I started the OSU Fisher WP-MBA program this January, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. However, this new schedule demands a lot of time from me on a regular basis. Therefore, blog updates are going to be infrequent from now on, but I'll do what I can to post some of the more interesting aspects about what I'm learning and doing when time permits. 

I want to point anyone who is interested in the current abortion debate in America to these two recent articles:

Stand to Reason: Biden's Blunder Redux - Commentary on recent comments made about stem cell research by Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Biden. While this blog post does not explicitly deal with the abortion issue, this is written by a staunchly Pro-Life author who argues that Biden made a critical logical error in his criticism of the Republican Pro-Life position of opposing embryonic stem cell research which ties into the next article.

I recently took the online personality assessment test from the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 which attempts to focus one on improving their strengths (hence the book title) rather than focusing on their weaknesses. While I don't find this book ground-breaking, it does provide a pretty good method for re-evaluating yourself so that you can keep in mind the important things to focus on in your life.  Here are my top five strengths, and what I plan to work on this year to better myself:

Ideation
Strategic
Maximizer
Analytical
Learner

Here are how I plan to work on what I consider to be my top 3 strengths, and the areas in those strengths that I can best capitalize on in the coming year:

The next morning, we discovered that it was good that we had slept in the shelter. Aaron A's bivy had broken in the night due to wind, and he had crawled into the already cramped shelter with us. Matt's tent got a little water in it, so he didn't sleep so well either. Some thought it was time to just get off the trail before it got any worse. But, before we left that morning, we would need a really hearty breakfast to sustain us on our final journey. It was the perfect time to fix some pancakes! Especially since we had brought pancake mix and syrup for this purpose. Below are the ingredients and tools needed to properly cook pancakes on the trail:

Day 2 began with a warm cup of disgusting tasting espresso that Matt made from his camp espresso maker. It was small and quite portable, but it just didn't work right out in the middle of the woods. Soon enough, we were ready to go again, and began our second day of hiking up one hill and down the other. It was uncharacteristically hot that day, but we weren't too bad off as we were usually hiking through thick woods. The one memory that stands out from this day was when we happened upon a group of Forestry Service workers on a logging road. We came trudging out of the woods and happened upon about 8 older men. Most of them looked about 60 years old or older, and must have been taking some kind of break as they were all standing around their two pickup trucks smoking and talking. We greeted them and struck up conversation about the adventures we had had so far.