Survived the first week!

I can finally say, without guilt, that I am happy the weekend is here! I made it through my first week after re-entering the world of full-time students. I am only taking 3 classes, nothing too crazy, but two are each 4 hours a week (one is only 2), and they all have 3-hour labs. So that is 19 hours of classroom time per week... for only three classes... However, one class I took twice before (anatomy and physiology), one class is devoted to healthy cooking, and the other will be just a pain in the butt, but at least the professor seems nice (microbiology). Not too shabby. As a total surprise and bonus, the nutrition lab is a cooking lab! We modify recipes, learn cooking and baking techniques, look at ethnic cuisine, etc. Next week we will be making cocoa meringues and vinaigrettes. This is where being an 'older student' comes in handy--I have probably 7 years of recipe modification experience on most of the other students. Joke's on them!

The worst part of this week really was just dealing with the Registrar, IT, and Student Accounts, and also getting used to commuting. After stressing for months over the drive, I am quite proud that after just four days of practice I have gotten my driving time down from about 40min to 30min. This is assuming the traffic isn't too terrible, which it usually is, but I have been driving at strange hours and avoiding peak traffic, leaving the house as early as 6:45am and driving home as late as 8:15pm. In the following weeks I will be having even longer days, and will be getting home at 8:00pm two nights a week, and at 10:00pm once a week. UGH.

Today was tricky with a morning class. Too early to go running with Seth, I instead went after class and explored the neighborhood around the university. It wasn't a great outing (lots of traffic, often without shoulders, lots of poison ivy on the roadside, etc), but at least I was able to sneak it in and keep up with my streak. As of today, I have been able to run every day for the past 13 months! This of course includes days traveling--Seth and I went running at the Iceland airport, and I had to run at 2:30am two days this summer due to early flights. Somehow I have been able to fend off illness and injury, too, and have not come up with a health reason to take a day off. Slowly I am learning Seth's secrets to fulfilling this addiction ;o)