Sorry for not posting anything for the last three weeks, but I was in a funk during my vacation, and for the past week I've been hastily writing the lab reports I should have written during the vacation but didn't due to said funk. It wasn't a bad vacation by any means, I'm just a little on edge for reasons I will explain in a bit. But first, a little bit about my vacation:

As a vacation, it was pretty good. First of all, my dad and I picked my mom and sister up from the airport on the 8th. They had a safe trip, and on the way were able to spend a week with an old friend of ours in Cambridge. My mom was also very nice and inquired about my lost luggage at Heathrow (thanks Mom!). They weren't able to find it, but she was able to give the staff there more details about my bag and a copy of one of the stickers on it, so hopefully they'll be able to locate it soon. I could just ask BA to compensate me for the value of the luggage at this point, but then I'd have to repurchase everything I had taken with me (assuming I can still find some of that stuff), which would be a huge hassle. Besides, my RainFurrest T-shirt was in there! I gotta get that back! :P

Aside from that, I didn't do much else besides play Half-Life 2 and Portal. Not very productive, but quite fun! Oh, and I got a little gift from one of my cousins:


And now on to the reason why I've been on edge for the last three weeks.

As I mentioned before, last summer I signed up for the Aramco sponsorship program. If accepted, I'll be hired, given a salary, and assigned to a department within the company which I'd start working in as soon as I graduate. Crucially, I was told that they're going to tell me whether they've accepted me or not this October or November, so I've been watching my e-mail inbox like a hawk. I'm fairly confident that they'll accept me, since my grades are quite good, but still, the uncertainty's killing me! This is a huge deal for me. I mean, my educational career has basically been one big build-up towards becoming an engineer, and the outcome of this is going to determine where I'll be and what I'll be doing for the next few years.

I don't know, maybe I'm worrying too much about this, but on the other hand, I'm really excited about it as well. Just a few short years earlier I wondered how I could ever mature in time to branch out on my own and enter the workforce, but I feel I'm ready now, and I can't wait to get out in the real world, start my career, and start "the rest of my life", as it were. I just hope they reply soon!

OK, so I'm trying to early register online for courses in the upcoming fall semester, but I'm hitting a few snags.

One of the courses I plan to take is CHE 306, a core course and one that is a prerequisite for basically every 400-level course in the curriculum. For some reason, an important class like this only has ONE SECTION SCHEDULED. At least it's open, however, so it's not all bad. The bad part comes in when I tried to add more classes. CHEM 311 (another required course that is a prerequisite for a lot of later courses) only has two sections. One of them was already closed when I started registering, and the other is at the same time as CHE 306. Once again, bad, but not too bad, because there's another chemistry course on the curriculum, CHEM 323. The lone lecture section is open, and it's even at a convenient time for me! The downside? All the lab sections are full, and you can't take the lecture without the lab. I tried signing up for the lab's waitlist, but the system just gave me an error that now I can't sign up for the lecture section because "Term Not in Adv Reg". Apparently, Grok the Caveman doesn't want me to enroll in the course.

So at the end of it all, I was only able to register 10 hours worth of courses, even though the minimum is 12 hours, and I'd ideally like to take 16 or more. There's another course worth 2 hours that I'm going to register for later (the only reason I can't do it now is because its schedule has changed, and the registrar's website hasn't been updated yet), but that would still leave me at the bare minimum number of classes for next semester. Hopefully I can sort out the "Term Not in Adv Reg" problem with the chemistry courses and maybe see if I can take Tae Kwon Do again, as that would bring the total number of hours up to 16.

Anyways, I hope I didn't bore you all to sleep with this little rant of mine.