Today I had a bunch of free time and decided to actually go to the library and peruse through some interesting stuff. I ended up finding the 1939 entire collection of US News and found some very interesting stuff. I really wish they had these resources available when we learned about the Depression and World War II in high school. I also realized that there's actually a nice view of New Haven when I'm there during daylight:

 Evidently Finland is the only one that paid its debts...

And of course there were plenty of skewed graphs on the economy and also, check out the ad for "Boulder Dam"...now more commonly known as Hoover Dam. 

In the restricted section I spotted some cool looking huge cloth maps on scrolls. I'm gonna have to check it out sometime, but we need a librarian's permission. 

Yesterday was the birthday of one of my suitemates for next year. He is from Milan, Italy so we (everyone in our suite for next year) decided to take him out to Frank Pepe's Pizzeria Napoletana, ranked as the best pizza place in America by CBS news. http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/10/22/new-haven-pizza-named-best-in-america/
We got the white clam pizza for which Pepe's is so famous, and we sang him happy birthday in our best Italian we could speak. It went something like "boppity boopity, bop bop!.. a spaghetti....a ravioli" while sang to the tune of Happy Birthday. He laughed and was embarrassed by us since the entire restaurant became very quiet while we sang in fake-Italian. Then we ate cake! We got him a cake that had an inside joke from earlier in the year about him going back to Italy.

I went to the main library on campus, Sterling Memorial Library, tonight to study, but ended up wasting about 45 minutes perusing through the stacks of collections. I always see something that catches my eye and then I forget to study. There are just rows and rows of very interesting old collections:

Tonight I came across multiple things, including the entire collection of Harper's Weekly, a periodical that ran from 1857-1916 and is most famous for its coverage of the Civil War. The volume below is the edition from January 6th, 1900. It is about the U.S. conquest of the Philippines during the Spanish-AmericanWar. A U.S. history fanatic would have a field day flipping through the various volumes.

 I also came across a pocket-sized almanac from 1807. 

I also flipped through an English newspaper from 1818.

Bottom line? I shouldn't study at Sterling anymore unless I have plenty of time to kill. With about 3.5 million volumes housed in that one library, I could spend weeks perusing through the book stacks. 

Thursday night I was walking back from the wardroom at the Navy office after a long night of studying, and I came across  a couple of front-end loaders and a dump truck getting snow to haul off. I thought to myself how sad it is that we have to pay companies to come and haul off our snow so we can have normal operations, haha.

I was studying in the library yesterday for my calculus midterm, and on my way back down from the fourth floor I noticed the elevator button (the one you push to beckon the elevator, not the buttons inside the elevator) had the wrong labels. You have to press the "door open" button to go up and the "door close" button to go down. I wonder if it has been this way since the library was built a long time ago... :

I really enjoy studying in the main library because it's a good mix of places to get lost and reading rooms that are really nice. Yesterday around 10 am I decided to use a reading room since it wasn't crowded...it's one of the more aesthetically pleasing places to study at Yale: 

And of course, I'm guilty of taking a selfie so I could show my girlfriend what the rest of the room looked like:

While on the topic of selfies, I might as well point out how I have been refusing a haircut while up here. I made the decision to only get my hair cut when in Georgia. I have found innumerable deficiencies among all three barber shops up here, so I just wait until I get home to get haircuts now. I'm not very picky when it comes to haircuts, but the barbers up here will ask you what you want, you tell them, and then they give you the haircut they want to give you and disregard everything you told them. I have the longest hair in the unit, and our Staff Sergeant (USMC drill instructor) must cringe when he sees my hair. But hey, it's still within Navy grooming regulations so there's not much to do about it. Two more weeks until a haircut!

Study abroad application results finally came through yesterday, and I ended up getting accepted to the London School of Economics and also to Cambridge University. I'm going to go to Cambridge and study financial markets, and it'll be from late June to late August. The other good thing? My girlfriend happens to be attending the same program at Cambridge also. Now I just hope my Commanding Officer signs the waiver for summer training deployment. If he doesn't I'll only be home for about a week all summer. I'd leave mid-May for deployment to the Pacific, come back late June, and then two days later take off for England until August 24th...two days before classes at Yale start again. I'd rather just not go on training deployment this summer.

This is my midterms week, and I haven't really been stressed at all. I did my econ midterm today, and I've calculus tomorrow. Along with that, navigation's midterm is Friday morning.

Today during our midterm review, the LT asked me four consecutive questions, and to each one I responded "I'll find out, Sir." After successfully evading having to answer four questions, he finally asked me "Midshipman Sellers, do you know any of the material for this midterm?" I just responded "Well Sir, I plan on learning everything Thursday night and Friday morning right before the midterm so I can use this time to study for calculus." He just laughed and shook his head and wished me luck learning everything in one night. Haha, he did tell us to focus on studying for Yale courses instead of using our time up on navigation since we don't get credit for navigation. It's strictly memorization anyways, since the only thing I have to learn that I don't already know is the US Coast Guard's Rules of the Road COLREGS. It's easy stuff like light configurations for nighttime navigation, sound signals, dayshapes for different ships and restricted visibility operations.

Less than 16 days until Spring Break 2014.

So my Mondays are basically like a third weekend day for me. I only have one class from 1-2:15, so I can sleep in as late as I want, grab a meal, go to class, and come back and sleep. Today I actually got up around 8 am and decided to study some since midterms are coming up in a day. I studied for calculus and econ today. I had to go to the wardroom across campus to study though, since my roommate (the one I am not so fond of) plays video games very loudly and is honestly an obnoxious person. I got SO much done since I wasn't distracted by him. Tonight I took a break from studying and went to Subway, and I was all about that $5 footlong lifestyle. 

Now just three and a half more days until midterms are over, which means NOTHING to do until spring break. Aside from this week and finals week, my semester is pretty much a joke. One class on mondays, two on tuesdays, two classes on wednesdays, one on thursdays, and just Navy lab on fridays. I consider myself to have a 5 day weekend every week this semester. 

If I can pull through this multivariable calculus class with a B or better (I originally thought C+ or better, but my buddy told me "Sellers, dont be a screwup; have some self-respect"), then I'm happy. Even for a midterms week I'm not too stressed out. 

The sad thing is that by the time I'm done with midterms the Olympics will be over. If that's the worst thing about this week then I'm doing pretty good though.

Yesterday I had my semesterly meeting with one of our Lietenants to discuss my evaluations and my FITREP (Fitness Report). I did pretty well... I was evaluated at a 4/5 with 5 being the best. He said that good of an eval never happens as a junior officer in the fleet, so I shouldn't expect those numbers on my first tour. But anyways, overall it was good meeting. We discussed study abroad this summer, and he's on board to help me get the Skipper's signature for my deployment waiver. Hopefully everything falls into place and the Skipper is willing to sign the waiver so I don't have to go on a summer training deployment, but if I do, I put in for a west coast cruise out of San Diego, so it wouldn't be a bad month at all... chilling on North Island in Coronado.
    I've been getting ready for midterms since I have three midterms this week. Econ on Wednesday, Multivariable Calculus on Thursday, and Sea Navigation on Friday.

Today we had the commander of the reactor system on the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) come and lecture us about joining the Surface Warfare Officer Nuke (SWO-N) community. It was pretty neat to hear about all of the propulsion stuff and the places he had been in his 20 years of Naval service: 86 countries and all 50 states.
After that one of our staff members who is also a reserve Commander drove me and a few other Mids over to Submarine Base New London to get our military IDs. She also showed us around base and let us go to the exchange and stuff. We also got to see the USS Virginia, the flagship of the Virginia class fast-attack submarines. On the way to the base we got to drive by the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, which was very nice. The best part was driving by the academy and seeing the USCGC Eagle, the three-masted sail ship captured from the Nazis after WWII and now used by the Coast Guard to train their officer candidates. It's a beautiful ship to see.
Anyways, I got a random picture at the exchange and then a nice picture of sunset in the New Haven harbor just a short distance from campus:

Today we had a treacherous snowstorm. I woke up, and found out that Navy PT, afternoon class, and work were all canceled today. Unfortunately, my 9 a.m. calculus class was not canceled. So I went to calculus then came back to the room and slept until lunch, went back to sleep until dinner, then came to the Navy office to study and practice navigation. We've been doing maneuvering boards lately, which is an antiquated way of navigating that we used before radar was invented. The Navy still wants us to learn it, so we do. And it's pretty interesting. There's pretty much an algorithm for it, so once you memorize the steps you can do it without having to think too much. It's kind of funny because the book we use for it seems like it is right out of the 1940s or something. But it works.

So I found out yesterday that there is a chance I get the opportunity to go to U.S. Army Mountain Warfare School this summer in Vermont. I found some videos on Youtube of it, and it seems really intense. Rock climbing, rappelling, all sorts of high altitude stuff, and a guaranteed 14 hours of mountain combat training each  day. I figured if the opportunity presents itself I might as well go... it may be invaluable training if I find myself in a situation one day in which I need to survive in the mountains (e.g. getting shot down). It will also give me very helpful skills to get through SERE (Survival,Evasion,Resistance and Escape) School that they send aviators to for training in how escape becoming a POW, and if taken prisoner, how to resist torture and escape. I'll take rigorous and difficult training now over having a lack of necessary skills down the road.

So lately I've been doing a mock PFA (Physical Fitness Assessment) every day in preparation for the official PFA we have next week. However, I found out today that I was thinking it's a week earlier than it really is. In the words my roommate, "Bro, that gives you like 7 more days of lifting, running, and that gains diet." If you weren't aware, a gains diet is a diet where one eats A LOT in order to put on muscle.

I found a new collection to explore at the rare book library - Yale has a rare map and globe collection that is particularly interesting. They have everything from Napoleon Bonaparte's personal battle maps to globes belonging to King George III of England (The king during the American Revolution) to nautical charts from the past few hundred years. It sounds pretty chill, so I'll have to go check it out sometime.

I also recently heard that our rare book library acquired a Tyndale Bible, which is first Bible printed in the English language - the English equivalent of a Gutenberg Bible. The library has Yale's Gutenberg Bible on permanent display, but the Tyndale Bible is not on display yet, so I can probably have it pulled for viewing one afternoon.

This econ class is so cool. It's neat because Prof. Shiller is great friends with George Akerlof (another Nobel Prize winning economist from Yale)...whose wife is Janet Yellen, the new chairman of the Fed. He just has so many connections and gives a really neat insight on the economy. He's also just a stellar guy.

Yesterday was quite the adventure. I had navigation class in the morning until 9:45 am. After that, I called the dentist to try and get an appointment since my molar has been in lots of pain for the past week. The dentist said to come on in, but their office is too far to walk, so I set out to rent a car and drive about 30 minutes to the dentist. After the dentist finished up, I gave my roommate a call and I swang back by campus to pick him and we were off!

We drove about 20 miles south towards New York to Costco. I must say, I bet it was senior citizen discount day, because I am positive we were the youngest people in the store by a solid 40 years. We even made friends with some very elderly man as we were having our coffee beans ground up. After Costco we decided to grab lunch and found an Olive Garden.... it was a very nice break from dining hall food.
We missed intramural bowling, but we decided lunch out was better than intramural bowling.

The way the campus car rentals go, it is an hourly rental. I had it booked until 4:30, and hurried back (as much as one can hurry on icy roads) with only two minutes to spare. The problem is, my roommate couldn't find his AAA batteries he bought (it was a big pack for $20) once we got back to the suite. We decided to go back to the car after dinner to see if they were there. In order to open the car to check if they were in there, we had to rent it for another hour. It turns out they weren't in there, so they must have been left at Costco. Either way, we decided to make the most of our rental and drove to Sports Authority. At sports authority we both bought some stuff... I almost bought a Yankees jersey since I'm going to the Red Sox-Yankees game in April. However, I decided it'd be cheaper online.

Unfortunately, the gps my roommate was using took us the wrong way back, so we ended up having to extend the reservation ANOTHER hour and went on a drive up to Hamden Connecticut. We stopped by a Walgreens and then finally headed back south to campus. It was a day filled with spontaneity and adventure.

By the way, I got a 1/2 gallon of peanut butter at Costco! Peanut butter is one of the few foods that fill you up very quickly, so we all buy peanut butter all the time.

I also saw a frozen lake for the first time yesterday, on a side note.

Here's a motivating picture:

An E/A-18G Growler. That's the ideal airframe I want to fly, and evidently not many guys choose electronic attack over fighters, so my chances are decent at getting assigned this airframe. 

There has been a recent release about Navy Nuclear Power School instructors allegedly cheating on their qualification tests. While some people are equating it to the Air Force's missilier cheating scandal, I really don't think it is anything close to say the Navy has just as bad of a scandal on its hands. Think about it: the Air Force is dealing with a scandal of around 100 commissioned officers in charge of the ultimate weapons of mass destruction: Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missiles. These officers have allegedly been involved in things from drugs while on duty to cheating on their qualification tests in proficiency to fire and operate the missiles. That's a big deal. There are serious issues with the strategic defense portion of the Air Force and the scandal, including complacency, mission relevance, narrowness of promotion pipeline, but mostly (and most disappointingly) a sheer lack of integrity. 

The Navy is dealing with senior enlistedmen (not commissioned officers) that were offering new instructors the answers via their home computers (which is also a leak of classified information, since all Navy nuclear power information is classified) to the qualification tests. That shows a huge lack of integrity among these individuals. It's an utter disappointment to see this lack of motivation and integrity among the military's senior enlistedmen, especially those charged with training this nation's officers that will go on to operate nuclear reactors in submarines and on aircraft carriers. So fundamentally these are both huge issues, but in practicality the Air Force issue is much worse because this occurred at an operational command where the leadership, who by the way were in charge of the most deadly weapons on Earth, sets the example that is only corrosive to a command and leadership structure. To me, that is a shame.

Anyways, today I woke up and saw that we had gotten about 5 inches of snow overnight, on top of what we already had on the ground. And now we have a big storm moving our way this weekend. I have never prayed so much for spring to arrive. 

I woke up to a dreadful surprise this morning: more snow. Yesterday was practically a spring day - it was around 40 something degrees and it was nice outside. Yet this morning it started snowing and has been snowing ever since. Although I have posted many pictures of snow up here (snow was somewhat of a phenomenon the first few times) I'm going to post some more.

The pictures both above and below are the view from my bedroom window.

Today I was fortunate enough to get one of  very few tickets to see Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor deliver a lecture here on campus. While I admit my political views aren't always consistent with the Yale community's political views, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see a Supreme Court Justice speak since they rarely ever speak in public. Coming away from it, I can say that all court decisions aside, she is a very intelligent, humble and quite hilarious lady. One of her best attributes is the constant willingness to admit she doesn't know everything, which is always an admirable thing to do. Personally, I think what truly makes a person intelligent is being able to shut their mouth and open their ears more often than the other way around. All things aside, it was an interesting lecture and I'm glad I went. 

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2014/02/01/supreme-court-justice-sonia-sotomayor-returns-to-yale-to-give-lecture/

No, I didn't get a picture of her because the security detail didn't allow electronics once the Justice came out on stage.

I hate those weekends when you get to Sunday night and realize you accomplished absolutely nothing over the weekend. This was one of those weekends. At the same time, it's pretty enjoyable to do nothing sometimes. I got my study abroad applications submitted and now have about a month until I figure out if I am accepted or not.

I cant wait for spring to get here when it warms up... this cold weather gets old pretty quick. I'll be excited to get back out on the water and start sailing again to enjoy nice weather like this from September.