Spring break is always a nice chance to relax halfway through the second semester. This year my friend Kayla from architecture and I drove down to California. We left after class last Friday and stayed with a friend in Provo, UT. It was about a 7 hour drive the first day. We went to a comedy improv show that night, it was a funny show. The next day was a 10 hour drive, down through U
tah, Arizona, Nevada, and then California. It was nice to stay at a home while on vacation. It was the first time I've had three complete meals in a day. We also went to In N Out Burger multiple times. On St. Patrick's day we went to Venice Beach. It was fun to see all the street venders and all the interesting stuff they were selling. While we were in California my brother was on a Breaksaway trip in New Orleans. Breaksaway is a program through MSU where students can take a trip and do community service while on spring break. They did some work in parks in the New Orleans area and some other community service activites. They had the opportunity to go to a Hornets game while they were down there.
The musician Girl Talk preformed last weekend in Bozeman at the Gallatin Country Fairgrounds. It was a fun concert, I saw lots of people from campus there. I went with some friends that drove down from Missoula for the weekend. Girl Talk one and only member is Gregg Gills who will take well recognized portions of songs, mash them up, creating a new remix song. It was fun hearing portions of songs I knew, many I didn't. 
This is a structures project we did recently. It reminded me of elementary school, except for the part where we had to calculate loads and figure out the forces on the members and the reaction at each joint. We could design a truss to resemble whatever we wanted, some people made a ski jump truss while others represented the animal kingdom with squirrel, frog, and bird trusses. We used a program called MD Solids (mdsolids.com) where we drew the truss and applied loads. It then calculated whether members were in compression or tension and the forces on each. It was a fun project where we got to be creative with designing trusses.
