Back from Vacation

We're back in New Orleans from our various vacations. We both apologize for the relative silence. But fear not; tomorrow will feature some awesome animal-based blogging.

Classes start up again for the University on Monday. Nora still has classes to take; she will probably post her schedule at some point. I am fully done with classes, and my teaching doesn't start up until a few weeks into the semester. So I just have research fo a couple of weeks. I passed my qualifying exams; I was formally notified the day before we left (which was apparently a bit slow). I'm told that I passed them quite handily, which I'm glad to hear. It's a huge relief to be done with them. They are enormously (surprisingly so) time-consuming to prepare for, so it's good to have that extra time again. And they are the big hurdle at which most physics students drop out of grad school. So it's good to be past that finally. On to research!

I will be presenting a poster at the American Chemical Society meeting in March in San Francisco, which is exciting. We are presenting a bit of work I did over the summer and the fall in between studying, and am continuing between now and the meeting. My time between now and the meeting is likley to be taken up finishing some experiments and assemblying the poster.