Chicago

Well for those of you who don't know I've been living in the Chicago land area for almost a month now. Kind of hard to believe I've been here that long already. Which at the same time means I'm almost half way through with the time that I'm here for.

I'm living in Westmont, IL which is a suburb of Chicago. It's pretty small compared to some of the surrounding areas. It's about 10 minutes from Naperville and probably 15 to 20 from Aurora. It's a nice little area that would be a good place to live when you have a family and such.

The internship is going pretty well. The first two weeks I was enrolled in some of the classes from the College of Microscopy here. The first class was Fiber Identification. Was a pretty in depth class on all the ways to identify different types of fibers and how they are made and all that fun stuff. I'm definitely no good at identifying them though. We did unknowns and I got just about all of them wrong. I think I just don't know exactly what to look for yet. The second class I took was the Hair Comparison course. This class was awesome! The people were a lot of fun to interact with and I learned a ton. I was better at identifying some things in this course than I was in fiber. Now I've begun actually working on my "project" for the summer. They've put me on the JEOL NeoScope, which is a bench top scanning electron microscope (SEM). I have to say it's a pretty impressive instrument and extremely easy to learn how to use. I've taken some cool pictures with it. If you have checked out my Facebook album "SEM Pictures" you should. Even if you don't know what you're looking at, they tend to be pretty cool.

Taking an online class right now as well, but hard to believe in about 12 days that's over as well. It's been pretty easy. Computer science. It has been slightly interesting, but at the same time I don't get why I need to convert decimal numbers into binary, hexidecimal, and octal numbers when the computer does all that anyways now. Although I was pretty excited about writing a program the other day and getting 100% on it without any of the hints.

Now to the fun parts! I've been visiting downtown Chicago about every weekend since I've been here. So amazing and I wished I lived right down there instead of in the suburbs. If I ever decide to move to Chicago, I'll definitely want to be living in that area. It's been so much fun exploring the city. I feel I'm finally beginning to understand public transportation and I have to say...I love it! There's even a system called the Metra that takes me from Westmont all the way into downtown for about 4 bucks! Then when I'm down there I just take the 'L' or the buses anywhere in the city I want to go.

I've been along Lake Shore Drive, near Navy Pier, Wrigley Field, Millennium Park, the art museum and so many other places I can't even begin to talk about them all. This city is just so awesome.

That's about all I've got for now. Hopefully I'll start writing into this more often again. I always seem to fall behind by about 4 or 5 months.

Quote of the Day
"You can't always get what you want/but if you try sometimes/you just might find/you get what you need!" --Rolling Stones