A Blustery Autumn Day

What a wonderful sound to wake up to; rain rain and more rain. I lay there enjoying the smell and the gentle patter until I remembered AR's windows were down on his miata! He usually backs it under the front porch roof far enough that the cracked back window isn't a problem though, and he assured me he'd put the windows up while I was at school, so I slept another hour. He had put the side windows up. Unfortunately though he had put the back window down completely to ease the strain on the aging plastic and the car had rolled forward while he was trying to start the battery (another story) so when I walked by to load my car this morning I discovered his was flooding! Nothing like starting the morning bailing water and pushing a dead car around in the rain. Bought a wet vac on the way home and the car is now seatless and baking in the sun with a fan over it for good measure

The first week of school was good. I LOVE my classes, or at least I love two and the other two are ok. One teacher is a B. F. Skinner style behaviorist with a passion for debate, so I had fun engaging him. He claims that there is no such thing as a thought, only the behavior of thinking (what does one call the thing that you are thinking about then?) and there is no such thing as empathy, only functional behaviors etc. He's really sharp and quite aware of his biases, so his class on empirical treatment methods will be fun despite the outrageously long paper requirement and the big hairy exam at the end. The family forensics and family law class is going to rock too. Our prof is a PhD JD and very current on her stuff (she sat for the bar in July) and even better, she dropped half the reading from last year because the aforementioned prof refused to back off on his enormous paper. I'll do the full reading eventually, but this way I can fit it in at my convenience. For my adolescent therapy class I have to make a game as a delivery vehicle for my chosen method of therapy. In this case the disorder I must address is autism. This could be a really fun project if I didn't have so much to do, but I'll try hard to be upbeat about it anyway and see if I can't have some fun.

So then there is just all the cover letters to write and my dissertation proposal to finish and the IRB to impress, all by December. Oh... and that class to prep for in my spare time. La la la!!!

The best news is that my Friday class turned out to be only 2 credits, and thus 2 hours, so that means I can spend THREE hours on my dissertation every Friday before I go to work, and just enjoy the 1 hour lunch and 2 hour dinner periods as me time. It's not much, but it's something! One of my classmates has agreed to walk with me every Thursday, so that's nice.

It was great fun being somewhere with a TV this week so I could watch the VP debates. I saw a late rerun on MSNBC and enjoyed the show. I have to give Sarah Palin major kudos for managing by the end of the 90 minutes to come very close to pronouncing nuclear correctly. It was great improvement from the beginning of the debate! Good sign that she's a fast learner (too bad she didn't think to use that for an answer when asked for a policy she had rethought). She really did redeem herself as a good speaker and I was amazed at her appearance of smiling composure under the grinding stress that had to be going on for her. Of course she completely missed the concept of debating (or more likely strategically avoided it... in an interview about Couric she described it as "to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about"), but hey, there were bigger things at stake than actually answering the questions she was asked, right? Seriously, I was a little taken aback that she was allowed to continuously hijack the process like that, but on the other hand, I really wasn't interested in seeing any one publicly humiliated, so perhaps it was for the best. She's a forward looking maverick after all...