Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Weekend Off

Okay. I obviously didn't post any since this past Thursday - thus violating my initial agreement to post daily - but I would contend that I had good reason for not doing so.

My first lame excuse for not contributing to the blogosphere for 4 days is simply that, while I love my computers, like all great relationships I needed a break. Which is what I took. I actually managed to make myself use the computer for less than 10 minutes each day. Instead I read a fair bit and played with the babies.

Second, I played a fair bit of Zelda (Wii!) on Sunday when Julie and the babies were at her parents and after I had discovered that my home computer copies of Word and Excel were defunct (possibly owing to their illegality and my recent download of Windows Updater from Microsoft. Oops!) Looks like I'll be transitioning to OpenOffice now . . .

Third, yesterday was the first day of fall classes at NKU. I'm enrolled in 3 classes right now for the fall (Geography 101 telecourse, Spanish 102, and a Literature course on the graphic novel) and may well add another.

My classes are good, I think. Katie, my younger sis-in-law, is in the Spanish class with me and thankfully seems to have a somewhat better existing knowledge of Spanish vocabulary than I do currently (I took Spanish 101 in 2002, God help me!) and she can attest to having seen and heard the profesor (that's Spanish for professor) stand in front of the room and repeatedly yell "No hablo ingles! Hablo solo espanol!" ("I don't speak English! I only speak Spanish!") I'm convinced he's lying about this, but whatever . . . He seems nice enough otherwise and maybe I can finally learn a foreign language.

My other class is . . . on the Graphic Novel and Literature so, as you can probably discern from that, for the next 4 months the "literature" I'll be reading is comic books, most of which I have not only read before, but read MORE THAN ONCE before. Luckily, I'm fond of the professor and the books we're reading. This now means that, during the course of my somewhat protracted and aimless college career, I have now taken classes on Film Studies, Alfred Hitcock movies, the history of cartoons and animation, comic books, mythology, religion, and the history of Science Fiction literature. So, yeah, anyone remember the fat guy on The Simpsons that works in the comic shop. He has, if I remember correctly, a degree in folk lore and mythology. He has a goatee too. So . . . . nevermind. But the graphic novel class seems pretty sweet.

I also found out that the same professor is teaching a 2 week course in London this winter on British Fantasy. I'm currently attempting to convince my HR department that they should reimburse me for the $3300 tuition for the class so that I can go. Even if they don't do that, I still think I'll be able to go. Julie is hip to me going and the opportunity for me to be able to do something like this is closing fast. It's too good to pass up.

Working now. More possibly later.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So you illegally had WORD and Excel? I am shocked, ashamed, astonished!!! No excuses Mr. Ellis. You promised to write everyday and I was seriously let down by not seeing anything posted. What a slacker. And here I am so good about commenting...

Jason Ellis said...

You would be AMAZED at the number of things I have illegally.