Happiness, Day 5

Today's Gratitudes:

• My hydrofracking professor. I'm so lucky that I have another kind, intelligent, helpful man on my thesis committee. I met with him about my thesis today and he had so many brilliant ideas on how I can enhance not only my work, but also myself. He told me that the way to becoming marketable is to learn as much software as I possibly can, as that knowledge will help me to have the advantage over other applicants. He said I'm well on my way to doing that from taking his CMG short class. Also, turns out he has his own contact at Itasca (!) who told him that his students can complete training for the fracture software for free!! So even if I don't get my mentorship with them, I can still learn that software for free! And even if that somehow fell through, he has recommended additional software that would be good for me to use for my project. Also, he told me that he was impressed with my thesis title and idea. I'm so glad to have him on my team, I always seem to leave his office in a great mood.
• Geothermal team meetings. Today we had our first team meeting in awhile, due to all the traveling to conferences that everyone had been doing. It's really awesome to see what everyone else is researching, and what ideas everyone else has for each other. I think it's a great way to learn new things about our field.
• Today the scale at the gym had been fixed and re-calibrated. I told them about it yesterday because it told me that I weighed 152 lb, and I knew there was no way I could have gained 15 lb in one week. But they fixed it, and it said I weigh 137 lb. Sweet! Getting closer and closer to my goal. 26 lb down, 12 lb to go.

Today's kindness:
I had asked my officemate if she could drive me to pick up my computer, and she said she could take me. But then she cancelled on me at the last minute and I had trouble finding someone else to take me. I decided to be nice and forgive her for that.

Turns out, they hadn't even fixed my problem >_< So it's still in the shop anyway.

Today's reflection:
I really enjoyed talking to my hydrofracking professor. I have a lot of hard work ahead of me. I work hard, but I'm going to have to work even harder. These are the things I need to do:

• Spend time learning as much software as I can during my time here. Try to figure out which software would be best for my thesis work.
• Do a background reading on what has already been done so far on sedimentary enhanced geothermal systems, and find out the successes and failures.
• Research the three basins I want to study to make sure there is enough data for me to use those.
• Do enough of the above in the next few weeks, so I can finish my project proposal, schedule the preliminary thesis committee meeting, and schedule my thesis proposal talk.

Anyway, he's the second person to tell me that he was impressed with my project (my thesis advisor had been the first). It's really nice to be told that I'm doing a good job and that my project is interesting and important to people who are smarter than I am.

As for meditation, I just... agh. I'm just not good at it. Maybe I'll get better at it if I keep trying, and then I'll be able to better focus on everything instead of getting lost in my own thoughts all the time.