Welp, as of now I have been to every single class I will be in for this semester, and boy is it gonna be a long one. My intro programming class is basically just teaching me how to program in a program I've already been using for a year. I thought it was going to be the more interesting and intense aspects of the program.

I was wrong.

Sadly, it's one of those pesky required classes, and so I can't exactly just skip it. [Insert heavy sigh] The good news is that it's only half the semester, so after fall break no more silly programming class for me, and one less final at the end of the year. But in general, most of my classes are pretty relaxed. For one thing, I can actually understand my calculus professor, and he patiently explains everything you need to know. My last professor just stood at the front of the class and would ramble about math that might or might not have been related to the topic at hand. He was obviously brilliant at math, but he was the worst teacher I have ever come across.

Chinese 201 is going to be the death of me though. The teacher walked in on the first day, I had previewed the vocab, hadn't gotten lost,  I was feeling good. She walks to the front, writes her name, turns to face us with a smile on her face. What a liar. She says, still smiling, "My english is not good, and you're here to learn Chinese, so no more english." And then she exploded in Chinese. I was not prepared. And being a native speaker, she's naturally a very fast speaker. Chinese is a fast language. Chinese people seem to always be in a hurry, and everything is about speed. You can definitely hear it in her lectures.

I've slowly begun to grasp the concept of listening and responding in Chinese, but she still talks fast. I feel like even if I was fluent, it would be very hard to keep up with just how fast she talks. I enjoy it, it's certainly a challenge, and oddly enough it is my hardest course out of an entire semester of engineering classes. Meredith came back from her summer program talking in complete sentences, and not a whole lot of pauses, so at least I have a live-in tutor for when I need help studying.

I also TA for two separate classes, both intro courses of course, but they are two distinctly different professors. They are certainly interesting people, but I definitely favor one over the other. And I just remembered that I have to make a lesson plan for my upcoming days, where I am the only teacher and the actual professor doesn't have to be there. Fun times.

Not much else has happened in class, because I go to boring classes with boring people. However, the apartment is alive and well. I love grocery shopping, I love cooking, I almost wish I had just gone straight to the apartment freshman year, but oh well, what's done is done. The dorms weren't bad, my roommates were okay, I suppose. But there was almost an air of not being on campus. In all honesty, I feel more studious in my apartment than I ever did in the dorms.

And speaking of roommates, Operation: Keep the Fish is a go. Thanks to Gabi, we found a fish that is almost an exact copy of my roommate's fish that I babysat over the summer. She actually wants it back, but I've grown attached to the damn thing, and in all honesty it was mostly mine to begin with. She got it for a birthday present, and then promptly forgot to take care of it. I fed it pretty often, and cleaned it the most. I think she mostly liked the idea of having a fish, but didn't quite know how to care for it. And besides, this fish is actually pretty active and interacts with you. He chases my fingers around the bowl, and gets excited around feeding time. I took care of the damn thing for 4 months, I'm going to keep him alive for as long as I can.

I do feel bad sending another fish to what will inevitably be a sad death at the hands of my old roommate, but I can't do that to the little guy I've grown fond of. Meredith could never remember his "real" name that my roommate had given him, and so she always called him Thor. I like this name. So now my fish is named Thor. We have yet to do the exchange, but I'm almost 900% sure that my roommate will not notice that a different fish is in her bowl. The new one is a little smaller, but she hasn't seen him in four months, I doubt she'll have remembered him properly anyways. As long as he's red, it'll be fine.

I'll let you know how it goes once it finally goes down, but it should go without a hitch. And as for my life, that's about it, really. I could tell you every little remotely interesting thing that happened to me, but that would take way too much time for me to type and too much time for you to read. And so I'll leave this off here, and hope that once classes start picking up I'll have more to tell you about. Until next time, dear readers.