Sleep, or Lack Thereof; School, and Household Stuff

Grrr. Not only am I up way too ear­ly (could­n’t get back to sleep), I wrote a com­ment to a post in some­one’s LJ, then real­ized that Sam had left him­self logged in. I delet­ed the com­ment, signed in as me—and could­n’t find the post. I thought it was in papil­leau’s jour­nal, but I don’t see it now. Fiddlesticks.

I took my sleepy-time med­i­cine by about 8 last night because I did­n’t want to over­sleep today and it takes 8–10 hours to get out of my sys­tem. I still did­n’t go to bed until 11 or so, and had trou­ble get­ting to sleep. That’s been com­mon late­ly. Any­body who has been around me after I take that med­i­cine will know how weird that is, though—the stuff usu­al­ly knocks me out with­in half an hour. And then I was awake by 2 am. I final­ly gave up and got out of bed at about 3.

It is nice to be up before any­one else, though. The house is very qui­et. Okay, the house is qui­et except for the cat, who is cer­tain that me being up means she should get break­fast sev­er­al hours ear­li­er than usu­al. Even the upstairs neigh­bors are quiet!

Speak­ing of them, they do seem to be prepar­ing to move out. They have been car­ry­ing huge bags out to the dump­ster pret­ty much constantly—it looks like they’re exca­vat­ing up there! That gives me cause to won­der if they just don’t keep house nor­mal­ly, or if they’re clean­ing out clut­ter in prepa­ra­tion for moving.

We went by the book­store on cam­pus yes­ter­day to check out how much my books will run for fall semes­ter. Good Gods! I’m just tak­ing four cours­es, and one has no books that the store knows of as of yet. The oth­er three require nine books in all, though! While some of them might actu­al­ly be of use past the semes­ter, I have real doubts as to whether I actu­al­ly *need* them. For instance, I do in fact already know HTML. But what if the teacher actu­al­ly does some­thing like assign­ing mate­r­i­al from the book, exer­cis­es or what­ev­er? Blah.

The course that does­n’t have any books list­ed is the med­ical com­mu­ni­ca­tions class. The descrip­tion states that stu­dents will study med­ical ter­mi­nol­o­gy on their own. I’ve stud­ied med­ical ter­mi­nol­o­gy in the past, when I was doing med­ical tran­scrip­tion. Since I was work­ing for a com­pa­ny that spe­cial­ized in that field, I was able to use their ref­er­ence books. There are quite a few of them that are fair­ly nec­es­sary to such pur­suits, though. I’m hop­ing I can sim­ply use free online resources, but it’ll real­ly depend on where the pro­fes­sor goes with the course. If I must buy them, though, they’ll be expensive.

I am annoyed that none of the three pro­fes­sors (one class list­ing changed) have syl­labi post­ed for their class­es, though they teach these same cours­es on a very reg­u­lar basis accord­ing to their fac­ul­ty web pages. Only one of them has any­thing more on the web than the very stan­dard bio on the school site, and his is just a link to a whol­ly per­son­al web page. Appar­ent­ly that’s stan­dard for the TCOM depart­ment though—and that seems back­wards to me. If the Social & Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies pro­fes­sors can almost all have their syl­labi on the web, would­n’t it make sense that the Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions fac­ul­ty could and would too?

Oh—we have six work­ing phone jacks now! Final­ly! Of course, the Bell South guy did not show up between 8 am and noon as was promised. In fact, he did­n’t show up until well after 2 pm. He was here until after 3. Since we were to leave here by 2:30 to take G to an appoint­ment with her psy­chi­a­trist that was in Dun­woody and start­ed at 3, that was not good at all. The doc­tor want­ed to meet with all of the parental fig­ures, but I had to stay here since we could­n’t just leave the Bell South guy in the apart­ment. I was very much annoyed. Of course, the doc­tors in that prac­tice have always run way behind sched­ule, and since I had a pre­sen­ta­tion to give in my 5:25 pm class and expect­ed traf­fic prob­lems, it was prob­a­bly for the best. (Of course, the doc­tor was on sched­ule this one time. Figures.)

Sam and Katie and I watched The Mask of Zor­ro last night. To be more accu­rate, I was present while doing oth­er things, which is the way I nor­mal­ly “watch” any­thing on TV. It was decent enough. G had used up her bud­get­ed screen time ear­li­er in the day, so she played with some friends and read for a while instead of watch­ing the movie. I don’t think she was ter­ri­bly inter­est­ed in that spe­cif­ic movie anyway.