3rd semester, GO!

This is what I spend a lot of my time looking at. Once you've seen the face, you ALWAYS see the face.

I started my third semester at university two weeks ago. It's okay, so far.

Most days I get in pretty early (9:00 or 7:30 AM) and finish sort of late (8:00 or 9:30 PM). I chose this schedule because it's Monday-Friday, so I can still go to the gym on Saturdays. The only thing is, on Saturday I was too tired to go**. I might as well have gone, though, because once I woke up in the morning I couldn't get back to sleep anyway. I employed my time in a half-assed study session instead.

I joined the gym at school, along with a friend. So we can pop off during our free time, do some bench presses while looking at pictures of boob-y models posing on weight machines, and run back to our respective classes, all in the time it takes you to blink! But only if you take a nap between the beginning and end of the blink, obviously. Otherwise we mightn't make it.

So anyway, I had five classes originally, but dropped Math because my teacher was... well, she was quite something:

Teacher: Look at this sequence. It oscillates between increments of ten and seven. Add ten, then add seven, then add ten... okay?

Me: Um, but that goes against the definition you just wrote. That sequence diverges, and the definition is that it doesn't diverge.

Teacher: Huh? Oh, you're right. That's a good observation. Add a little note next to it in your notebook, that it works this way, too, so you don't get confused. It just doesn't say so in the definition.

Me: Ohmygod.

Yep, her examples were always helpful. Like this other one:

Teacher: So what's the general term of this sequence? Let's see. To get the first term we could do this... squared... minus two... but that won't give us the second term... if we divide it... Okay, then. [Wites one board: As we can see here, in some cases it is hard to figure out the general term of a sequence****.] So, on to the next example!

I was left with four classes and days punctuated with long stretches of nothingness in the middle, so I signed up for another class, preforming a complicated e-mail operation in which I arranged to take lectures with one class and lab with another (due to schedule problems). I also signed up for another class thinking I wouldn't get it anyway (five people wanting the one spot left) but SURPRISE, I got into both classes.

Oooooh, I thought, will I be able to take all six classes and pass with proper grades? Or just, you know, pass? Should I drop one? If I drop Earth Sciences I'll have Mondays off... Okay, I'll do it! I'll drop a class!

So on Friday I was all set to drop Earth Sciences, but then I found out that the deadline was the day before. Why not publish that useful little tidbit on the Faculty's website? Gah!

So I have bitten off a lot, and it may prove to be more than I can chew. But it's like that time three weeks ago when I overestimated my hunger and accidentally made too much oatmeal: I buckled down and ate it anyway (okay, I ate most of it and the dog got the rest, but oatmeal is cheap and it's not wasted if it goes to someone furry who really wants it. Shhh!).

**I figured I'd need recovery time from lack of sleep. The day before, Friday, I fell asleep on the bus to school (standing up and constantly jerking awake), in Molecular Biology lab, in Fungi class and on the bus home. I stayed awake during both Plants lab and Animals lab, though! I mean, in Animals lab I fell asleep a few times while I was drawing a sponge, but that was just because the sponge was big and the structure got a bit repetitive. Other than that, I was fit as a fiddle.

**** When she wrote it her grammar was bad, too, but that got lost in translation.

This is really pretty. It's a (thin thin thin) slice of orange peel, dyed with Sudan III, a brownish-reddish, carcinogenic (!) dye. The oil in the peel got stained this here purty shade of orangey yellow that you're got yer eyes on.