Back To School

Hello!

Well, Christmas break is over and I'm back at school. I finished my first day of my second semester classes, and it was pretty nice to be back in class, I must say. Break was fun and relaxing, and it was exciting to see people in Fremont again.

I came back to Provo on Thursday night, and Julie, Alan, and I stopped at the U of U for a quick little tour of their GORGEOUS campus. I'm so jealous that BYU doesn't look like that. BYU's buildings are actually... pretty ugly, I'll admit. U of U had some gorgeous old buildings, along with a lot of historical stuff that was cool to hear about (Alan loves facts, so he was spouting them out as we walked around campus about which army came through exactly what spot and who stayed in each house, etc).

And I'd been so excited to go back to the snow after hearing about these storms and how it snowed like crazy when we left, and I get there and.... its gone. Pretty much all of the snow was gone or had turned to inches thick layers of ice. Apparently a few DAYS before I got back the weather decided to suddenly get really warm and melt everything. It was so warm that on Friday Mallory and I were walking around with short sleeves in the snow.

So Mallory got back Thursday afternoon before I did, and Julie came back Tuesday. Krista came back Friday and then Somers and McKenzie came back Saturday, but McKenzie only dropped in for a few minutes before she left, and then she came back Sunday night.

Today for my classes I only had anthropology, american heritage, and biology. I have anthropology with Somers and McKenzie at 10, and then at 11 is american heritage in the same room, and I have that with Somers and Alden. Then at 12 I have bio, and I found out that Sarah Topham and David Grimm are in my class. David just now came up for the winter semester and has been working at home, and I've only seen Sarah a few times around campus, so it was nice to see them again.

My biology class is a little... weird. My professor hates big classes and ours is about 300 students. He also loves birds... and so we had three required books to buy for the class, ALL of which were on birds. Bird tracks, bird sounds, bird feathers, bird species... EVERYTHING about birds. There was no book required on biology in general... just the bird books. And one of the bird books makes me feel like I'm four because it has a little button on the side that makes bird noises and it reminds me of those little kid books with the buttons that have the picture that corresponds to whatever's on the page and they press it to hear the noises. That's.... basically one of my textbooks. We also have no tests in that class, which is sweet... instead he gives us crazy essay assignments in which we have to answer questions such as: What's in an egg? or What is a snake? And he wants us to be creative, write poems, and whatnot. He also has a piano in his... biology classroom... and he started playing Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera to demonstrate how he would describe a bat. He started singing the lyrics, "Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation. Darkness stirs and wakes imagination.... Slowly, gently night unfurls its splendor..." etc. And he was like, that's how I would describe a bat! That class... is sure to be interesting. He also wants us to have a field trip every friday during our class. We meet every monday, wednesday, and friday, and he said he wants for almost every friday to be a field trip where we go look at birds or something... I don't know. He's a little... odd. :)

My other two classes seem fine though. American Heritage will be okay so long as I keep up with the readings and study a lot for the tests.

In about a half hour we have FHE, and its the whole ward tonight because we have 13 new members of our ward, so tonight is just a mingling night so we can meet them.

Tomorrow I don't have a class until 1:35, which is pretty sweet. I've got philosophy 150 and CHum 200 tomorrow, which I'm pretty excited about. I think those will be my two favorite classes this semester.

Hopefully things go well tomorrow!

-Cate