the painful transition from math to met

[Quite apart from the fact that I have turned American and write math instead of maths :-( ]

Actually, the transition from maths to met is quite a pleasant one. I can now perfectly permissibly get excited about clouds, even if they aren't displaying kelvin-helmholtz instability; look up satellite images of hurricanes; and a significant proportion of my study seems to bear relation to everyday, real phenomena. Add to all that that I got to go on a FIELD TRIP; a real field trip, where I could wear my hideous yet warm ensemble of outwear gear, thus adding to my sister's possible reason's to disown me, and prance along the Dorset coast whirling meteorological instruments around my head and watching boys let off weather balloons (we girls lost out because 1) the boys were eager and 2)the boys were taller and less likely to pop said balloon on a spiky tree).

However, certain aspects of this whole application malarkey are rather upsetting.

For example, I am, for the first time in my life, the owner of my very own scientific calculator. Why?

Well, at GCSE and below, my poxy non scientific one coped (I still own it, and it has breakout 2004 stickers on it and my name in orange nail varnish). At ALevel I got to borrow a school graphical one, and learn to draw smily faces for my friends/teachers/self. As for undergraduate, there were two types of maths.
1) we don't need numbers, silly numbers, it's all about defining things, or manipulating things, or whatever, but we can generally survive without things so ridiculous as 7.9346x10^-4.
2) If we did need numbers, say to analyse a physical model, or a clever expression of pi, we wrote a PROGRAMME which did it for us (or a programme which spent eternity trying to compile and then exploded in a puff of smoke, but the point remains).
[this is an awful awful explanation of why I didn't need a calculator, but I didn't].
So, to the question 'you're a mathematician, can I borrow a calculator?' you could answer smugly 'no, ask a physicist' or 'no, ask an engineer'.
But no longer. while my brain can do division and multiplication and the like, it's not quite up to exponentials and logarithms (if yours is, I suggest you check that you aren't actually a computer.) and quite a lot of meteorological expressions seem to contain these pesky things. So I just spent £10 that could have been spent on
1)cake
2)cake
3)cake
...
(the veggie frenzy passed)
on a calculator.

But it is new and shiny, so I guess I can find it exciting for a short while.