Mindscape

I'm Back!

Hello dear readers, however few you may be! I am finally back home from the spring semester of college! I have to say, while this semester had the least amount of classes that I've taken since my fist semester, it was by far the busiest.

I took five classes, and boy did they keep me occupied. It was busy, but it was also a lot of fun. I took a ceramics class, which was a bucket list activity, and holy cow was it time consuming. I'll put pictures of the stuff I made on the next post after this one. English also took up a lot of my time. I wrote a personal essay, a profile essay about my brother, and a research essay. I'll try to post those to my Collections thing after a few revisions. Speaking of which, I think I'm going to merge my two little collections book things. I really liked that English class. I feel like it helped me advance my skills as a technical writer.

Sociology was pretty okay, but the professor was hard to understand. He had this deep Cajun accent, and he would repeat things constantly but mix up his words just a bit to where the subject matter didn't really make sense. History was history, which is to say I'm majoring in it so I love it and find it fascinating, although my professor had a major hate-on for Russia and was trying to teach us about events that are currently unfolding and are not considered history yet because we don't know the whole story yet. I tend to go by the 10 year rule of thumb, but to each his own I guess.

The last class I took was Honors Forum. That class angers me more than any other that I've taken so far. And I have to take it again if I want to graduate with honors. I did not learn a single thing in that class aside from what I researched for the final project, which was a group project we got to pick the subject for. The professor didn't teach us a single thing. Instead, she brought in a bunch of other professors to do lectures that we had to summarize. And the worst part? The class doesn't go toward my major requirements or my GPA. It only counted for one credit hour, so instead of having five classes with fifteen credits, I had five classes with thirteen credits. I want to finish as soon as possible without accruing extra debt by taking more than sixteen credits per semester (there's a huge fee for taking more than fifteen hours), so this extra random class that I'm being forced to take is getting on my last nerve. I'm trying to take fifteen hours per semester so I can graduate in exactly two years, but this one class would have thrown me off if I hadn't taken eighteen hours the last two semesters.

So yeah, that was my semester. I got a Satisfactory in Forum, a B in history, and A's in everything else. That puts my semester GPA at 3.75 and my cumulative GPA at 3.5. If I can keep it there or preferably bump it up higher, I'll be gold. But enough about my school! I've been home for a bit less then a month now, but this is the first time I'm actually free.

First, my mom graduated nursing school. Now she has her associates degree with only a few credit hours away from having her bachelors, and she plans to get her masters sometime in the future. All she has to do now is pass the NCLEX and she can start working. She's really excited and we're all so proud of her!!

Next, my whole family (minus my dad and bro because of work) drove ten hours to my aunt's house for my cousin's high school graduation. The ceremony was held in this huge convention center on a basketball court and there were several other graduations being held in different parts of the building. My cousin walked and we cheered for him and he pointed up at us and we got some great pictures. The valedictorian speech was emotional and gave everybody goosebumps. There were 300+ graduates. It was way better than my own HS graduation. We had 150 graduates and 10 valedictorians and two salutatorians who all gave speeches. Ugh. We spent a week there, and it was so great seeing everyone together. We helped my aunt pack for their big move to California in a few weeks, so everything is all squared away and they're ready to make the trip.

Last, my big brother got married. My family was in charge of decorating the bridal shower and all of the rehearsal. Everything turned out beautifully. We had to make a lot of the decoration by hand. The colors were cobalt blue and white. The bride's sister is allergic to flowers so they all had to be fake. Fake cobalt blue flowers are super hard to come by (non-trashy-looking ones at least), so we painted a lot of them. The ceremony was beautiful and I teared up a bit. My mom cried and all my aunts cried and my bro cried and all the groomsmen cried and it was great. The reception was good, as was the food. We had a groom's cake made for my bro, and it was Star Wars themed because I know my bro. He absolutely loved it. All his groomsmen loved it too. But the wedding cake. Sweet lord in heaven that was the most amazing cake I've ever eaten. It has ruined me for other cake.

But yeah, everything is finally done now. We're all so tired. We got back home yesterday and unpacked and just chilled for the rest of the day. I played with my fur baby outside for a while and it rained for most of the day.

Also! I got a summer job! Well, more like a job handed to me by association and it's better than my other option of going back to working at the nursing home. My dad took over the regional branch of Space Walk after the last guy got fired. For anyone who's unfamiliar with Space Walk, it's fun jumps and blow-ups and stuff. We have eight units that we rent out to people, plus a snow cone machine. Right now I just help set up, take down, and clean the units, but my dad is teaching me how to do the contracts and computer stuff. It's hard work doing the tear downs since the floats are so dang heavy, and the cleaner we have to use practically melts my fingerprints off, but we can set up a unit any time we want for free.

So yeah, that's it. I'm finally going to be more active on here again.