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September 21, 2004

One of the Herd

A longish post composed over a couple days, talking about school and the new house and animals and impossible art projects, as usual.

It all feels really surreal right now, even the moving of large quantities of stuff down here in the rented minivan, Rosie stuffed in her crate in the middle.

I'm sure it will start to feel more normal soon, like when I get internet access worked out at home and the paperwork for my wireless access goes through at school. Until then I'm building this post offline, so maybe it will be really huge by the time anybody else gets to read it.

As for the house: well.

To say that my landlady has a lot of decorative crap is to put it mildly. She likes royal blue. She has a lot of royal blue stuff. Like, royal blue anything and everything. I admit I haven't seen her underwear, but considering the blueness of the rest of the house, I'm taking a good healthy guess. I'm half surprised the dog hasn't been dyed royal blue.

Serendipitously, the duvet covers I bought are blue. Not on purpose: had they been in stock I would have bought the red ones of the same pattern. But it doesn't hurt to get in good with the one who pays the utility bills. See my utilitarian room in cellphone camera glory:

Monday:

So I just went through my first day of classes at CalPoly, and it was both better than expected and about what I expected. For one thing, with a quarter system the teachers have no illusions about how much material they can cover: they know it is considerably less than with semesters, so they seem to have planned the amount of stuff on the syllabus accordingly.

It is pretty amazing to be one of 17,000 students. There's no way you can know half of what is happening on campus like you can at a smaller school.

I had my first design studio today, abbreviated because it was the first class and you really can't go for the whole six hours on the first day with no materials. The best part about CalPoly is that we get keys to the studio and it is ours for the whole quarter. Nobody else can get in, so we can leave our crap out on the desks and not worry about it walking away. Which means I can bring in a lot of my supplies and just leave them there. This is a very good thing.

The worst thing is that this teacher has some different ideas about what she wants us to use as far as supplies, so I have to buy a bunch of stuff, despite coming down with a lot of art supplies. I wish I'd thought to bring my sewing machine, too, because for the first assignment, I would like to sew part of it. But that iron-a-seam tape works pretty well, so I'll probably just use that. I'll write more about it when I've figured out more details. Until then, think large fabric envelope with a button closure.

Physics looks to be interesting, as well. My teacher is Turkish (which meant she said my name right the first time). She yells so loud while lecturing that my ears were ringing after the hour was up. I think I will have to sit further back in the room or I'll be deaf by the end of the quarter. This is the physics for dynamics, which means fluid dynamics, wave behaviour, and optics. The class is designed for architecture students, so it's half women, which is a nice change from last year's physics lectures with me and forty guys.

I'm also pleasantly surprised by my statics class. There's a sizable lab component that should make it much better for learning than just a lecture. CalPoly has this big thing about learning by doing, and they've been restructuring the curriculum to incorporate more of that. My year is the guinea pig year.

Tomorrow are intro to the designed environment (basically a repeat of intro to architecture, but I'm trying to be game about it), design graphics, and physics lab.

Tuesday:

I finally got wireless working at home. It works sporadically in my bedroom, but fine in the living room, which means that I have to post from the living room.

Classes were good today, though my physics lab teacher is a bit odd. I had the afternoon off so I went shopping for some art supplies and things for the first studio project. I'm making a container to use as a portfolio.

Posted by ayse on 09/21/04 at 7:47 PM