October 2007

Driving Home From A Good Day At School.

Have you ever woke up and just had a feeling that the day was going to be a wonderful day? What a beautiful feeling; you wake up without needing the alarm clock, your eyes flutter a little bit, the glorious dreams of the night before linger like a warm hug and there’s no paw searching for a little tuna in your eye.

That’s how I woke up this morning.

Today was the last day of midterms. Professor Frightful didn’t get the midterm ready in time, so he decided to give us a “double quiz” covering the last two chapters. His teaching style is out there, but I’ve pretty much acclimated to it and gone into self-study mode, so I think I did well on my midterm turned quiz.

I feel confident with the paper I turned in for English. I wrote a dissertation on “My Antonia” by Willa Cather discussing all the gender confusion and homosexual tendencies in the novel.

Always trying to be the responsible student, I signed up for an extra Surveying lab to make up for the lab I’ll miss next week while Earl and I are in Ireland. Today’s lab was with the other Surveying professor and the class was considerably smaller; my normal class has 22, today’s class had 5, including myself. That made a big difference in many ways. Having a different professor gave me a new perspective on how to do things (he’s much more strict with procedure, which is a good thing) and being a small class gave me considerably more hands-on time with the equipment. I was nervous going into the class because I didn’t think I’d know anyone, but the guys were great and I felt comfortable with the “new” crew. I plan on signing up with this professor for my next Surveying course in January.

Lately I’ve been feeling like my professional destiny ended with asking “do you want fries with that?” for the rest of my life, today it was a great feeling to get back on track and start feeling the DOT thing again.

To end the day on a great note, Earl indulged my geek ways and sat down with me as we watched an episode of “The Secrets of Isis”, followed by the “Bewitched” movie with Nicole Kidman and Will Farrell. I hadn’t watched the movie in a couple of years and while still quite disappointing, we both enjoyed the experience. (Nicole Kidman should beg Sony to do ANOTHER Bewitched remake and this time make it more like the real thing.)

Today has been a good day. I feel confident in taking this vacation now.

I am just arriving home after taking my first final exam of the semester. Today’s foray into testing was for my “Health and Wellness” course. As a half-semester class, we get to squeeze a final into the flurry of midterms.

My initial reason for taking this course was to sidestep being the overweight father figure dressed in a pair of shiny workout shorts in a sea of buff, teenage male muscleheads and still make my physical education requirements. I figured the course would be like the health classes we all had to take in high school and in many ways it was just as I had imagined. The professor was the soccer coach, was usually dressed in coach attire (complete with a whistle around his neck) and somewhat resented the fact that he had a class of students that were trying to get out of physical exercise for their physical education requirements. On the whole I enjoyed his presentation style, preparedness for the class and the relatability of the topics to real life.

Surprisingly, this course turned out to be my favorite course of the semester. And I find this a little odd for several reasons. First of all, it has nothing to do with my major. Always looking for signs from the Universe, this aspect concerns me a little bit and leaves me to do some thinking about the path that lies ahead. Secondly, because I really enjoyed the class I managed to drag myself, on time, to this 8 a.m. course twice a week. I made it to every class and I think I might have been one of a very small number of students with perfect attendnace. Night owls usually don’t make it to 8 a.m. class.

So now I’m well versed in a smattering of health related topics. And I feel good about it.