Graduation is in 28 days.

This was a fun week. I haven't posted in about 4 weeks. After my last post the senior design project kicked into high gear. I was getting to the computer lab at 8 AM and not leaving except for lunch and dinner until 9 PM every day, even on the weekend. Things got so bad that one of my teammates started having nightmares about the project on a nightly basis. My team finally got it done though. We turned in our report at 9:00 AM on Tuesday 11/17, 7 hours before the submission deadline. We were the 2nd team to deliver the project and our report was a very reasonable 257 pages long. Most of the other seniors had a test on Wednesday night to cram for, but after that about a third of the seniors in the department went out to a bar together and decided to get royally trashed (myself included). Thursday, admittedly, was partially spent recovering from Wednesday. I woke up for the first time asking myself, "why does my head hurt?" Haha.

But it's done. At this point I have very little left between me and graduating on December 19th. I was so thrilled to check my degree evaluation and have it say, under "Total Requirements Met," Yes. As long as I get a "C" or better on everything this semester I will walk. My classes are mostly wrapping up. The grades look good though and I should make my goal of graduating with high honors.

Unfortunately, spending the 13 hours a day in lab working on the project and going to class and doing work for my job, etc hasn't left time for coins. I suppose this has been for the best. I haven't been able to work much so my income took a hit. I couldn't really buy anything even if I had time to look. It has also meant that I just haven't had time to read the other journals and that has been frustrating. I feel like I've been "out of the loop." I also don't know if I have the energy or the endurance to go back and look through the back-log of what I missed. I can just say that I hope everyone else has been scooping up those killer deals I haven't been able to look for.

I returned to the site to find a rather ominous timer. It's cool looking, don't get me wrong, but it's just no fun to be reminded that the deadline is less than 20 days away and I haven't been able to tweek and improve my sets in quite a while. I look at some of the holes in my signature set and know that I have the coins to fill them, but the coins are raw and I haven't been able to get them submitted. There are so many things I would have liked to have done, but practical concerns have won the day. Looking forward, I need to do one more minor project and get cracking on Grad school applications, not writing coin descriptons, though one is decidedly more fun than the other.

I did add a 1991 MS69 kookaburra to my collection a couple of weeks ago, at least. I think this happened after my last post anyway. It's hard to remember really. I ordered it just before the project got really crazy and it arrived during the peak of things. I think it speaks for how crazy things were that, where I normally rush to entire new cert #s, I didn't get around to entering a 10-digit number into a dialog box until 4 days after it arrived. I also just realized today that I never left eBay feedback for the purchase, and it's been nearly a month. The seller must have wondered what the heck happened.

This has definitely been a case of coins (and fun) being crowded out by life.

Maybe I'll get lucky and get some monetary gifts for graduation. Maybe then I'll be able to get away with buying something nice to mark the event; maybe I'll send in some of the coins I need to get graded; or maybe I'll have to start making rent and loan payments.

-Proudest member of the fighting Texas Aggie class of 2009! Whoop!