In this week's news...

And there's a first week of school down. Chemistry, molecular bio, and trig. Trig, methinks, will be interesting. By the end of the class the overwhelming image impressed upon me was that i was having an hour and fifteen minutes worth of dental work done with no anesthesia. And i generally like math. Just that the prof is this overweight, burnt-out drill dergeant looking/acting feller that's desperate that all should know he ain't gunna take no crap offa' nobody, and that in spite of all appearances, he's cool. And then simultaneously he fires off a barrage of what he'd like you to believe are jokes: flat, syrupy, goofy one-liners that have the effect of making (at least me) cringe and internally scream, "Ow! Stop that." Then he'd repeat 'em a minute or so later just to be sure everyone got it. Maybe i'll get used to it.

In biology we've so far learned beyond any shadow of a doubt that we all share a common, precellular evolutionary ancestor with yeast. i can't seem to get very excited about that no matter how hard i try. i think about it and think about it-- no effect. Oh, and bacteria have the ability to pick DNA up off the floor (or from other bacteria), splice it into their own genome, and express it. Sounds like a fine hobby. Also gives me a renewed vigour 'bout not taking unnecessary antibiotics. Very bad. i think that's m' most interesting class.

Chemistry's just fairly dreadful. i don't think there's really a way to make chemistry any less dreadful. One either likes it or doesn't, and i doesn't. i do hope it grows on me though.

i guess all in all, i've seen my kiddoes maybe two hours in the last week, and i'm becoming almost hopelessly depressed. All part of growing up, i guess: c'est la vie.

my first day of school

Had my first class today. Chemistry, it was. And exceedingly unlike UNM it was, as well. i'm going to a community college here to knock out a bunch of prereqs, and the differences are large thus far. For one, i actually shall have (as of tomorrow morning) paid more for books than i did for tuition. Just spent 300 bones on two books and a lab manual. That's painful. 'Course, it's also incentive to pass the friggin' classes. Also, though, the class itself was different. i walked into the room where the lecture was to be, and thought, "How are they gunna fit 400 people in this room?" Lo (and behold, if you will) the lecture capped at somewhere in the vicinity of 40 souls. i guess i got used to needing field glasses to see the prof. ---and to be truthful, this poor mousy lady really could do with a mic. Then we started into the lecture proper: also a positive divergence. At its crescendoed pinnacle we learned that it is, in fact, matter that both has mass and takes up space.

Now, i 'spect it'll get steeper and faster in due time, but i gotta say that present acceleration is just about right for this old dull guy. Now let's see if i can drag me arse outta the feathers for a 7:30 lab tomorrow morning.

"Only 8 or 10 more years, buddy, and you might be gainfully employed. Almost there."

i'll just retrospect a moment here: do a li'l inventory, as it were. Aeon just just just turned two, preceded narrowly by Annie making five. That's odd. All of a sudden it hit me how dreadful ancient i am, and i'm not even the one who had the b-day.

Anyhow.

She started kindergarten on mon. That's the bit, i think, that really slapped me upside the nog. Beside the obvious observation that she's now old enough to go to school and i honestly don't remember enough things happening in her short li'l life the collection of which might legitimize her being that old, i simply never had any intention of her going to kindergarten. So she spent the afternoon hobknobbing with other unsuspecting lit'luns, and making construction paper teddy bears, after which we took her out for ice cream at Baskin Robbins whereat we generally celebrated the defeat of my ideals. Oh well. And who knows?-- maybe i'll find a way to get a thought in edge-wise around her real education.

In other news, we're "renovating" our house. "Renovating" in this context thus far consists of buying thousands of dollars worth of flooring and various stylish porcelain accoutrements, storing them in morbid heaps on every available square inch of real estate, and then dedicating an as yet undetermined number of days chasing problems deeper and deeper into the bowels of our utterly unmaintained sixty year old house. Presently, the "bathroom" is a toilet sitting on a concrete slab in a grove of wall studs and sundry plumbing plexus. i spent some time this evening cross-legged on that slab spading dirt out of hole in it where once a 400 lb. cast-iron bathtub lay and drained its contents. Apparently, whilst removing said tub from its moorings, i managed to crack loose a lead joint in the (wild guess here) sixty year old drainage pipe. Blessedly we shan't have to jack-hammer the foundation to get to it as i was at first led to believe. Instead i'll lay face down in a hole and'll clean out with a wire brush the sixty years of accumulated sclerotic stenosis (or whatever the blanket term is for the crud that people wash down their drains) in the pipe joint until i have shiny clean metal. Wow-- suddenly i'm hungry.

At any rate, i invested in a canister respirator today. Probably get my money's worth outta that. i'm seriously ready for the "building back up" end of this proj. Right at the moment i'm feeling exotically expensive and not so productive. The upshot is that there are fewer and fewer things that can still go wrong: there's all kinds of room to go upward.

Nastrovya