I'm sitting here in the Woodbury University library, and I can't help but feel a little awed by the former chapel turned temple of knowledge. We had a chapel like this at this one school I went to in Oregon...the school used the de-consecrated chapel as an auditorium. I can't help but think that perhaps that would have been a good use here too. The acoustics are not so great for a library but probably are awesome for music.

They didn't get rid of everything from the old chapel. There are beautiful medieval-looking stained glass windows on both sides of the central aisles. They are reminders of the former mission of this place: as a Catholic girls' school. It is rumored that Mother Cabrini's ghost hauts the library. I don't put much stock in it, but I suppose that a nun who was declared a saint in the 1940s would be quite unlikely to be an unfriendly presence.

Now that (hopefully) the financial situation has been cleared up, I feel I can really throw myself into my studies here. I really can't think of any profs this semester I truly dislike, and as I have mentioned before Dr. Gilbert is someone I can really say is 100% on my side...it may be too early, in truth, to say she's a mentor but she's been great so far.

I got my math test back, and I got a B! As you know my typical math test scores were Cs at LAVC. This textbook is more sensible and the prof is better than almost all of those I dealt with there. I still miss Prof. Hito, and hope she's doing well. So far the material has been more like review for me, but it's going to get into new territory soon. There are more resources available here for help than there were at chronically cash-strapped LAVC...there had better be, considering the tuition bills I'm racking up!

Also I got my first paper back from Abnormal Psych...Dr. Gilbert is my prof there and aside from a few quibbles about APA style her only complaint was the length. She didn't just dock me for it, she suggested which things could be snipped for space and not hurt the paper. She's not graded the paper yet...she's not graded anyone's paper. We are to revise and resubmit as part of the procedure. That is a cool way of handling things, imho. Revision is part of the process anyway.

There is something quite peaceful about a college campus at off-times of the day. LAVC was nice in the late afternoon, after the day classes were by-and-large over and before the night student crush. Woodbury's a lot like that too. We don't have an army of brazen fox squirrels begging people for nuts or other foodstuffs, but that's just fine. I can handle their absence. I'll have to find other forms of entertainment here on the one day I have lots of time to kill.

Some other brief thoughts: I hope Cindy Sheehan's OK...she apparently got injured yesterday in New York City during a rally. Ms. Sheehan was apparently grabbed by her backpack straps by a NYPD cop. :P Long time NYC peace activist Zuul (Paul Zulkowitz) was arrested for not having a permit for the modest PA system the rally used. Yeah right, and you're expecting people to go without a PA in the middle of Manhattan? Go fsck yourself, NYPD. Pick on someone your own size, bullies. :P

The Steve is 100% right that raising prices on legal downloads will send people scurrying back to illegal P2P music downloads. I'm still angry at Apple for making iTunes 5 unusable on my Macs. But he's right this time.

Also Opera is now free as in no-cost, making for yet another option for avoiding Internet Exploder. This is good news for Mac OS 9 and below users, because Opera is perhaps the only stable browser for that orphan OS. It's also available for Linux, making it as cross-platform as Firefox.

Finally...Rita, go get yourself a Margarita in Mexico. The folks who suffered through Katrina don't need to get strafed by a second hurricane. Yeah, it looks like Louisiana is out of harm's way, but so many Katrina survivors have fled to Texas that a hit in Texas would be another blow to their fragile sanity. Really, take a Mexican vacation, Rita. Spare them.