Today was another day where I woke up exhausted. I am really over this jet lag. It’s not even like I am getting bad sleep, I am just not feeling rested despite a decent amount of sleep. Once again, I had to get up and start my day my anyway. I guess I have been getting too used to sleeping in.
One shower and coffee later, I was feeling a lot more awake. I had about an hour before class which I used to do some last minute studying for French. I was pretty feeling very prepared for my exam by the time I left. In the mood to listen to my audio book, I turned on The Shining before heading out. I think listening to it while commuting will become a new routine for me.
I got to class a few minutes early and made a few last glances at my notes. Our professor soon handed out the exams. It was about four pages long, but I didn’t see anything too surprising when skimming through it initially. I did all the fill-in-the-blanks and easy questions first, and saved the writing portions for later. Despite my speaking skills being a lot better than my writing, I still knew almost everything for the exam. The first writing portion asked us to use future tense and write about what we will do this weekend.
Feeling particularly confident, I tried to make mine funny, as well as correct. I wrote about how I planned to sleep a lot and go the bars with my friends. I predicted that I will rest on Sunday morning because I will drink too much on Saturday night. Who knows if this will come true.
The second writing portion was supposed to a letter we were writing to a friend about life in Grenoble and things we liked. I started it off basically and talked about the weather and what not. In an effort to do some brown-nosing, I wrote about how university was great and how good my French professor was. In French I wrote, “Sometimes I make mistakes when spelling French words, but my professor always gives me good grades because she is nice”. I really hope this statement becomes true because I definitely forgot an accent or two on some letters.
I handed in my exam feeling very good about it. Now that French was over. I know had two less classes every week. After my last circuits lab today, there would be even less class.
Before circuits, I went to the cafeteria with Nick and Harry. Katie ended up joining us as well. Too lazy to make a sandwich this morning, I brought one of my pre-made salads for lunch today. After a nice break, we headed to circuits.
A nice view from campus today. Every tree somehow turned green while I was away from France.
I had a bad feeling lab would be long again today. This was actually less of a feeling and more of a known fact. All of my circuits labs had lasted at least five hours. At least this was the last one.
Vesko and I started the lab with great confidence, thinking to ourselves, “This will be the one we finish on time for once!”. We spent a really long time setting up our first circuit. It was a basic series circuit with a resistor, inductor and capacitor. It became tricker when we had to connect a multiplier which was another powered circuit that calculated the power used. We had to connect the oscilloscope’s two channels to the multiplier and circuit as well. Vesko and I were extremely certain that we connected the circuit correctly. We had check over every wire to make sure it matched the drawing perfectly. Still, it was not giving a reading.
After some discussion with other groups, we found that our setup was identical. Jonathan’s group was having a similar problem as well. We finally asked the professor and he told us our drawing was correct, but we needed to flip the AC generator. This must have been the problem. After flipping the generator and checking all the wires, we got a reading, but it did not look right. We were dumbfounded. What could be wrong? We spent another twenty minutes double-checking everything. Eventually we gave up and called the professor over again. It turns out we never plugged in the multiplier. That is how we managed to waste an hour and a half of the lab. And I wonder why these labs take so long.
The rest of lab was less of a mess, but we had to do some more tedious graphing. By the time we had collected all of our data for the lab, it was just past the five hour mark. We usually have to hand in the report at the end of lab, but our professor said we could hand it in next Monday. Rather than stay to 7:00, Vesko and I opted to finish the rest later. It was just some calculations. Plus, we both agreed it was impossible to think straight in this lab room.
I headed home and had a bit of time before dinner. Feeling pretty exhausted, I listened to The Shining for half an hour before dinner. I was getting really tired and was battling sleep. The dinner bell rang eventually and I headed downstairs.
Jessica had returned, plus Jerome and his wife would be eating with us. I appreciated the new company, but other guests usually means less French practice for me. A-M and Andre usually slow their French down when talking to Jessica and I. They don’t really do this when guests are over understandably, so I didn’t say much during dinner. The appetizer was something that I’m pretty sure was rhubarb. The main course was sausage with potatoes. This was finished with bread and cheese.
Jerome and his wife left a bit early, which meant I had more opportunities to talk. We talked about the strikes in France and hiking for some reason. I was feeling tired and didn’t stay too long after dinner.
Wanting an early night, I really just spent the rest of this night on this blog. I also did a little research to try and find some scholarly articles for my paper.
Around 10:30, I called it a night. I really didn’t want to wake up tired again tomorrow.
Foreign Tourist with No Grasp of the Local Language 
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