First week

Friday marked the end of the first week of classes for me in my re-entry into academic life. Actually, it's a kind of strange segue from work to school, because here we have one intensive course all day every day for the first week. So, less than a month after leaving my job I find myself on an 8:30-5:30 schedule again! But luckily the day is broken up into lectures, activities, group work, and discussion, so the tedium of all-day class is kept at a minimum. (Of course, it doesn't keep me from nearly falling asleep at least once per day). The point of the class is to understand theories about working in multicultural groups. To do so, each class is divided into small work groups. I got very lucky and got a really great, nice group. We work together well and have a lot of fun. That's definitely made this week much easier.

In our studies and class discussion of team work, sometimes I have to laugh because we are covering so many topics that I find extremely relevant to my past work experience. In fact, we even used some of the vocabulary that was used in a work retreat I attended with my department at Penn State this past May. Luckily, the environment is so different, that concepts which seemed completely cheesy and stupid when presented in May (to a highly cynical group of co-workers) seem to make complete sense and be extremely useful in this supportive academic environment.

In other updates, I got a work-study job at the library, which is good. It's not a typical library front-desk job, where I might have time to do some homework, but it's a very flexible job for which I can define my own hours each week. I registered for four classes which will start next week, and I'm pretty pleased with my class schedule. I have Fridays free and on Mondays my class doesn't start until 6:15 PM.

I've been taking the bus to school, which is really easy, and free for me since I'm a student. I have about a 5-minute walk to the bus stop, so that will make it easy in the winter when I can avoid driving in the deep Vermont snow. So far Nate seems to be enjoying being a stay-at-home boyfriend, with financial stability for at least a couple of months from his work as a Tour Director this summer. We picked up a few more items for the house yesterday, like a small bookcase and an ironing board, but hopefully that will be the last time for a while that we haul heavy items up to our 3rd floor home. We also bought a rocking chair at the Salvation Army and are pretty psyched to have that! I'm already envisioning cold winter evenings in the rocking chair with a glass of wine, a blanket, and the cat on my lap. Nice. Oh, yeah, and a few books to read and papers to write, too. But let's not worry about that just yet.