My Bad

Sorry for a little delay betwixt posts. Everyone has been having issues with the internet, and I've been busy as well.

Today at dinner was really neat. It's the one time when professors and administration people serve the students their meals. It doesn't end there either. They put your food on the plate, they make your drinks for you, and then another teacher approaches you as you walk away from the drink table, takes your tray of consumables, and walks behind you to your seat. They pull out your seat, remove everything from your tray, get you drink refills, all while you listen to a live jazz band compiled of students. The piano player in the band lives 2 doors down from me, he's pretty good. The teachers also periodically walk by with a dessert tray too. It was pretty fun. Good food too: Salmon, cooked zucchini, a very good punch mix, carrot cake and berry tart for desert, and a friendly smile all around. Geroge Moffet was serving out the main course and I of course introduced myself as the son of my father. He and his wife knew of me immediately (she was demoted to serving the vegetables).

All of my classes sound pretty interesting and relatively demanding. I first had Global Environmental Issues on Wednesday. The teacher is a former Prin student who accepted the teaching job after spending some years living/working in Fairbanks, Alaska. There isn't much structure to the course yet, he's new to teaching the course and hasn't formulated a proper layout yet.

Yesterday I had Wildlife Conservation (WC) and American Biography (AB). WC sounds really neat. Three weeks from tomorrow the entire class will meet at 7:30 AM and spend the next 4 hours observing and counting all of the Eagles in a certain area near the campus. We'll be using telescopes/binoculars I'm sure, but it sounds pretty neat. Hopefully I'll be able to take some pics in the process. WC also has a full-day field trip some time in February to the St. Louis Zoo.

AB is a course that seems to be about learning how to read a biography: When was it written relative to the subject's lifetime, what relavent stuff is going on during the time it was written, what sorts of sources does the author use, what scope, style, bias, thesis does the author have, what's the background of the author. These elements are all included in discussions about the material in the text as well, and the books all sound pretty interesting. There are a total of 4 in the class: Sickles the Incredible, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, Molly Spotted Elk, and A Bright Shining Lie. The time periods range from the Civil War through the Vietnam War.

It has been very fun so far walking around campus talking to people I don't know. Everyone is usually willing to talk to you, and everyone is friendly.

Last night was my first experience with house meetings in Lowrey. Most everyone in the house meets downstairs at 10:30 PM. There's a big wrestling mat in the middle of the room and chairs all around. The mat wasn't really used for THIS meeting, but apparently it usually is. There are some brief announcements, what's happening socially on campus, etc. then a couple guys usually have a story to tell, not necessarily with any theme or purpose other than it's funny. One fella talked about a particular experience during his study abroad in Japan in a public bath...it involved dancing. Being the first meeting of the quarter, the new guys had to be brough to the middle of the circle (me and 3 other guys). I was the only transfer new student, the others were only new to the house, not campus. We had to say our names and where we're from firstly:
"What's your name?"
"Wil-.."
"YYYYYYEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH"
"Where you from?"
"Chica-.."
"YYYYYYYYEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHAHHHHHHHHHHH"
Then we had to do the worm dance. That was about it, but it was a pretty fun atmosphere. One guy tried to fit himself into a mini-fridge...not quite. A soccer ball was being kicked all over the place. 'Twas fun.

That's all for now. We have classes tomorrow just for this one week because of the funky start time. Class starts at 8am, OH BOY! G'night

WGM IV