Lucky Me

I took this photo on Wednesday as I was leaving a study session for my botany class. That large sculpture is one of my favorites on campus. It's Bruce Nauman's The Center of the Universe. It's amazing, I think, that it sits on campus and you can walk right through it when you need or even want to. (Funnily enough, it sits next to one of the least inspired buildings on campus, this kind of ugly, brown, squat structure with blocks of airless, windowless classrooms. It's a very schizophrenic pairing.)

Anyway, yes, it was raining that day, a cold, heavy rain that proceeded not only to laugh at my sad little compact umbrella but also to thoroughly soak me and my backpack filled with notes. I arrived at the study session looking more than a little bedraggled.

And the insult of it all was that I really only went to the study session to kiss the instructor's ass a little as I didn't really need to look at slides under the microscope that had little more information than the pictures in the textbook. But I went--me and four out of my twenty-four classmates--and looked at a few slides and asked a few questions, and it was fine.

I stayed an hour then I walked back across campus in the drizzle and took this picture.

And today was test day.

The actual test was preceded by a lab practical that was little more than eleven or twelve questions that could be answered, most of them, without looking through the few microscopes that had been set up. The test was a little more challenging, perhaps seven or eight pages in length. I missed a handful of questions on the test, mostly because I couldn't recall the exact storage molecules in red, brown, and green algae. Nor could I recall the number and type of flagella in the same groups. Ridiculous little things like that.

Anyway, it's done.

I've been sitting with Crunch while Judi and Paul are out of town, and poor dog, not only has he done little but sit and watch me study, he was also struck with a horrible case of doggie diarrhea. I swear, I thought he was going to turn himself inside out. Worse still is the fact that his coat is very long, including on the backside, and cleaning him up meant taking the garden hose to his hiney. I'm sure you can imagine the indignity of a cold water hose-down after a bout of the runs. So that was how our last couple of days have been.

Lucky me!