Laser Guns-Day 70-March 20th, 2018

I woke up this morning around 9:30, but didn’t get out of bed until 10:00. I don’t have many early classes this semester and will definitely miss the extra sleep I get here. I finally got out of bed, ready to seize the day. By the seize the day, I mean eat breakfast and work on my prelab for physics. I like to be as prepared as possible for lab, partly to make my life easier and partly so that my lab partner thinks I am smart. Greg is really good at physics and I want to seem like I know my stuff.

I’m going to take a quick tangent for a moment to talk about something I randomly remembered about the name Greg. One time when I was eleven or twelve I went to a family reunion. I don’t know who arranged this thing, but there was a ton of people related to me and everyone had nametags. I thought it would be really funny if I wrote my name was Greg on my nametag. This caused a ton of confusion, but is really funny in hindsight.

Back to my day now.

After finishing physics, I watched an episode of the Sopranos which was really good. A good portion of the episode took place in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and it reminded me of going camping there with my friends. The Sopranos always gives me a good dose of New Jersey since that’s where the show takes place.

I quickly ate a salad for lunch after the episode and headed out to campus. Once I got the lab facility, I learned Greg and I would be working in a very tiny room. The idea of working for four hours inside what was essentially a closet was pretty depressing.

Our Lab Room for Today

For this lab, we were proving the existence of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. This law just says that the heat energy produced by something is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. To test it, we were using a really hot sphere and a thing called a thermopile. For our values, we measured the temperature of the sphere and the corresponding voltage. We would graph all of these and use the data to solve for the Boltzmann constant. Fun stuff!

There was one really cool piece of equipment for this experiment though, the thermometer. This was no ordinary thermometer, it looked like a gun and shined a laser. Whatever the laser was touching, it would tell you the temperature. I took every opportunity to play with thing as much as possible, pointing it at different parts of my body and the room.

The thermometer

Since we both did a lot of the prelab at home, the lab went really quickly. It only took about two and half hours and I got to go home a little earlier. The other highlight of lab today was when Greg asked me if I had a girlfriend and what parties were like in Boston. We also discussed my lack of success with French girls, although he didn’t offer me too much advice.

When I got home, I wanted get some work done but just ended up lying in bed for a bit. What can you really do about that.

I found some motivation and ended up going to the gym. My biggest motivation in life is easily my terrible fear of being late. I always plan out everything in advance time wise to make sure I am not late. The fear of being late to dinner if I didn’t go to the gym on time is really what got me out of bed. Yeah I am a bit much sometimes.

It was a bit colder today, so wearing just shorts to the gym did not seem like a good option. As a result, I bundled up for my walk there. Today was chest day at the gym and a good one. I finished with the usual ab and push up workout.

I returned home disgusting and starving. I quickly showered and desperately waited for Anne-Marie’s dinner bell to go off. In what felt like eons later, the bell rang and I headed downstairs. The appetizer was the usual salad, but with a bunch of new stuff added like hard boiled eggs and tomatoes. I am a big fan of hard boiled eggs in my salad and enjoyed this very much. The main course was chicken in a nice brown sauce with potatoes and mushrooms. Mushrooms have really grown on me during my time in France.

After the bread and cheese course and dessert, I stuck around after dinner with A-M and Jessica as usual to practice my French. I really struggled for some reason tonight, but I guess that makes for good practice. I was trying to talk about some of the museums I’ve been to and the painting I had to write about for class.

This conversation made me realize how many museums I’ve been to this semester and I’m actually somewhat impressed with myself.

Here’s the list so far:

Musée de la Révolution française – Vizille, France

Swedish Army Museum – Stockholm, Sweden

The Louvre – Paris, France

Musée Dauphiniois – Grenoble, France

The British Museum – London, England

Musée des Confluences – Lyon, France

Musée de Grenoble – Grenoble, France

Van Gogh Museum- Amsterdam, Netherlands

I am tempted to include the Guinness Storehouse, it technically was a museum about beer. Hopefully there are plenty more museums in my future while I still am in Europe.

After dinner, I spent some time working on my French homework. I could go through it really quickly, but I always take time to really understand everything since it can only help me more in France. Once I was done with that, I wrote this blog and went to bed.