I did well, I shouldn’t complain, I will anyway, but I shouldn’t. I came out of the semester with a respectable 3.23 GPA. That’s good by any measure.

It does fall short of my 3.5 goal though. 3.5 is important to me because that is the cutoff for the Dean’s List and I set myself very high standards.

I would like to be able to shift blame for not doing as well as I would have liked to my Bullshit nutrition class, or the inscrutable standards of my Public Speaking class, or as other people like to complain about the impossible standards of my Biology professor. I got Bs in all of those classes and that’s why I missed 3.5. The reason for it is blindingly obvious to someone who tries desperately not to lie to themselves, I earned those Bs. I did B work.

I had other stuff going on, my son had very scary health problems, stuff like that. The inescapable bottom line though is that I got the grades I deserved.

I rarely studied, I did all of my homework at the last minute and I missed assignments in all of those classes. Some of those assignments, particularly in Biology were easy to miss or forget about because a very small portion of them was online and under a moving time limit. Other students did them though, so who can possibly be to blame here?

My biology professor, despite a reputation he earned very early on for being a hard ass, was extremely fair. He told us at every turn what we were expected to know and where to find the information we were responsible for.

The standards in my Public Speaking class were inscrutable. I rarely knew even with a rubric for sure what I was being graded on. On the other hand there were days I didn’t go to class. We had assignments that I didn’t end up doing because of that. Those hurt me in the end, and it is completely justifiable that they should do so.

I’m not going to lie to you Nutrition was a bullshit class. I didn’t learn much of anything. however I did awesome on all of my assignments with the exception of a few quizzes with questions that had no right answers. I missed one quiz and one weekly assignment because I forgot about them. There were hard times during the semester like I said and my mind was often elsewhere. That’s not what, I want to say killed, my grade but, lightly wounded is more apt. Considering all of that I came out with a 93% overall. That was until our participation points were added. I hate, hate, hated, the class and any excuse as feeble as it could possibly be not to go, and I wouldn’t. I knew we had “iClicker” questions occasionally and it would severely hurt my grade if I missed to many of them, yet still I chose not to go to class.

So I missed my mark, because I didn’t do A work, I did B work, and it showed.

I have college Algebra over summer session and the writing class I withdrew from early in the semester to retake as well. I’m going to be doing my damnedest to do A work in these classes. I’m not taking enough credits to qualify for the Dean’s List because I have to pay for summer classes out of my own pocket. I need to make this up to myself though, I don’t owe the Dean anything.

I’m expecting a B in public speaking and somewhere in the range of an A in the rest of my classes, Nutrition might also be a B, but I don’t think so. I don’t know how people who aren’t as smart as I am do this. I don’t have to work that hard, things come easily to me, and I have no time for anything. This would be murder for a lot of people.

Summer session is going to be a lot simpler than I thought it was going to be. I’m taking two classes but not at the same time. I had forgotten that summer session is broken up into two parts. It turns out one class will be in the first part and the other in the second, which is fortuitous it will give me a chance to recharge my batteries a bit.

As time keeps slipping by me I keep thinking of the things I should be doing but am not. I should be finding employment as a CNA, it looks good on a med school application. As I keep watching the money from the two stories I have published, well one published and one half-assed published trickling in I keep thinking I should write more. It would be nice to get better at it, and I need to think about my future. That income could really help. I need to be getting in shape, I’m pushing 260 lbs. now and my goal of being back to nice solid Nordic 200 is getting farther and farther away.

It’s getting late and I have a lot of school work to do tomorrow so I should finish my musings another time.

I knew my folks were fine, and staying with one of my brothers in Bozeman. My mom called everybody to let us know they had been safely evacuated. When I was born we lived in a small two bedroom faux log cabin. When I was three or so it was struck by lightning and caught fire. The damage was really pretty superficial but the house was very small and my youngest sister must have been sixteen at the time and with me, it just wasn’t enough anyway. So my father with the help of many of the handy people in my family, my brothers and sisters from both sides of the family and their friends and associates. This little cabin we lived in was built up into a three story A frame house.

That was more than 30 years ago. It has an old cedar shake roof and trees crowding up on it on three sides. My father says when they evacuated, he wouldn’t have given a dime for the house. There was no way anybody could conceive that it would survive. The more I followed the news and tracked on a map which places had been confirmed to have burned, the less I thought it possible.

I was given hope that none of the pictures of burning buildings I saw where my folks house though. It’s kind of an iconic place for the community now. When people relatively familiar with the area ask me specifically where I grew up they always say “Oh, yeah, I know that place.” when I tell them. If it caught fire, due to the A frame style and deep porches on the front of the house it would likely go up spectacularly; and with the 8″x24″ beams ribbing the house it would leave a dramatic skeleton behind as well. I was certain it must have burnt but was surprised not to see any pictures of it.

By a minor miracle, or whatever you prefer to call it a slurry place flew over moments before it would have gone up and it’s fine.

The mail box burned down. The one you can read the numbers on is actually the neighbors, theirs is the one on its side.

So, yeah feeling pretty lucky about that.  The place across the street didn’t do as well. Their basketball hoop was untouched though, unfortunately I didn’t find a picture of that.

Oh also some of the chickens were okay.

That was months ago though. Ive been back twice since. We went over for Christmas, I didn’t think to take any pictures then, but that was the first time I’d seen Pine Creek since the fire. So much was gone it was unbelievable.

For the first time in my life my folks had a view. The drive to their house was always magnificent. The Absoroka Mountains are gorgeous, and they are to me the quintessential mountains. When somebody talks to me about mountains I see this.

Now you can see that mountain on the right from my folks dining room table. The only thing you used to see from the dining room table was trees. They were nice trees, but very thick.

I was hoping over spring break to find some morels. They come out after fires, Montana has a lot of them, I’m told, and few if any deadly false morels. I could be wrong about that, I’m interested in mycology but not well versed in it.

We got there and the kids wanted to look around. It was later than we had anticipated so the mushroom hunt would have to wait for the next day. We looked around the house instead. I took m daughter upstairs to look for bats, they often nest in the peak of the third floor porch. On this occasion there was nothing, not even droppings. I don’t remember there ever not being bat droppings up there. but then I saw this and thought it explained the lack of bat crap pretty eloquently.If you aren’t familiar enough with them to recognize this, it is an owl pellet. Maybe we’ll dissect it one of these days.

Out on the back patio, the lichen had just gone nuts. There has always been a few spots of lichen out there, but never anything like this. It makes me wonder if there isn’t some kind of relationship between wild fire and lichen. It’s easy to connect anything slightly unusual to the fire right now, whether that’s accurate or not.

There was a magnificent raptor of some kind flying around all weekend. There may have been more than one I don’t know, and I was never quite quick enough on the draw to catch a picture of it. It kind of felt like LARPing a game of Pokémon Snap.

The only animal we saw at my folks house that night was a rabbit that appears to live under the shrubs next to the road. He came out to munch on something in the front yard, then stopped for a few minutes to watch the sun set. That’s how I choose to interpret his stopping in the yard and staring at the sun until it set anyway. I guess there could be less anthropomorphic answers, but I don’t know what they would be.

The next morning I was going to take the kids across the road for the promised mushroom hunt. I pulled out my iPhone and found a picture of some morel mushrooms to show the kids what we were going to be looking for and they were both pretty excited to be going.

Until I actually started making the necessary, or as I saw them necessary preparations. First off obviously we needed a bucket, no problem. Then we put on our shoes, good so far. Then I told the kids that they could make as much noise as they wanted while we were walking around, Yay! Then I got the can of bear spray and started to give the kids the “if we see a bear” speech, wait, what?

That was apparently a deal breaker for my son. I was a little surprised by that given that my kids know that there are bears near Grampa and Grandma’s house. So he didn’t go. My daughter on the other hand couldn’t wait to go out and science the crap out of those woods. So just her and I went. I turned the volume all the way up on my iPhone and blasted sea shanties into the woods as we walked. (Don’t judge me.)

The neighbors, who knew we would be out looking for mushrooms, recently had most of the dead trees cut from their property. That made sense to me the were dangerous and somebody might get hurt. What doesn’t make sense to me are the trees like this one. It’s clearly dead and burned out, there is no hope that it might live. It leans kind of precariously. (towards me as I took this picture actually.) This wasn’t the only one like this. I almost wonder if they never bothered to actually look around their property when trying to decide which trees to keep.

I haven’t made a secret of this, but I kind of hate geology. Sorry if you don’t but it just doesn’t twiddle my dials. However The area around my folks place has some of the most iron rich rocks, I’ve ever seen.

I wonder what shattered all these boulders, there are many just like this one. I assume it was the heat of the fire, or more likely the subsequent cooling. Something about that doesn’t sound right to me.

I don’t generally allow pictures of my kids online, this one is probably okay. What I’m showing here is the birch trees in the background. When I saw them I thought perhaps for some reason the birch trees might be a little fire resistant. the answer is of course no.

These birch trees upon closer inspection have no bark from about 4′-6′ up from the ground. Another baffling why didn’t they cut these down moment for us.

My daughter noticed this one or I suppose I should say three. There are three distinct trees here complete with bark in the center. My guess is when these trees were standing it was indistinguishable from a single tree.

On one hand I wanted to count the rings, on the other hand that would have bored the ever living crap out of my daughter. She loves science but that love does have limits.

We found a deer skeleton. Given how intact the skeleton is and the presence of bears in the area I have to suppose that this deer probably died in the fire. It was a pretty stark reminder of what happened here, and how fortunate it was that nobody died.

Especially combined with the small pile of our neighbors possessions that managed to make it through the fire.

Then we went home, and had a lovely afternoon with all my maternal brothers and sisters.

It’s been a rough semester, like I said last time, every class is more work than I expected. Then a little over a month ago we took my son to the eye doctor. His optics discs were bulging a bit. This led to a series of events that ended in the little guy getting a spinal tap and me not getting a lot of work done.

So my Spring Break has largely been a wild ride of getting caught up on the things I should have done previously, but for whatever reason did not. Then I got one of the better pieces of news I’ve had this semester.

A little back ground.

Taking a quick run through the University Center (at other schools, it might be called the student center or student union) I passed a table for the school’s various study abroad programs. I noticed out of the corner in my eye, in small letters in a lower corner of a poster I saw the word Antarctica, it stopped me in my tracks.

I’m not a cool guy, never have been. So I like a fair number of things that uncool people like. Most relevantly here the works of Lovecraft and Poe. As a kid I always wanted to be an explorer. I was disappointed in about fifth or sixth grade when I realized that people had been just about everywhere on the planet and if I was going to be an explorer I would have to be an astronaut or something. This might make me a little weird as nerds go, but that didn’t really appeal to me.

As I grew older though I realized that yes people have been everywhere but there are places few have ever been and there are many discoveries to be made in those places. For the past few years Antarctica has been near the front of my mind at all times. When I turn on my computer in the morning one of the first things I do is to check my Google news feed.  Down near the bottom just before facial hair, technology, and business, I have Antarctica. I read every day about these amazing discoveries being made down there and I want to be a part of it.

If the truth were to be told my initial push to go back to school and to shoot for medical school, is largely in an effort to go to Antarctica.

Anyhow the nearer past, the kids at the booth were just starting to pack up, but I did manage to pick up a copy of all the brochures they had available. When I said that I was interested in Antarctica, they kind of mumbled something about applying through hrmnhrmmkrmrhrrrf. Apparently the requirements to go to Antarctica are a bit stricter than the other programs and one needs to apply directly through the school that handles the trip. A few minutes with Google and I discovered that that school is SUNY Brockport. I went to their web page and applied, rounding up all the documentation they require and sending it in.

With the things going on it took me quite a while to gather up the fairly simple documentation they require. I was a little nervous because My GPA is not awesome. Even with making the dean’s list last semester I only pulled my GPA up to 2.58 or so I forget exactly. The program requires a GPA of at least 2.5, so I knew I was pretty close to the bottom of what they allow.

Just as I was finishing up an assignment for my Nutrition class I got an Email saying my application status had been updated. But it didn’t give me any more information than that, When I checked on my application I had a hard time finding the right link and it just told me that a decision had been reached, and nothing more. I was starting to get frustrated because I wanted this so badly. Then I noticed a hyper link  and followed it to discover that I had been accepted into the program. It also gave me a laundry list of things I need to do. As you might expect I haven’t even had the chance to really look it over yet.

The next day I had to go over to my folks place and hopefully find some morels.

I ended up dropping my writing class, which I think I was only one of maybe two or three people who have had a 100% on all projects so far, just because it will be the easiest class to take at another time. I’m going to be working on my bachelor’s degree for another four and a half years and as much as I would like to get some of the bare bones work out of the way for it like this writing class, I need to keep in perspective that I have plenty of time. I am constantly looking for ways to reduce the overall time this is going to take because My GI bill is going to run out long before I’m done, and I’m on the hook for the rest.

There now you are caught up on where I am. i actually logged on here today because I wanted to talk about one of my classes in particular this week. This started as a G+ post but was starting to edge towards the ridiculously long so I decided to transplant it over here.

Steve Running came to our Biology lecture this week and talked to us about climate change. His data was pretty remarkable as one would expect I suppose.

He got me thinking about the problems of Climate Change and how to over come them. I think the only answer is genetic engineering. I don’t expect China and the US to stop burning massive amounts of coal, and everybody to stop using fossil fuels, that just doesn’t seem like a practicable solution. It wouldn’t be a solution anyway it would just slow the growth of the problem. Don’t get me wrong that’s a good idea, but it won’t “solve” anything in and of itself.

Instead if we want solutions, we need to genetically engineer organisms for more efficient photosynthesis and farm these organisms in centers where pollution is the worst, sunlight is the best or some combination thereof.

Additionally we need to plan for a world in which severe climate change is a reality. We need drought resistant grains and other food crops, we need to breed livestock that produces optimally under more arid conditions. In short if we are going to live in this world and every indication is that we are, we need to breed the organisms that are going to make that life possible, the sooner the better.

The generation of electricity is the main culprit here, sure cars play a part but not anywhere near the magnitude of electrical generation. We need electricity as humans in the modern age we really don’t have any way to sustain ourselves without it. Dr. Running suggested that he thinks the future of power generation is going to be personal level off grid solar and wind power. I think there is probably something too that. I think it would probably work well to power most homes, the problem comes in trying to power cities in some places this might work pretty well but I think in general those places are probably going to be an exception rather than the rule.

Instead I’m pretty certain that we need to overcome our fears of nuclear power and step up production of that. It is currently the cleanest most efficient form of power production that is practical on a large scale. It does have its dangers and its drawbacks like anything else, but if you look at how much power is produced by nuclear fission around the world, how long it has been going on, and how few problems have actually come from it, rather than how many popular culture tells us could come from it it seems like an obvious solution. It does generate a relatively small amount of nuclear waste that we have no real way to dispose of and that is an issue we need to work on as well. but if most personal electricity needs are met by using abundant natural and renewable resourced like solar and wind power that would also have the side effect of limiting the amount of nuclear waste that would need to be generated.

It’s an interesting thought exercise anyway, well at least to me it is.

So, I’m being more active, I’ve switched to not a vegetarian diet, but a more produce centric diet I would say. I have not yet figured out how to work in multiple small meals a day yet and do still eat just two or three big meals, which from my own experience as well as just about every study I’ve ever seen is not good for weight control.

My Anthro class I’m taking right now is not in the least bit challenging. My professor for the winter-session is using the simplest grading structure known to man. We have three exams of roughly equal weight each with 33 or 34 questions. These will be combined to give us our grades. Between the two exams we’ve had thus far I’ve missed a single question. The material is only moderately interesting to me, but it does provide me with little tidbits that spark my scientific imagination.

One of those tidbits was homeothemogenisis (that we maintain a constant body temperature). Of course as a biology student I am aware that humans are mammalian and part and parcel of that is being warm blooded. These are facts we are taught in elementary school and we tend not to think about again. When the professor was talking to us about cold adaptations in humans he mentioned in passing the energy requirements to maintain a constant body temperature and that got me to thinking about all the things we as humans can do to “waste” energy.

I looked at quite a few studies on these things and the question of wasting energy and its effect on weight loss has only been just touched on lightly. I think there is a lot of room for study in this area.

I found quite a few studies that looked at the energy costs of maintaining homeothermogenisis in a cold environment, they are surprisingly staggering, but only one of them seemed to consider the effect of this on weight loss and there it was only as a side note as a possible subject to examine further. It is quite cold in Montana in the winter our days have been having highs in the high teens or maybe low twenties these past couple of weeks. It was notably colder when I was growing up but I think it is subjectively reasonable to say that it is cold now. Given that I have been making an effort to go outside without a coat for a few minutes a day.  I wear gloves and boots to protect my extremities as well as a hat and scarf, but I leave my trunk exposed (more or less).

I also looked at the effect of sleep on weight loss. There has been a lot of work here, it is well documented that sleep deprivation can be linked in a positive correlation to obesity. However it takes energy to be awake. In trying to figure out how to use this I decided to try sleeping six hours a night, less than I’m used to but it shouldn’t be so little as to trigger sleep deprivation.

It turns out that six hours really works for me as a sleep schedule. I’ve been going to sleep at midnight and waking at 06:00. I’ve been waking refreshed and ready for the day. This is as opposed to going to sleep whenever I feel like it (sometimes earlier, sometimes later) and actually forcing myself out of bed at around 07:40ish.

I’m making an effort not to increase my food intake. My diet is garbage in general, but it is improving. I find it is a lot easier to make small incremental changes (and data supports this) than to try to make sweeping changes.

Unfortunately I don’t own a scale so I can’t measure what progress if any I’m making towards weight loss. I got my initial weight of 250 from my Wii Fit (as well as the fact that that’s up from about 236 a month and a half ago. The ancient television that it is hooked up to gave up the ghost a few days ago, and nobody in the household can be bothered to get the other even older TV from the master bedroom and bring it downstairs. This is especially true since our general quality of life has improved since the TV went out.

Subjectively it does seem like my pants are fitting a little better, which is what I’m really using as my measure for diet success anyway.

I did some stuff, such as going to my folks house for Christmas, with the kids.My folks have lived in the same place my whole life, well my father has any way, there was a divorce and my mother and I moved around the state a bit, then they got remarried and once again live in the same place. They have some pretty nice views now. That wasn’t the case last year. Over the summer there was a forest fire, one of the largest in the country and the deep forest around my folks place was pretty heavily burned back. There were quite a few neighbors who lost their homes, and my father who lost his paper boxes and that’s it gained some survivor’s guilt. Funny that, he fought in World War II, he is roughly of an age with my wife’s Grampa Santa, he never liked to talk about the war, but I never got the impression he had any survivor’s guilt from it, though to be fair I don’t think his ship really lost many men, but this fire in which nobody was killed (one person received some minor burns) has deeply affected him.

We have some family drama going on with the house, there. I am the youngest of all-told nine kids. I have no full brothers or sisters, they are all the children of one of my folks or the other, except for me. My youngest sister (on my mother’s side), who is older than me by 14 years lived in the house from a year or two before I was born, I think I wasn’t there, until she moved out at about eighteen or nineteen. One of my brothers (My father’s other son) stayed with our dad for a few months, when he was going through a divorce. When my father passed eighty he had lost most of his eyesight, his hearing, and not a small number of brain cells from when he repainted his El Camino in the backyard under some plastic tarps one winter. In my family on his side we tend to live until our early nineties he figures in his condition he doesn’t have quite that long so he has become concerned with his estate. I don’t know what my sisters want from him, though I’m sure he’s already given whatever it is to them if he knew. My brother told him that all he wanted was the El Camino. When my father could no longer see to drive he just gave it to him, he checked with me and I have fond memories of it but I didn’t really want it. Everybody (including my folks) always figured I would get the house, It was my home, I grew up there I’ve never been away from it an entire year in my life, not even when I was in the Army. Now it turns out my brother figures he’s entitled to that too, well I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, I live 250 miles away from it, but I don’t think my brother needs it. He lives in Washington and I imagine he’ll just sell it and pocket the money, he has an expensive wife. While I was over my folks asked if I would mind if they put me on the title with them so when (I’d say “if” but lets be realistic they are both in their eighties) something happens the house will pass directly to me without going through the estate.

When we managed to get home after the holidays, we wanted to take the kids swimming. We called everybody we knew with kids until we got to one of my gaming buddies, everybody was busy doing something else, except he and his wife wanted to take their son sledding, this was last Thursday, and they invited us to go with them. We did, we had a great time, all the kids had fun, right up to the point where my buddy’s wife broke her leg. We game at his house on Thursdays so that was pretty much that. Also the GMs kitty was going into renal failure, so game called on account of sad kitty and broken leg. This week it will be our cleric’s anniversary so he won’t be there but we’ll probably play with out him.

That reminds me. I used to like to draw, but I was always self conscious about it because there was, without fail, always somebody handy who was a much better artist than I. It got to the point where I hated doing anything related to art. Then I went back to school, and I registered for Public speaking, just so i wouldn’t have to do an art class. When I got my graded Biology Lab Notebook back there was a notation that my illustrations were excellent and if I wanted to pursue that I could probably make a good career of it. My wife saw that and figured that it was a shame that I don’t really draw anymore (probably at least a decade since I’ve really drawn anything) so she got me some art supplies for Christmas including a fountain pen with some drawing nibs and ink. I like to use fountain pens, and I know none of that stuff was cheap so I decided to give drawing a go again. Being the nerd that I am I used the Pathfinder Bestiary as a reference and drew my Pathfinder character. I’m a perfectionist so I keep seeing things I’d like to add or that I wish I’d done differently, but I’m told it’s good. I was thinking earlier today, that if I really wanted to improve on this skill, I should make time daily or weekly to do something like this. I find drawing kind of stressful though so that’s a pretty big “if”.

I am all in all pretty happy to be getting back to class. I am taking Anthropology 101 over winter-session, it’s only one class but it is three hours a day every day for pretty much the whole of January.

It seems like the class is designed to be an easy pass. I’ve heard that that is true with most winter-session courses. I’m not really sure what to do with this class though. In class I furiously take notes, I hand write down all the major points of the class, I rarely refer to them again, but the act of writing things down seems to be more the point. My professor has kind of made that superfluous though. He has already provided us with all of his lectures for the course, all of the study guides, and all of the handouts, in simple easy to read PDFs. I know that the furious note taking is part of my learning routine, and so far it’s worked very well and I don’t want to screw up the formula, but the practical person in me hates to write down something I already have written down.

I’m sure I’ve posted this in the past, but I slacked off a lot the first few times I tried college. My GPA heading into this semester was about 1.7, pretty terrible. I didn’t try, I didn’t care, I just wanted the piece of paper at the end and I didn’t figure it mattered what my grades were.

That’s why I’ve set my sights so high. I’m aiming for medical school, because I must do well to get there, it’s the doing well I really want. Fortunately so far this time through I have done well. I’ve gone from Academic Probation to the Dean’s List, my overall GPA is now 2.58. That’s not necessarily something to write home about but it is a huge improvement.

My lowest grade was not terribly surprisingly, Geology in which I received an A- or 3.7, across the board everything else that counted was an A or 4.0. My Algebra was an RA+, but because it was a remedial class it doesn’t figure into my GPA, which is a little disappointing given that I did so well.

I knew I was looking at an A in psychology, I hated the course but was doing exceedingly well in it the whole time. I knew I  had an A in Algebra, but wasn’t sure whether or not it mattered. I wasn’t sure what I was going to get in my Biology courses I needed a C+ in both of them and figured I had it and was hoping for a B at least in the lecture, but wasn’t sure if I would exceed that threshold by much for the Lab. Geology I felt like I was drowning the whole time, I was set to be happy with any passing grade just to clear the previous two failed attempts at it from my GPA.

My half-assed attempts will always remain on my transcript, but they will no longer count against my grades. Fortunately I had a chance to speak to my Biology Professor while he and my wife were both a little ill in the same clinic. He told me that my poor performance previously followed by dramatic improvement may actually work in my favor, when it comes to getting accepted to medical school. I hope that he is correct, and I have no reason to doubt him. He’s seen this attempted thousands of times in his over twenty years of teaching he knows how often it succeeds (rarely), and how often it fails (usually). Apparently every Biology major is planning on going to be a Doctor someday, and his usual attitude is jokingly dismissive of them. I always find it amusing because I’ve done the research and I know how few students are accepted each year.

I’m looking forward to taking Anthropology over winter-session, mainly just to get another class out of the way, and hopefully to bump my GPA a bit more.

When I first tried to come back to school I retook the lab, again it was at about five in the morning and I was working until midnight at the time. So again I failed it.

Of course that means I needed to take it for a third time. I made sure that I got a better class time, and attended religiously. This time though the class is much harder. Over all I was doing pretty well. Going into the final I was looking at a 90% for the class. Though my final lab score was my worst yet, which was disappointing for me since I felt pretty confident about it.

When I started the final I kind of started to freak out a bit, the questions required that I recite loads of Geology terminology, that I had forgotten. It struck me that, that’s one of the things I don’t care for in Geology, there is a lot of memorization. Memorization is not knowledge. I understand the concepts, concepts are easy and make sense and to me I see that as the important part. So where I didn’t know the word I tried to get away with explaining the concept for partial credit.

There is a limit to how negatively that can effect my grade. There where quite a few answers that I did know and I don’t want to give the impression that I feel like I did horribly. I would estimate that I’ll probably get a B on the test which should overall bring my grade to a high B or low A. Celebration is really in order because unless I am severely mistaken, I will never again need to know a god-damned thing about rocks.

Today is my last Final of the semester, in Algebra. I’m feeling pretty confident going into this, there is very little chance that I will come out of this class with anything but a high A. It’s a “Remedial” class so I don’t know how much that can effect my GPA, but we’ll see.

I missed only one question on my lab final, but got the bonus question so there I got 31/30. I still felt pretty bone-headed for missing the question I missed, if i had taken my time and actually looked in my lab notebook I wouldn’t have missed it.

The lower image is in essence what appears in my notebook, and the question was about the nerve cords, which like in most arthropods are ventral, I put dorsal. It’s a silly mistake.