So, this past 19th, a week from yesterday, I moved back to Cookeville. We had a couple of days for a training retreat, of sorts which mostly felt like a waste of time, so since I’m not doing big sibs for credit I didn’t go the second day and just slept in.

Thursday the freshman arrived, which mostly involved several hours of trying put together these infernal new bed lofts that they are renting out to dorm residents. Maybe if the beds themselves were new too, it would have been okay, but no, the lofts are very difficult to fit together on old, slightly mis-sized beds scattered around Murphy. The rest of the weekend was spend trying to rally the freshman out of their rooms to go do stuff, like play Super Smash Bros. Melee on the +70″ projection screen now installed in my room. Nathan and Josh had been planning on getting a projector since last year, and they just got one at the end of this summer, but they decided after a day to put it in my room, for room size considerations.

One thing I hadn’t remembered about the beginning of a semester was all the free food. It didn’t mean very much to me last year since I actually had a meal plan then, but this time the mention of free food perks up my ears a bit more. However, I still don’t go too much out of my way for it since my roommate, among other friends, has a meal plan with more than enough meals each week, especially if he goes home on weekends, so I get a lot of mooching opportunities for food from the cafeteria or grill.

Speaking of the grill, it just re-opened yesterday all remodeled (very nice looking) with the Blimpie replaced by a more generic, but better looking food-wise, sub sandwich place. Also added in place of the old generic burger grill is TTU’s very own Backyard Burger, still not open for business yet, but possibly next week. I’m looking forward to it very much. Our very own Chic-fil-A would have been awesome, but ByB is probably second best as far as quick-service food goes. Hopefully they will uphold ByB’s standards a little better than our campus Sbarro does.

I dropped my Thursday night American history class for a MWF morning honors section of the class. I’ll never go to the night class so I don’t know what it was like, but I definitely have a lot to look forward to about the honors section. It doesn’t sound much easier than the American history I was in last year, but I don’t think I’ll be struggling to stay awake in it like I did so much last semester. Physics is still humdrum boring just because it’s concepts I’ve seen before, though I don’t think I’ll be able to get away with not going to class like I did last semester. Discrete Structures seems to be a class about logic and proofs. So far it’s been about boolean logic, which doesn’t look to be very hard at all. I’m very much looking forward to what my C in Unix class holds in store for me. It feels like it my prove to be difficult, but I can’t imagine how it could require as much time as my Java class from last semester. I think I have a great professor for my microecon class, but I’m contemplating dropping it just because it may be a bit too much. I’m at 19 hours now that I signed up for a online Python class, and econ will probably be the first to go, with it’s mandatory $60 online coursework access fee.

I got a different work assignment for this year’s work scholarship. I’m working in ‘The Institute‘, which is a hidden-away office on campus. I had no idea what it was for, but from what I’ve gathered so far it’s the support center where teachers can go to get help for putting their course online with the web software that TTU uses. It’s pretty hectic in there this week since the switched over to a new system just this month (iLearn instead of the old WebCT). As long as I can learn it quickly, which I’m certain that I can do faster than anyone else, they’ll need all the workers they can get to walk various students and professors through the steps of using the new and more complicated system. I like it a lot more even though I’ll actually have to be doing something this year, compared to spending 95% of my time in the basement of Johnson hall playing Flyff.

Other news on the side: I’m planning on coming back this Labor Day weekend to get handfuls of stuff I overlooked in my packing. I got the brand new album from The New Pornographers: Challengers. I haven’t listened to it a whole lot yet, but my initial reaction is thumbs up. I learned how to play Magic the Gathering today. It was kinda fun, but not worth spending my time getting addicted to it. I went to Goodwill yesterday and got an assortment of speakers, some subwoofers and some satellites. Josh, Nathan, and I are working to set them up in a sort of homebrew surround sound system for the projector, powered by my PC. So far just the subwoofers are running in tandem with my regular computer speakers giving me an effective 2.3 speaker system (L&R satellites, LR&C subwoofers). It’s a bit overkill, but what-the-hey, it was from Goodwill. It was cheap. Oh, and I can’t wait to get my hands on my nifty new 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M once I get home. I normally wouldn’t have gotten it but I found this amazing page on the Creative site: their refurb page. Unlike most places: “Oh, hai. Buy refurb! Save 10% lolz!” Creative is giving you whooping 40-75% discount on their refurbished products, depending on what you’re looking for. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for a new set of nice speakers, a portable media device (or just an MP3 player), or a new sound card.
That’s just about it for me today. Look out for some pics of the new semester and more regular updates if I can stand it.