didn't have a pen for them and one of the chickens escaped and got eaten.  One other got smothered in her sleep by a bigger chicken.  So we built them a pen.  We let them out all day.  Everything was fine. For about a week.  Then a cat got in and ate four of them.  So again we started only letting them out when we were watching.  Yesterday, Dad spent all day enlarging the pen and electrifying the top so when cats would climb, them would get zapped.  We get home from church and there is a cat in the pen over the body of a dead chicken.  Back to the drawing board.  We can't put a top on top of the cage unfortunately...

Boring

The problem with blogs is that you have to have something to blog about. I have nothing. I lead a very boring life. I planted some flowers today. We'll see if any actually come up. Happy Easter

Is Anyone Out There?

I haven't posted in years. Literally years. I had forgotten my password and had to get a new one. A lot has happened. I graduated high school, got an AA from NCC, and in the fall will start attending NWICC. I am still a gymnastics coach but now I coach team. My specialty is bars. Our first meet of the season will be in 2 weeks. Sound the dramatic music now. I have decided to keep this post short.

White Out

So this winter is we are getting a lot of snow! It's the powdery snow that when the Iowa winds blow creates a white out. We started the 2nd semester on Monday. On Monday, we got out at 11:30 because of the blizzard conditions. When we got out of school it was perfect. A couple of hours later... On Tuesday we had a late start because the Monday winds had blown the snow over the road. Tuesday night it snowed so on Wednesday we had another late start. Today (Thursday) we are not supposed to get above 0. It's supposed to be -20 w/o windchill. Brr! That's cold! So today will be our first full day of the semester.

My new schedule...

Study Hall

American Literature II

Home Room

Physics

Calculus

American Government

Open Campus

College Prep English

Novels and Films

In novels and Films, the first book we are reading is of Mice and Men which we read our sophomore year. Our second book will be the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, again, a book we read our sophomore year. After that, we will be reading 2 other books that I haven't read. Our teacher for Government is crazy (and not the good crazy).

Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective

Since I haven't posted in a very long time, I thought that maybe I should post something humours. My Physics teacher gave us this... (that is who you should thank/blame)

WARNING: If you believe that Santa exists, do not read farther!

There are approximately 1.74 billion children (15 years of age and younger) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to about 38% of the total, or 660 million.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 3000 visits/second, assuming two children per home. This is to say that for each Christmas household with a good child, Santa has about 1/3000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh, and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 330 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.8 mile between homes; a 11,830 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 mi/s, and a conventional reindeer can run 15 mi/h.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child receives two pounds worth of gifts, the sleigh is carring over 660,000 tons. On land, a reindeer could pull as much as 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job cannot be done with eight or even nine of them - Santa would need 440,000 of them! The entire load, including the reindeer, weigh 726,000 tons or roughly sixteen times the weight of the Titanic!

In addition, 726,000 tons traveling at 2370 mi/s creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 186 quintillion J/s each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 3 ten-thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the second house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 4740 mi/s in 0.00017 second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 4.6 billion g's. A 250 pound Santa would be pined to the back of the sleigh by 1.14 trillion pounds of force (that is, if the sleigh had sufficient structural integrity to withstand the acceleration - which is ludicrous!), instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing hm to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.