Little Choo Little Choo Little Choo Little Choo
It's update time!
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Beans is really cute but really kind of annoying. He's kind of nocturnal, which I suppose isn't abnormal for a cat. He gets bored at night, though, and he likes to climb all over me while I'm trying to sleep. He purrs really loudly and stomps all over me, and he uses his little paws to press ticklish areas of my body. Last night he was pressing the little cleft of skin right under my nose and above my upper lip. Somehow he's figured out the most sensitive areas of my body and presses them over and over, trying to get me to wake up.
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Teaching surveying is going well, I think! This year's class is big at 25 students; this is very large for our department. The faculty are really happy about this, as it means that more undergraduates are choosing civil engineering. I remember when I first started graduate school it seemed as if Case had money coming out the wazoo with the whole rebranding campaign and the MTV commercials and the VP debate; now we basically have nothing, and I'm not sure why. Things have been really bleak in the civil department especially, as we've never been a big department anyways, and there have been rumors floating around that we're going to be eaten by the mechanical engineering department. So having 25 students is a really hopeful sign that maybe we'll get big again.
One thing that I've noticed about doing the limited teaching that I have is that it's kind of a let-down when you teach a class a repeated time, just cause you completely have to start over with the students; you get a batch of them through an entire semester and they mostly know all the course content, and then you have to start completely over once the next semester begins with a whole new set of students who -- not through any fault of their own -- don't know anything. It's not so bad with teaching surveying, cause at least I have spring and summer semester off; I remember it being really depressing when I TAed statics four semesters back-to-back and had to restart from vectors every single time. But I guess that's something you get used to after a while if you stay on the teaching end of things. I do like teaching surveying a lot.
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Mike and I went to see V For Vendetta at Strosacker this past Friday. This was the second time we saw it, and I really like that movie. I went to Borders on Sunday and bought the graphic novel and read it yesterday and today. I think like the movie more; sorry, Alan Moore! Mike and I also saw Little Miss Sunshine a couple of weekends ago. That's an entirely different type of movie, but I really liked that movie, too.
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Ross very kindly built a laptop for me out of two broken and discarded laptops that Mike brought home from work. So I am now officially cool since I have a laptop, woo hoo! I was going to have super awesome geek cred and have it just run Linux, but we decided to put Windows on it so that I can use it to teach my class AutoCAD. So this semester I will be all high-tech with the projector in the computer lab, sweeeeet... We'll see if it works out correctly.
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Long weekends are great. Going back to school tomorrow may result in a really sleepy Judy.
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Beans is really cute but really kind of annoying. He's kind of nocturnal, which I suppose isn't abnormal for a cat. He gets bored at night, though, and he likes to climb all over me while I'm trying to sleep. He purrs really loudly and stomps all over me, and he uses his little paws to press ticklish areas of my body. Last night he was pressing the little cleft of skin right under my nose and above my upper lip. Somehow he's figured out the most sensitive areas of my body and presses them over and over, trying to get me to wake up.
--
Teaching surveying is going well, I think! This year's class is big at 25 students; this is very large for our department. The faculty are really happy about this, as it means that more undergraduates are choosing civil engineering. I remember when I first started graduate school it seemed as if Case had money coming out the wazoo with the whole rebranding campaign and the MTV commercials and the VP debate; now we basically have nothing, and I'm not sure why. Things have been really bleak in the civil department especially, as we've never been a big department anyways, and there have been rumors floating around that we're going to be eaten by the mechanical engineering department. So having 25 students is a really hopeful sign that maybe we'll get big again.
One thing that I've noticed about doing the limited teaching that I have is that it's kind of a let-down when you teach a class a repeated time, just cause you completely have to start over with the students; you get a batch of them through an entire semester and they mostly know all the course content, and then you have to start completely over once the next semester begins with a whole new set of students who -- not through any fault of their own -- don't know anything. It's not so bad with teaching surveying, cause at least I have spring and summer semester off; I remember it being really depressing when I TAed statics four semesters back-to-back and had to restart from vectors every single time. But I guess that's something you get used to after a while if you stay on the teaching end of things. I do like teaching surveying a lot.
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Mike and I went to see V For Vendetta at Strosacker this past Friday. This was the second time we saw it, and I really like that movie. I went to Borders on Sunday and bought the graphic novel and read it yesterday and today. I think like the movie more; sorry, Alan Moore! Mike and I also saw Little Miss Sunshine a couple of weekends ago. That's an entirely different type of movie, but I really liked that movie, too.
--
Ross very kindly built a laptop for me out of two broken and discarded laptops that Mike brought home from work. So I am now officially cool since I have a laptop, woo hoo! I was going to have super awesome geek cred and have it just run Linux, but we decided to put Windows on it so that I can use it to teach my class AutoCAD. So this semester I will be all high-tech with the projector in the computer lab, sweeeeet... We'll see if it works out correctly.
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Long weekends are great. Going back to school tomorrow may result in a really sleepy Judy.