I've already been here over eight weeks?!

I just took the last of my midterms this morning and have a little time off, so I thought I'd give an update. The last few weeks of school (that is so weird to be saying...) are probably going to be really hectic, so who knows how much more "time off" I'm going to get.

First off, I'm now on my third professor in studio. Prof. Rogers, the first one, left two weeks ago to go to Italy for the remainder of term (oh, I just realized I never said what she grade I got on the second project - she gave us a 95!!! :D very estatic about that). A professor from Italy was supposed to come here to teach us, but there was a week and a half gap between their flights, so we had a substitute professor. -_- oh joys. But now we have our prof. from Italy, so hopefully that will go okay. He seems to have a lot of interesting things to say, but it sounds like he's going to have us do a lot of research, which will be a lot different from all my previous projects, but it'll be good to be busy again.

Though, I was definitely kept busy during the gap weeks. Our sub, Prof. Dougan, was, to put it lightly, a hippie. He had long dredlocks that reeked so bad his stench filled the entire room. He really enjoyed class discussion for hours about things like going with the flow of things and how bad our school is and how they don't know how to teach. He doesn't believe in giving grades and thinks that doing projects can't teach you how to design, only diving into problems can (though he never really fully explained the difference). Anyway, he was weird, and he smelled, that's all you need to know. He gave us his own project (despite being instructed to give us our next project from the Italian professor): we had to draw the shadows from our shadow box, then add extra lines that were parallels or tangents to make lots of lines, then ink the shadow outlines, lastly fill them in with watercolors... in one week. So, I didn't really put a whole lot of effort, since we aren't even sure if it is really for a grade and I didn't really want it to cause any extra stress. So, I just did what I felt like that for the most part was what he wanted, and it actually turned out pretty neat. He really seemed to like it, he even picked it as one of seven or eight in the class to hang on the wall... though he did hang it sideways... oh well, it looks so abstract I suppose it probably doesn't matter.

The way he hung it up...
The way it should be, based on my actual shadow box (you could even scroll down to previous post and see if you can find the shadows I painted in my box, if you wanted...)

Anyway, that made studio busy the last couple weeks, trying to produce that in such a short period of time.

As for other classes... Systems... *bleh* at least I can just keep telling myself, just six-ish more weeks of this class. That's all that keeps me going in this class. Oceanography - I'm doing really well in this class, though I just took my second test this morning. I think I did pretty well (knock on wood)... in Lab I've got one of the highest grades in the class, so that's good, especially since I never really considered myself a science person... then again, most of the people in there are business or communications type majors so it could just be they are all even less science-y than me. History is going pretty well - I got a 93 on the midterm! And even having to do a group project isn't turning out so bad, at least we are working steadily on it. My partner and I are at least halfway done if not more while most people haven't even started yet, so I suppose that's a good sign. Book of Mormon is good as always; we are almost done with 2 Nephi.

Church is going better as well. I feel a little more at ease being the secretary, though I won't go as far as saying I like it yet. I still will always prefer being the pianist instead, but you can't have everything, right? And I still play whenever I can, after institute, at FHE, at institute activites, etc. So it's not all bad. Choir is going great. We just sang a piece on Sunday and everyone was really impressed, even our director! And now we get to start working on our Christmas songs, which is my favorite part of choir. We just started learning a piece that is a really cool and pretty arrangement of "I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day" that I think will be awesome once we know it.

ANYway, I think that's pretty much all that's new. I'm going to the institute's Halloween party so I'll definitely take lots of pictures, it should be really fun. And a cold front just came through, so now it finally feels like it is October, as if fall finally came to say, okay, it really can be Halloween a week from now. It had seemed really weird to have Halloween only a couple weeks away and it still be in the 90's outside. I just love the cold weather!

Have a great autumn everyone!