I’m Done!

With school! For now!

Digital Photography! A!

Biology! A!

Painting! A!

Geography! A!

History! B!

But, a B is still amazing considering that was the absolute worst class I have had so far, and I was fully expecting, and had made peace with the fact, that I was getting a C. On all 5 of the exams throughout the semester, there was not one that I completely finished. As I got to over halfway done each time, a little message would pop up saying “There is two minutes left. Please save your work as it will be submitted for grading.” And I would panic and quickly race through the rest of the test franticly clicking random answers hoping I would get some right. I never did. On the very last exam, however, I only had one single panicked click. One. And I missed three questions. I was fully expecting to get another D or a C on the test, because normally I always missed so many. I never had trouble on any of the assignments. I got full points on just about everything, except the exams. But since I did so well on the final, it pulled my grade up instead of down, and I ended the class with a final score of 84.66. I am very happy with that B.

My second worst class was Biology, but it turned out to not be nearly as bad as I had expected. The “horrible” teacher who made Joel and I split up in lab the first day, turned out to not be nearly as awful as she seemed. In fact, by the end of the class, I felt sorry for her because just about everyone else in the class talked about her behind her back, using language that, 70 years ago, would have gotten them 12 bars of ivory soap crammed in their mouths. She may not have been the greatest teacher in the world, but she did not deserve the names they called her when she couldn’t hear them. The only thing that made her “awful” was the fact that they didn’t like her tests, mainly because it was obvious they didn’t study enough, and half of them didn’t show up on the time, if at all. By the end of the class, 6 people had failed just because they missed so many labs, and most of the rest came very close to failing. It was their own fault they didn’t get good grades, but of course they blamed her. They were all adult age, but they acted like babies. It was very pathetic.

On the day of the final I was sitting outside the class studying, waiting for Joel to get back before I went in, and she came up and told me that she just wanted to tell me that it had been a pleasure having me in her class. I’m sure if Joel had been there she would have expressed the same thing to him, because out of all the other students, I’m pretty sure we were the only two not to either give her any grief or gossip about her with the other students.

Geography was an okay class. I took it because I had to, but I did choose it out of a bunch of other classes because I don’t think I know enough about geography. I still don’t but I know a lot more now that I did, and I plan to keep learning. You may recall THIS post, well, I still have that coloring book, and we actually only used it during the last two weeks, which is a shame since I think it really helps you learn. So I plan to just keep working on it, and I’ll just keep on learning as I color in it.

Digital Photography was my best class. besides the reports I shared from geography, that was the class that I shared the most on here from. I learned the most, and it was the class that in the long run will probably benefit me the most career-wise.
My other favorite class was Painting 1. I had a lot of fun in that class, and now that class is out I have all my paintings back, so I will start sharing them on my blog. I just need to get them set up and photographed. That will have to wait for a little while though because most of my free time will be spent getting ready for Christmas. Thanks to my Digital Photography class, I will be using my newfound knowledge of Photoshop to restore more pictures for my Grandma’s Christmas present. (See! It’s already coming in handy!) :) She knows I’m restoring them, as I had told her a few months ago that I needed to for a class for school, but she probably isn’t expecting me to get them all printed up for her for Christmas. So if I have time before Christmas I might get some of the paintings up on my blog, but otherwise it will have to wait until the holidays are over. Either way, I’ll get them up here eventually.

Next semester I am taking a graphic design class, just a basic one to brush up on the subject, since it has been about 4 years since I went to ITT Tech. That will be an online class as it wasn’t available in a classroom setting. Not sure how it will work, but I’ll find out I guess. I am also taking my LONG awaited Design 2 class, with one of my favorite teachers. I loved taking that class in my first semester. If you’ll recall that was the class where I learned how to use a sewing machine and I made a kite that wouldn’t really fly, except to swoop down and attack the person who was launching it. :p You can re-read all about it and see the pictures HERE if you’d like. :) This time Joel and I will be taking Design 2 together, as he had a different class to take during that semester and he took Design 1 the following semester. Joel and I are also taking a class called Digital Drawing, which is another graphic design class. Due to the name of the class we are hoping it will be making use of drawing tablets, (The computer kind). The other class we have together is Painting 2. No waiting over a year for the second class here. :) I loved the first class, and we had a great teacher, so I am really looking forward to this one as well.

Well, that’s all my news for now! I’d better get busy on Grandma’s pictures, only 6 days left until Christmas!

The Nightmare is Over!

Well, the day that I have been dreading all semester has come and gone. Do you remember what I said I did not want to do? Here’s a hint, Biology. Here’s a second hint, Baby Pigs. Yeah. Thankfully it wasn’t as bad as my imagination had made it out to be. I still wouldn’t in a million years choose to do it over again, but it wasn’t as dreadful as I had thought it would be. It was made a whole lot less awful by the fact that there was only one pig per table and another guy at my table wanted to be the one wielding the scalpel. So I didn’t have to do any of the slicing and dicing. I still had to watch and help find organs, but I was ok with that. The actual cutting was what I wanted to avoid. So I’m quite happy that that is behind me now. :)

On another positive note, our Photoshop class has FINALLY have moved into the Mac lab at the art center! Of course, we’re two thirds of the way through the class, now, but at least we get some time in there before the semester ends… Today we pretty much learned the basics of how to use a Mac. It was very easy. And fun too. When I have enough money I’ll be switching permanently to using Mac products.

In painting class we’ve done quite a few more paintings, but I haven’t gotten photos of any of them yet. I don’t want to photograph them while they’re still wet, and I haven’t seen them after they’ve dried to take pictures. Which is for the best in the case of my self portrait. I look like I have leprosy. When I get it home I’m repainting anything that has skin tone. And this time I’ll be using store bought pre-mixed flesh tone. I won’t be attempting to mix my own skin colors anymore…

Well that’s about all the interesting school news I have for now. One of these days I will get my paintings posted. It may not be till the end of the semester, but I will post them! :) What I won’t be posting is pictures of us dissecting pig fetuses. No one wants to see that…

Not Much News

I haven’t really had anything to blog about, so I haven’t posted in awhile. School is going pretty well. The worst class is my history class. That I have not been getting all A’s in, but at least this is not for lack of study. It is an extremely hard class. The teacher makes all the questions in such a way that it is impossible to find the answers quickly. The tests are open book, but that hasn’t helped one bit. The first exam had a two hour time limit, and I believe it had 75 questions. I wasn’t even able to finish the test before the time ran out. In most of my classes, (And I don’t say this to brag, it’s just a fact) I am almost always one of the top students, so If I wasn’t even able to finish it, I hate to think what the test might be like for all the other students. There’s another exam coming up this weekend, so you can pray about that if you think about it. For Joel too, as he is having the exact same problems as I.

Biology has been going pretty well. I did much better on the second test, an A. :) This week in lab we made yogurt. and then two days later we tried it.

 

It was nasty.

 

Painting class has been going well. I am loving it. No photos to share yet, but I’ll take some soon. This week we learned how to stretch our own canvases for our next project. A self portrait. Not really looking forward to that…

I’m having fun learning Photoshop. :) Here’s a picture that I decided to improve. :) It may end up on my photoblog in the future, but here’s a preview for now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was quite pleased with how it turned out. It really looks like it was taken out in the wild instead of an indoor jungle! :)

Tomorrow I have my monthly Photo Club meeting at the zoo, so I will be getting lots of new pictures to share. I actually still have a bunch from last month that I could post, but I haven’t found the time to go through and edit very many yet. Hopefully I find some time this month for my photo blog. I think I made only 7 posts this month, and two of them were yesterday!

Well, I’d better go for now, I need to get up early if I’m to make it to the meeting in Omaha by 9 in the morning!

Bad Habits = Bad Grades

This week I got a terrible grade on my biology test. The grade I got was an 85. Some people would say that’s nothing to be ashamed of. An 85 is a B and is considered above average work! Yes, a B is a good grade, but it is not the grade I could have had if I had applied myself better, and actually, the grade could have been a lot worse. After I finished the test, I knew I had a very low grade. I was expecting a C at best. When I saw the 85 I was shocked. There had been two bonus questions worth 4 points, but I did not expect them to pull my grade up that much. As I suspected, the teacher had curved the grade. I wasn’t the only one who did terrible on the test, so she added 7 points to everyone’s score, bring up the student who had the highest grade to a 100. (This did not help some students, I think she said there were at least 6 people who failed, even with the grade curve and the bonus points.) I would have had a low C were it not for these circumstances.

So, in light of all that, we come to the reason that I am writing this blog post. I am giving up a lot of things that are wasting my time. I think that the B was a warning that I needed to cut down on the amount of time I waste with “Entertainment”.

The first thing I have decided to do is cut WAY back on YouTube. I’ll still watch things from a very select group of artists, MysteryGuitarMan, The Piano Guys, but I am going to go through and unsubscribe from almost all of what I watch. Anything that is mindless entertainment.

The second thing I’m going to do, is give up watching most of the TV shows that I download. Don’t worry Shaina, I’m not talking about any of the shows I watch with you. :)The ones I am getting rid of are any that are mainly just more mindless entertainment. Most of them sounded good, but really aren’t that great. I started them though, and I am mildly curious to see how things turn out so I keep watching.

Lastly, I have decided to get rid of my Northern Imagination blog. Lately it has become nothing more than a place where I share YouTube videos. Since I no longer will be watching much YouTube there is no reason for me to keep that blog running. If I ever do come across a great video, Facebook will have to suffice for my sharing impulses. Anything else I wrote on Northern Imagination, such as humorous pieces, silly rants, etc. will be perfectly fine here on My Random World. That’s where I started writing stuff like that to begin with, and given the infrequency in which I write them, they really do not warrant a second blog.

With giving up these time wasting activities I am going back to putting school first. I do not want a repeat of the last biology test. If I get a B in something, I want to get it knowing that I did my best. I don’t want a B knowing that I could have had an A.

I also hope to have more time now to work on my photography blog as I have been neglecting it lately. If I have time after homework and before I leave for work this afternoon, I am going to do some work there. I think I am going to go redesign it slightly. I don’t like having all my links down below the posts, so I am going to move everything to a sidebar. Unfortunately this means going back to a slightly smaller picture, but I’m keeping it wide enough that it will still be very large.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I felt like I needed to write this, because if I didn’t “Put it out there” so to speak, I would probably just revert back to wasting time again. This way I have a little more accountability, and am a lot less likely to go back to my bad habits. Now if you’ll excuse me, my history book is calling me.

2 Weeks…

Today Mom, Dad, and Jacob left for Montana, leaving Me, Joel and James home by ourselves. What will we do for two weeks without them?
If we were another, less responsible family we’d probably throw a party every night, but sadly we have too much school to do. James has now started college as well, and though he doesn’t drive to Council Bluffs with Joel and me, he still has a full load of classes to attend at the Harlan campus and on-line.
This week is Joel’s and my third week of school, and it’s getting a little better than the first week. I’m still not sure what I think of our teacher in Biology. She’s not the friendliest teacher in the world, but so far she’s not given me any more reason to dislike her.
Digital photography is still rather boring, as we so far haven’t really done much of anything. Despite the name of the class, it is more about learning how to use Photoshop than it is learning how to take pictures, and so far we haven’t even opened the Photoshop program. I hope the contractors get finished with the new section on the Art Center soon so we have somewhere to go…
Painting was a lot more fun the second week. We painted color wheels, which although not as exciting as a regular painting, was a good exercise in color mixing. It was still pretty fun.
Well, I think that wraps it up for now. I have a bunch of pictures I need to edit and when I get them done I’ll have posts of pictures from James’ graduation party, new pictures of our kittens, and a bunch of new pictures for my photoblog from the zoo.

I’ve Been Rather Busy…

So I’ve kind of been neglecting my blog the last few days. I hope that this will not be a continuing habit, as I like to make regular posts, but with being back in school now, it is kind of hard.

School is going ok so far. And by ok, I mean simply that, ok. It isn’t going great, but it isn’t going bad. The reason it hasn’t been going great, is for many reasons, each class has had its own form of unpleasant-ness.

Digital Photography is the first class. To begin with, on the first day we received an e-mail from our teacher, telling us that class would be held in another room, in another building, clear across campus. (By the way, this teacher was my teacher in Photography 1 and both Joel’s and my teacher a year ago in Launching the Imagination) So we go to the new room and find our teacher standing outside with a huge group of students. The room had been reserved for a faculty meeting. So we had no room and ended up going back to the art center and having a very abbreviated class in the entry hall. The reason the class had been moved was because the room that we were supposed to be using has not even been finished being built yet. It was supposed to have been finished quite some time ago, but has not been yet. Apparently this new room will be a state of the art Mac lab with scanners and printers and everything a computer artist could ask for, so hopefully, this inconvenience will be worth it.

Biology is the second class, and it is so far the worst class I have ever taken. (This is not to say it’s awful, as I haven’t ever taken any truly awful classes, but in the time I have spent at school, this one wins for most unpleasant) I really hope it will get better, but when someone gives you a bad first impression, it is very hard to change your mind about a person. Our teacher gave me a bad first impression by telling Joel and I that we were not allowed to work together. She did not ask nicely, she straight-up told us, “One of you is going to have to move.” She has some sort of problem with relatives working together and claims that one will do all the work and the other will do nothing. I don’t know what kind of wacko-land she’s from, but this is not a problem that exists solely between relatives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that when this is an issue, it almost always will be with non-relatives. Regardless of her issues, the appropriate response to finding out that we were related would have been to explain why she has an issue with it, and then request that we find a different partner, instead of treating us like misbehaving kindergarteners.

Other than the teacher, I like the class, the material is pretty fascinating. I have always loved science, that is why I wanted to take this course to begin with. I just didn’t count on having a vicious harpy for a teacher. Ok, so she isn’t really that bad, I’m still just ticked off at her, so you’ll have to excuse my hyperbole. I’ll get over it, and blogging about it helps. :) Also, I tend to (Sometimes foolishly) look for the good in everyone, so I’m sure I’ll warm up to her eventually. (Unless she really is evil… :p) I don’t think she is trying to be a “Mean ol’ school marm”, she did say many times that she was having an especially bad day, so that most likely played into her demeanor. I think once I get over the teacher, I will really like the class. Until November that is…

Toward the end of November there is a day in biology set aside for dissecting a pig fetus, so I have been thinking of ways to have a tragic accident or get myself deathly ill in order to avoid that day. So far I haven’t really thought of any diseases or injuries that I’d rather have, so I may just end up having to go anyway. It’s not like I’m too squeamish, and am going to puke at having to cut up a baby pig, I just do not want to do it. (If there were no such profession as “Butcher” I would be a vegetarian. There is no way I’d kill an animal myself for food.) That particular class is in late November though, so I can always pray for divine intervention in the form of an interstate-closing blizzard… You can pray with me if you’d like. :)

The last class that we have to travel for is Painting 1. “What!?” you ask. “Why didn’t you have a great time in that one?! You’ve been looking forward to it all year!” Well, after traveling almost an hour to get to the class, all we ended up doing was going over the syllabus and introducing ourselves, with the promise of getting started next week. So almost two hours of drive time for twenty minutes of sitting in a classroom, when what I wanted to be doing was learning how to paint. That’s why it wasn’t a great class. I hope that the second day of Painting, which is tomorrow, will be better. Speaking of which, I really need to be getting to bed…

Before I go, I’ll quickly mention my history and geography classes, which are on-line. Both of those only fall into “Ok” territory, because they are mainly reading and fact memorizing. I was really looking forward to using the geography coloring book, but that doesn’t get used until toward the end of the semester, so that was somewhat of a disappointment too.

So all in all, my first week of school was not a good one. I am forever an optimist though, so I’m sure that it will get better. :) I can’t wait until my first real painting class! :D

The Start of a Busy Week

Today I worked, which is not completely unusual, but it was the first day of what will be a long and busy week. Tomorrow school begins again!
Tomorrow morning Joel and I have Digital Photography, followed by Biology, which is split into two classes, a lab and a lecture. This will pretty much take up the entire day, as the lecture doesn’t end until a quarter after four.
Wednesday, we have Painting 1, which I am quite excited about! That class lasts from 1:30 to 4:30.
Thursday is about the same as Tuesday, but without the lab.
Friday and Saturday I work from 2 till 10 on both days! I rarely get 8 hour shifts, and I am quite surprised that they scheduled me for all three days that I told them I could work! That almost never happens!
Then on Sunday we are having a graduation ceremony/party for James. We’ve been waiting to have it until after Jared got back from Afghanistan, so that he could attend.
I’m not sure what the next week will hold as far as work, but my school schedule will get even busier, as I start my two on-line classes, history and geography. Speaking of which, guess what arrived in the mail today!

I am way too excited about my geography class. :)
Well, I had better get to bed. I’d like to be able to get up at a halfway decent time in the morning…