robglazebrook.com

(I just wanted a big word in my title)

Yesterday morning marked the beginning of the ninth semester I’ve spent here at ISU, and it was an odd start, even as far as first days (which usually have something noteworthy about them) go. Yesterday was odd, in that, although I went to both of my classes, I didn’t meet either of my professors. And I’m not talking intimate, face-to-face conversation-type meetings, either. I have yet to see what either of them look like.

My first class of the day was Tae Kwan Do. After spending ten minutes finding the room (it was down a hallway that was under construction, diagonally across a gymnasium in use, and up a back flight of stairs to the third floor of a building I didn’t know had three floors), I get to the door, add my shoes to the growing pile, and step on to the mats. I look around for the professor (I’m looking for the little old Korean guy who could kill me with his pinky, so he should stick out), but I don’t see him. Turns out, he’s in Korea. Go figure. The TA’s walked us through the basics, and we’ll probably start in earnest on Wednesday.

Oh, and it was hot in that room. Real, ~real~ hot. A long, squat, poorly-ventilated padded room on the third floor of a huge exercise complex can really get nice n’ cozy when it’s 98 degrees outside. :)

After my sauna (heh), I headed across campus in the (comparatively) cool summer sun to my English class. Since we were all English-ites and upperclassmen, we sat around and socialized a bit before class started. My old buddy Rob Backstrom is in the class, which makes this something like our seventh class together. :)

Anyway, we socialized. And then we socialized some more. And then we asked each other for the time. And then we socialized. And then we got bored, and tried to come up with reasons that the professor hadn’t shown up yet. My favorite was the idea that it was some sort of a hazing ritual / endurance test, and the professor was sitting just outside the room with a list of our names accompanied by our photos, and would check off attendance and make notes in the margin as we walked out on him. In reality, though, it turns out that the guy is an English professor, and simply got his days confused. He sent us an email a couple of hours later to apologize and to assign homework. What a guy, eh? *g*

So. Let’s hope today’s classes go a bit more smoothly, eh? I just found out through the wonder that is the Internet that the teacher for my first class of the day (Visual Aspects of Business Communication) is a graduate student, so that has me wary already. The ‘Net also informs me that my Poetry teacher is a Distinguished Professor, which makes him an old fart. Let’s hope he’s a nice old fart.

In other news, I finished reading Lord of the Rings a couple of weeks ago and never thought to mention it, which means I made it well before my self-imposed deadline of today. I’ve read a couple of back-issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction that I never got around to since then, and a couple of days ago I started reading Stephen Dobyns’s The Church of Dead Girls. It’s a bit slow so far, and there’s far too many character names for my poor fuddled mind to get ahold of, but Megan promises that the book picks up and the minor characters fall to the wayside after a while.

Time to work out (I’ma gonna need to be in better shape than I am for Tae Kwan Do), shower, and dress for another day of Academia (Wacky Acky?).