Ego-less training

I've been noticing, in the last couple of weeks since my promotion to second degree, a problem begining to arise in my training.

It's very apparent to me, especially when I teach. My ego is starting to rear its head in the back of my head and that's not good.

Now I don't consider myself to be necessarily full of myself, but a small voice has been sounding in my mind saying "Well I'm a second degree now, so I know everything!"

I need to get a grasp on that.

My rational mind knows it's not true, but there is still that part of me that secretly wants to sit on a special chair and wear a big hat.

Even though I didn't morph into a magical martial arts goddess when I put my stripes on, I'm finding it hard to come back down to humble reality. That's part of the pitfalls of promotion I guess...becoming too big for your uniform.

I still have a lot to learn. A LOT to learn and I need to keep that in mind.

Ego-less training is important, otherwise you miss opportunities to learn and I don't want that to happen.

Guess I need to take a second and eat some humble pie....time enough later for the special chair and big hat!

Have five minutes...

So I have a spare five minutes to blog...

It's been a crazy busy couple of weeks (is it ever not so?). Right now I'm waiting on some samples in an oven. We ground up some rock, added some sodium peroxide and set the samples to bake. Kinda cool.....

Another girl and I are training how to digest our samples for microprobe analysis. By dissolving the rock in acid and sending it through the microprobe, you can get information on the specific chemical make up of the rock and trace chemical changes through time. This is useful when your trying to figure out the paleoclimate/paleogeography/sea level etc. of your study area.

Down side:

Takes at least 5 hours to prepare 11 samples....sucky!

Oh well....back to the grindstone (pardon the pun:)

Not the best start...

So, the new year has started and, although not in the UBBT again this year, I made a list of fitness goals on PHYSOUT for myself. I have to say though, that I am not doing as well on them as I did last year. In a way, I'm glad because that means I've made them more challenging, but the fact remains I need to get my butt in gear.

So I was all stoked to play catch up and pushed myself on Tues and injured myself. I hurt my back doing knuckle pushups so I had to take yesterday off working out and have been hobbling around the house ever since. Pretty pathetic!

This year is not starting out how I had planned! Bah!

It's hard when I know I'm falling farther and farther behind on my goals, but I know if I push too hard, it will set me back farther. Ah patience and progressing wisely....it's a fine line that's for sure!

Grad school is sssssooooo fun! I get to sit all day in my own office (that I share with two other guys, but still total awesomeness) and read about the coolest stuff! Right now I'm reading a paper on the Permian-Triassic (about 251 million years ago) mass extinction during which they think over 90% of all Earth's species went extinct. I suggest you google it if you haven't heard of it...pretty amazing. The formation I'm going to be working on is from this time period.

Ok so some of you (probably most) don't find that to be fantastically interesting but still....

I'm really enjoying it so far.

So ya, ups and downs...that's how life goes I guess eh?