A trip to Virginia Tech and a little bit of a set back

I haven't been able to post for I believe another week as I have had possibly the busiest week of my life. I have never had so much work in my life, talk about frustrating. I did get some good things out of it though. I am reading a good book, Song of Solomon, which I really enjoy, and starting a really good diet, which I will put a link to right after I post this, got back to lifting weights, which feels good, and I got to lift weights. Sadly, I got a little behind in my Japanese but I believe I still will be done by New Years and I hope by saying that I won't get lazy and slack off. Looking at if I finish off my work for tonight, I will have done 981 kanji, and will have 1061 left, just about halfway there, which really feels good. I have done about 400 in about 3 weeks or so, maybe it was 2 weeks I am not sure, but I want to just get it done and start with the fun stuff. As with Portuguese, I am going to ask for some books and a monolingual dictionary for xmas(I feel like I put that in my last post) and that will help me with reading, and as for speaking? I am not sure what I can buy for that that is cheap, I think just talking with native speakers is enough.

But on to the Virginia Tech Trip. It was a 2 and a half hour trip that I spent mostly sleeping through down and back(off and on, my knees were killing me). When we got off, we walked a little ways and went into a little room where we were offered a bunch of donuts and water, and then went into an auditorium. There my peers presented their research on Arabidopsis thaliana, and I was going to present mine as well but my partner woke up late and missed the bus. When our turn was up, the teacher told us to come up anyway, and we had no powerpoint, paper, data, graphs, nothing. So we just spoke for about 3 minutes just from memory, and we somehow pulled through roughly. I can't remember the exact order of everything else we did, but we also got a chance to see other Tech seniors' research on Arabidopsis genes using a bunch of methods and stuff, and I barely remember the terminology they used. If I was to describe Virginia Tech, I would say that it has a LOT of good people, and good technology, but it was kind of ugly, and it was in the middle of nowhere. Plus, of course, we can only be so close because they beat UVA in football right??