I finished up exams this past Friday, but I had to stick around to finish up a project. But man, on my propulsion test on Friday, my calculator nearly died on me. I was soooo scared, haha. You know how graphing calculators always pop up that low battery warning on you? Well, from past experience, that message has always been kinda like the boy who cried wolf: you've heard it so many times without it coming true that you just stop believing it. Well, during my test, the calculator worked okay for the first hour or so, then it auto-shut off, and I didn't think anything of it at the time, cuz that's just what it does, right? Well then when I needed it again, I hit the on button and it wouldn't turn on! I must have pressed the on button like 50 times. I felt like a soldier pounding on the chest of a fallen comrade- Nooo, don't die on me now! Hang in there, don't leave me, I need you! I made a promise to my calculator then and there that if it would just stick with me till end of the test, I'd change its batteries first thing after the test. I sat there looking at the blank screen for 30 fear-filled seconds before it slowly crept back to life. *whew* It lasted till the end and has new batteries now, haha. What a trooper, heh.

The project however, was a disaster. It was originally due on Friday afternoon, but I got an extension on it till Monday morning. And as expected, I didn't work on it till Sunday, hahaha. Bad idea though. I pulled an all-nighter and still didn't finish. It was modeling how satellite orbits are affected by the moon's gravity. (It's a lot more complicated than it sounds; the equations of motion can't be solved in closed form.) Well, I couldn't get the dang thing to work- I spent 10 hours alone trying to debug it, with no success. According to my MATLAB results, the effect of the moon is to cause earth-orbiting satellites to warp into another dimension, hahaha (if that's the physical interpretation of imaginary xy-coordinates). I ended up turning in a write-up for a miserable failure of a project, but I was so sleep deprived that I didn't care. Whatever. If nothing else, this 1-hour course single-handedly made me decide that I don't wanna pursue the space option of the aerospace degree anymore. Looks like I'm sticking with planes from here on out. =/