Tomorrow it will snow.

I breathe a sigh of relief and relax in my chair, my Journal page set up and my first post written. It is 11:45 PM ET. Thank you Zonelets for the relatively painless setup, and to A. N. Lucas for the .gifs I am using (at least temporarily) for some bits of this part of the site. I will probably continue to tweak this area quite a lot to make it more "my own", but I don't plan to make too far of a departure from the Zonelets script. My HTML is already messy. I shudder to think of how I'd approach Java.

I am taking three lab courses this semester, and each of them is delivered in an exclusively* online format, which I'm absolutely certain is going to pull me into a deep depression later on in the semester. Human Anatomy is, so far, a generally decent online-only classroom, but I'm bummed enough about missing out on cadaver study (!) that I'm going to get in touch with my professor to see about sitting in for one of the classes that's running in person, if there are any at all. I mostly want to learn by drawing, which you can only do so much of from a screen.

*Okay, not exclusively. All of the exams for Intro to Microbiology are to be taken at the testing center on campus. The first of these was today. I stepped foot on the campus of the school I've been attending for two years for the first time ever at around 1 PM. I have no idea how I did on the exam, though. Grades haven't been posted yet. I moved out of my apartment this past weekend, and I do... very poorly with changes in routine (I'm probably autistic, but nobody qualified has ever told me that to my face), so I had a lot of trouble staying focused and studying. I think I probably passed, but not much further than that. I didn't take very good notes this time, but I'm going back to make up for it.

I still don't know what to think of the Intro to Chemistry course I'm taking. I'm making an okay grade (aggressively okay) and I've got about the same frustrations with Chem and Microbio: I don't know how useful any of this is, when done completely online. Theory without practice. It seems like that's important enough and there must be plenty to learn from doing things this way, but essentially: It is on me to teach myself.

As such, I've got another page that I'm hoping to update pretty soon where I'll be posting the notes I take for my courses. I read a bit of advice somewhere a while ago that was to the extent of "study for your prerequisite courses like you are studying for the MCAT", so to that end, I'm reforming my note-taking to suit the purpose of being generally accessible resources for the subjects I study. No promises on when those will be posted, and it's not like anybody's waiting with bated breath for my meticulously handwritten anatomy notes, but I like to think that's about as good of a service as I can do as far as archival goes. Free knowledge, from my brain to yours...

I would have class tomorrow, but snow days apparently count for online college, too. After a disappointing, mediocre first showing with my exams, I plan to spend some time after I complete my chemistry assignments for tomorrow essentially doing a full overhaul of my notes with the nice pens I have here. I was in a weird situation before I moved because everything was put away.

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