JB School

Well, after having had 2 days in class so far, I think this is going to be doable. It's readily apparent that there are going to be some difficulties involved, but they're within an acceptable range. My classes at Cascade campus land me on the road during both the morning and evening "rush hour". The morning is fairly well locked up all the way in; on Monday I don't think I topped 20 miles an hour. I tried sleeping over at Eden's to come in from Vancouver on Wednesday morning and that was a little better, but I think I'll need to make some adjustments there too - I actually ended up getting up after Suzanne had left but before anyone else was really up, which meant no shower but I got to school almost an hour before I needed to be there, which was actually kind of nice. Coming back to the west side isn't too horrible - the I5 is already locked up but I can use back streets to dodge that. Eden gave me a route from Interstate Avenue that I promptly forgot - still got home, but ended up going through central Portland rather than landing on the 30. I'll have to work on that. In any case, highway 26 was still moving by the time I hit it on both evenings. I end up with about enough time for a shower and a hurried meal before heading over to Rock Creek campus. I guess evening classes are pretty darn popular there, because it takes from 5:30 to about 5:55 to drive the 2-3 miles from my apartment to campus. Go figure. My remaining trips this week shouldn't be too bad, as they're both single class days at Rock Creek.

As to the actual classes, well, it's been educational . Algebra is kind of comforting, in that I seem to remember/understand most of it, although I could swear I've never seen the quadratic formula before. I can apply it, but it really feels like a brand new equation, which is a little disturbing, in that I remember solving these kind of problems before, just don't remember how. The other problems given during the teacher's little pretest sorted themselves out from memory nicely though. By the way, if you're ever in need of a quick graphing calculator and don't have one handy, check out the freeware app GraphCalc (http://www.graphcalc.com/). My TI got here today, so I'll be using that for homework later to remember how it actually works in preparation for the quiz on Monday.

Writing class has been very straightforward thus far, although it seems like there's comparatively little reading and writing going on in class - too much time doing things like relearning how to cite quotations properly. I'm sure that'll change some as time goes on. My Biology teacher is very interesting. The first class she seemed to be going light speed, but kept on saying that we'd come back to this concept or that concept in later classes, which makes sense since the first chapter is an overview, but still, it made taking notes very difficult. She did post the lecture online beforehand, but that's the only classroom thus far that doesn't have a working wireless router in range. The second class was much more comprehensible, in that I'd printed the lecture beforehand to write notes on and the subject matter made more sense. The chapter was on very basic chemistry, which was a little fascinating, as I have not taken any kind of chemistry before and the concepts seemed to fit together pretty well. The only stumble came up in a discrepancy between the book's description of the relation between valence shells and orbitals (subshells), which the teacher said was wrong. Wikipedia agrees with her, so I'm going with her explanation on the test.

After class I made a compromise with myself and went to study at the Circled by Hounds show over at Biddy's. I think I confounded the girls by having my head in a book (rereading the first two chapters of Biology) for most of the show, but it was worth it, because it was pretty relaxing and I got to hear their new member a bit. It's kind of interesting, in that I wouldn't have associated a flute with their music at all before, but he melded extremely well. If you haven't heard them before, do yourself a favor and at least click the link - they're great musicians with some incredible energy in person. (For perspective, their last two CDs are litterally the only music I've bought since high school - I'm the kind of guy that normally lets Pandora figure out a background for me when I feel like music)

Well, it'll be time to head to the Lab section of Biology (with a different teacher) here in a couple of hours, so it's time to move on to more productive things.