SNOW

The weather here in Utah is officially the PMS outlet for Mother Nature.  The altitude and latitude we are at allows us to experience all four seasons in their fullness, albeit with a little bit of a twist.  In the spring we have snow and snow and snow, gradually getting warmer, and then BAM, its summer and nice and hot.  Thrown in between are days of wet and marshy grounds and rain and lots of wind that alternate with very hot and dry days and cold and snowy days.  Once summer officially arrives, its hot, hot and hotter (although not humid) till the end of August.  It will begin to cool down in September, with a smattering of very hot and very cold days, although it stays pretty warm.  Then, one day it will decide in October that it really wants to be fall and it gets cold and sometimes snowy.  Come November, the fall/winter weather will fight it out for a few weeks and then it will snow a foot overnight and be winter.  Welcome to Utah...

I love it here, though.  I like being able to experience all of the seasons, but winter is my favorite!  Waking up to 6 in of snow this morning was awesome!  That means that it is time to pull out my skinny jeans and boots and sweaters.  I hear a lot of people complain about the cold, and I hear a lot of people who come to Utah specifically for the world famous snow and all the winter activities.  Personally, I love so much about Winter.  I love the holiday season and the excitement that carries you month to month.  But the best thing really is the snow.  I don't know particularly what about it I love so much, but I can try to explain.

Back in high school, I would get up at 5:30 every morning for swim practice.  In the winter when I would leave, there would be no one else up or around.  The streets were never plowed yet (which was sometimes a pain to drive in) and all was quiet.  At that early hour, the sky was still dark and splattered with stars and light from the moon would glow off the new snow.  Silence was thick and absent in the cold stillness, absorbed by the snowfall that blanketed the earth.  Something about all of that was, and still is, absolutely mesmerizing.

Halloween

My family hates Halloween.  There is there is not anything intrinsically negative about Fall, or some of the activities associated with Halloween.  There is the matter of all things "Scary" that becomes a problem, however.   I have a terribly active imagination and it is quite capable of terrifying me witless without any help.  Because of this, I (and my family) tend to shun the majority of "Halloween" things like the plague.  My sister and I have an inside joke that starting October 1st, we become social hermits for the month.  It is the only way to avoid all of the scary movies, haunted houses and other detestables.  I find that many people give me a hard time for this.  What good does teasing me that I don't like scary things going to do than to annoy me?  Its not going to make me change my mind, or give into peer pressure.

I do find that people mistake me and assume that I hate everything associated with Fall/Halloween.  This is completely absurd!  I LOVE to carve pumpkins, and am actually really good at it if I do say so myself.  I also love to dress up, and usually go all out as this is the one time that I can get away with doing crazy and borderline inappropriate things.  I love the crispness in the air, the distinctive slant of the sun and the beautiful colors of the changing leaves.  I'm also one of those people who go out of their way when walking to make sure that I step on every leaf to hear the satisfying crunch! 

Back to the aversion to scary things, but there is one interesting catch:  I love to read horror novels.  Now, I'm not a huge Stephen King fan, and I don't like gore, but I am a HUGE fan of all sorts of supernatural things.  With that genre, the stories generally tend to fall into the horror category, but I love them anyway.  So I guess that makes me a bit of a contradiction.  Its not like that is anything new.  I'm a blond physics major who is also a hard core athlete.....tell me something I don't know.

The Waiting Game

So, life can be more than a little crazy at times.  The worst part is knowing and having to accept at times, that things are out of your hands.  Partially, to have gotten to this point is definitely a good thing.  But the waiting kills me.....as I learn patience. 

I had my interview for the Co-Op at NASA Johnson Space Center today.  I turned in my application over six months ago, at this point.  I didn't think there was realistically a chance that I still had a shot.  When I got the email for an interview last weekend, I was literally crazed with happiness.  Then the worry set in.  I was worried that I might say something stupid, or not say what I meant.  I was nervous that I would not present myself well.  And the old worried returned with a vengeance.  If I didn't get this position, what would I do with my life?  Would that change what I do with my majors?  Is this program even what I want to do with my life?

By the time last night rolled around and into this morning I had managed to work myself into a nervous and nauseated mess.  I have this incredible talent of literally making myself physically ill with worry and was putting it to use with a vengeance.  I had myself convinced that I was never going to get this position, and that it would save myself the disappointment if I just told the director that I was not interested anymore.  I have never been a fan of big changes, and this one would definitely alter my life forever.  It would just be easier to run from it than suffer the pain and humiliation of rejection. 

Thankfully, I did nothing of the sort.  Shortly after finding a nice empty room at the institute, my phone rang with a call from the director of the co-op program.  The next half hour was......interesting.  I felt that as I picked up the phone, my heart calmed down.  I was still nervous, but paralyzed by fear.  It was not necessarily easy to talk to the interviewer, but I found that I was able to answer the questions in a calm and thoughtful manner.  She was polite and intrigued, and I think I presented my case for the position well.  BUT (because there is always that new wave of doubt) she did imply that it would be difficult to place me.  The majority of people that are hired for the program are engineers.  I, however, (and somewhat obviously) am not an engineer.  This would severely limit their ability to place me within the program, as I do not have the educational background or future in that aspect of their system.  But in the program they do talk about how other majors are encouraged to apply, as it takes more than engineers to make NASA run.

Overall, I think it went very positively.  There are always those small doubts and regrets of what I should have/could have said instead, but that is always the case.  I choose to be positive.  I choose to think that NASA would be lucky to have me.  But in the end, this life altering decision is no longer in my hands.  Its all down to waiting 2 weeks to hear anything back.