So it's been like a month since I last posted anything, mostly because I've been so busy I haven't had time to sit down and write anything.
Christmas break was pretty blahzay. I couldn't wait for school to start so I could stop sitting around doing nothing and actually get busy.
Well, school started and I'm not bored anymore. I moved up to Towson to live with Lena and Charity in late January and I commute down to UMBC everyday, it's about a 20-30 minute drive depending on traffic. Not bad. So far living with them has been a blast. The house wasn't in good shape when we moved in, needed some serious cleaning, but we buckled down and cleaned that place in the first week or so. We scrubbed the floors and walls and sinks and vacuumed and got it looking liveable. Here is my room so far - still needs some shelves and drawers to be able to put everything away, and the futon and the extra closet space are going to be taken out soon and my keyboard will be brought in.
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We had birds for the first week that the girl who lived there before had left behind. We did not want them though. Charity was going to take one home, and the other one we had to find a home for, so we asked around, tried to take it back to Petsmart but to no avail. So we took down their big cage and put them in the bathroom for a little while, but then we realized it was too dark and they couldn't find their food or water or each other so we brought them back out into the open and put them in a small cage with a box. She then took both of them home that weekend and was able to get rid of the other one on facebook. So no more birds for us.
So life is fun in Towson, hanging out with the girls, making dinner together, trying to stay warm by doing the cha-cha slide, singing at the top of our lungs and huddling under blankets.
School on the other hand...
I'm taking 5 classes - 15 credits.
Py332 (Statistics for Psychology majors part 2), this class is a continuation of the stats class I took at Shady Grove last year. The deal is though, the campuses teach it two different ways. Over the course of the year we have to come up with a research topic, and do an experiment and write up a review on the results. Last semester at Shady Grove we came up with our topics, and wrote proposals and sent them to IRB (the ethics board for research basically). At UMBC's main campus they start out the second semester with picking out a topic and preparing to write a proposal and then do the experiment (all in one semester). So everything we've covered so far I've already done, but I have to find a new topic and write a new proposal because using what I used last year would be plagiarizing against myself. Hmm...
The Exceptional Child, this class is a Psych class about Special Ed kids. So far everything we've gone over I've learned in multiple Education classes. So it's been pretty boring. The professor talks really quietly in a huge lecture hall and it can be hard to hear her. I'm hoping we'll get away from logistical stuff like IDEA and No Child Left Behind and move onto the actual children.
I'm also taking a History of Women in America class which so far has been pretty interesting. My professor is pretty cool, she brings in music and sound clips for us to listen to from whatever we're studying. We're starting out with the Civil War women and working to the present.
Sensation and Perception -- oh my goodness. From the moment the professor opens his mouth to the moment class is over I have no idea what's going on. Everything he says is over my head and about stuff I've never thought about before but the way he presents it is as if I've already considered all these things before. Questions like, what is real and what are the limits of something being real? Well... I don't know, it just is real. But apparently it's much more than that. Let's hope this starts to make sense soon as I have to think WAY outside of the box.
And my favorite class... the Jubilee Singers. My professor is so awesome and fun and a Christian. The choir is fairly small, with a lot of really good tenors and basses. There aren't too many girls but we can hold our own pretty well. We're singing some gospel type songs like "From the Fount" and "Striving after God" and the classic "Siyahamba" which I already knew from I Cantori.
In other news, Brandy died this week, we'd had her for 10 years and she died of cancer on Monday. :( She was a good dog, always calm unless we got her riled up, and never licked our faces because we didn't like that.
