Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Month of May Recap

May was a surprisingly busy month for me despite the semester finishing up. I still had a lot of research to work on, and it's always interesting getting into a new schedule.

The first week of May I had finals, which ended up going quite well. I had two classes: Design and Analysis of Robotic Manipulators and Regression Analysis (statistics class). I thought that both of them were pretty hard, and wasn't entirely sure how they were going to turn out, but everything ended well. :)

The weekend of May 16th started with one of my very good friends, Helen, graduating with her PhD! Here we are getting lunch at the Farmer's Market before her final defense.


Of course after she had defended (and passed!), we had to go out and celebrate. It was a lot of fun--also the first time I have ever had Fireball! :-o


Saturday morning, she walked in the graduation ceremony, and then had a cookout for lunch. It was delicious and nice to see everyone. It was also rather sad because she lives in Michigan, and now that she is done with her PhD, she doesn't have any official reasons to come back to Indiana. Hopefully she'll keep coming back just to visit. :) I left from the cookout to go to a cabin at Starved Rock with two of my roommates from college. Here is a picture with them from my wedding!


We had a really good time making a fire, cooking brats over said fire, making s'mores (with Reese's! If you haven't done this, you should try it), and just in general catching up with each other. On Sunday we went hiking at Starved Rock State Park which was beautiful! We ended up walking around 7 miles, so it was a fun and healthy trip. :)

The following Wednesday, May 20, my mom called and told me that her and my dad were going to drive to Atlanta to see my sister and family the next day. She asked if D and I wanted to come--I initially said no because that seemed crazy to just go on a whim, but then we decided that we should go since we didn't have any reason not to. :) We rode down with my parents (four people in a car is a little much for 10 hours ha) on Thursday morning, and stayed until Sunday morning. I love visiting my two crazy nieces--they are growing so fast that every time I see them they are basically different people!


Isabella, the blonde one on the left in the picture, is 6, and Emily is 4. Whenever we visit, we try to spend a lot of time with them, and we always do at least one educational activity. This trip, we brought small rockets down, and they were able to put them together, decorate them (probably their favorite part ha), and then we took them to the local baseball field to shoot them off. They were pretty neat, going about 500 feet in the air! The girls seemed to really like them. My sister and the family are moving to Las Vegas soon--she used to live there and work as a blackjack dealer at Hard Rock Casino. While they are moving, my parents are going to watch the girls, so hopefully I'll get to see them quite a bit in the next month or so. :)

The last weekend in May we didn't do much, mostly just tried to catch up on research. I did get to do some good workouts with my friend Beth which brings me to my summary of my running in May. I set a goal for myself to run 60 miles this month--I wasn't sure if I would be able to do it, but I did! Highlight workouts were: a pub run with the local triathlon store (running + beer will always be a winner in my book!), running with D in Atlanta (I thought I might not make it due to the heat, humidity, and hills), a brick with Beth (30 minutes bike, 30 minutes run), and a long run with Beth the following day (8.15 miles--more than I have done since my half marathon back in November!). I ended up at 61.89 miles, so I barely accomplished my goal! :)


That's it for my recap of the month of May. Sorry I have been off the blogging radar for awhile--I am going to try to keep up with it much better. I do still read all of your blogs everyday though. :)