School: July 2004 Archives

I had a bunch of spiral-bound notebooks which I had used for various classes, and each of them had about 25 remaining clean sheets out of the original 100. I would not be able to use the remaining sheets for another class easily, and it seemed a shame to let them go to waste, so I just did some surgery.

I snipped the coil locks with dykes, twisted the coils out, and assembled the clean sheets into a new notebook shape, with the back and cover from one of the disassembled notebooks. Then I twisted the coil back in through the holes and used pliers to make new coil locks.

Viola! A stringed instrument! And voila! A new notebook!

I'm now trying to decide if this makes me resourceful, crafty, and smart, or simply a huge lame-o loser who rebuilds notebooks in order to save $3.

You may wonder what happened to the notes from the classes. I've got them in file folders for now, but once I don't need them any more for school, they're going in the recycling bin. I learned that lesson the first time around: the only school notes I ever used after I finished school were my Shakespeare notes, and that was because I hadn't yet bought my trusty summaries of the plays that's ever so much better than my notes. Yet I toted that crap around with me for five years.

I spent the last couple of days down in SLO, meeting with my advisor, looking at places to live, and locating hardware stores and hobby shops (the basic needs of an architecture student).

Downtown SLO is kind of twee and slightly yuppy for my tastes, but workable. There was a shoe repair shop, which bodes well. I don't think much of people who can't support even one shoe repair shop.

The countryside out of town is breathtakingly beautiful, and reminds me of the countryside outside of Ithaca, with slightly different vegetation overlaid on it. Last night I went for a drive through the fields and got to watch a sunset through the fog, that brilliant orange light streaming across the crops horizontally, diffused by the fog and occasionally cut out entirely by the hills.

I liked one place I saw: a tiny bedroom, but lots of common space, a usable garage, and a house dog who is charming and well-behaved. If I lived there, Rosie could occasionally visit for short periods, as long as she was well-behaved. That has a great appeal. Also, there would be a small private patio that I could fill with plants.

I looked at a couple of more generic places, but they felt very dormitory-ish, and I really dislike the feeling that I would be asked to buy alcohol for my underage roommates all the time. Also, they were much more expensive.

My meeting with my advisor went well. I worked out a schedule for next quarter, but a longer-term schedule will have to wait because there was a mixup in the admissions office and they didn't realize they had to do transcript analysis for all of the transfer students. So I probably won't get my analysis until mid-fall. I was a bit surprised to find that I'd be taking 18 credits rather than the expected 15, but they're in the middle of curriculum changes, so in a way it was to be expected.

I register on Friday afternoon.

I apparently have a secondary personality. This personality is answering the phone for me, which is a handy function for a secondary personality. She's even speaking to the registrar at City College, discussing the status of my transcript, which I have been unable to do (as they do not answer the phone, and apparently are not keen on calling back people who leave them messages in a timely fashion).

How do I know this? Because I finally broke down today after my third phone call, no answer, and message left on the voicemail to never be returned, and sent them e-mail. This is the response I got:

We spoke to you today and reported the status of your request. Weve never received a message from you. Maybe you didnt leave a phone # or possibly we couldnt understand the message. Both of these things happen frequently. We answer messages on the day or the next day after they are received.

Which is odd, because I have been sitting here since I got home at 1:30, phoning various registrars and so forth to try to get this stuff all cleared up in time for my transfer to get finalized.

Not only that, but if they didn't get a message from me, why did they speak to me in the first place?

And who the hell did they speak to about my transcript?

And why didn't they simply tell me what the status is in the e-mail?