After what was not entirely as relaxing a summer as I would have liked (I'd been hoping to spend it gardening, after all), I am back in school. With what feels like a ridiculously easy schedule, though I'm sure I will be more rushed as the quarter progresses.
This is my schedule (because I know you are all on the edge of your seats):
My earliest days, Tuesday and Thursday, start at nine. My latest days start at one. If it were possible with the sun shining right on my face, I could sleep until noon those days.
Of course, my late days end at eight, so that sort of takes the fun out of it.
The big excitement of this quarter is that I was required to purchase yet another programmable calculator. So in addition to the TI-86 that comes with me everywhere and sleeps beside me at night, I now have a TI BA-II plus, which is to say a financial calculator, for my construction finance class.
Because I can't get enough of changing batteries, apparently. (Noel tells me the battery in the BA-II plus will last all quarter, but I go through four to eight AAA batteries a week in the TI-86, so I am skeptical.)
Another excitement is that in my engineering class, we were issued our own copies of the Manual of Steel Construction to use all quarter long. This is a ridiculously expensive book, if you're an architect. Engineers should just buy the thing because they will use it until it falls apart and then they're going to want another one, so the $200 or something is worth it. Architects can borrow one from an engineer friend the five times in their careers that they ever need it. So it was nice to get a loaned one from the school rather than having to do homework in the library.
This is the sort of thing in the steel manual: lots of formulas and tables of values for sizing steel members and doing load diagrams and all sorts of other wonderful engineery things. Don't you just want one of your own? You know you do.
(Actually, I have to admit that if I ever found a copy of the ninth edition in a book store for a reasonable amount, I would be tempted. But then again, there was a reason why I chose a program that was so tightly integrated with an engineering program.)
