Settling In and Being Unsettled

So far I've only made posts about important or exciting things, but for this one I am simply going to rant about a couple things and tell you about my daily life so far.

All of my classes are on Tuesday and Wednesday. Yup. My normal week--5 working days, 2 break days--has been completely flipped. Now it's 2 working days, 5 break days (erm, I mean days when I have plenty of time to study). At Queen's, the normal work load is 3 modules. Each class normally meets for two hours a week, and many split those two hours between a couple of days. This is especially helpful for larger classes, like my Irish Literature course. There are so many students in that class that we have to meet in a physics auditorium for our lectures. We also attend a one hour 'tutorial' which is basically a small group discussion period.

My schedule goes like this:
Tuesday
12-1 Irish Literature (Lecture)
2-4 American Poetry

Wednesday
9-10 Irish Literature (Tutorial)
11-1 Philosophy / Metaphysics

And that, as they say, is that.

On a quick note, I enjoyed cooking and eating dinner with some friends on Monday. We met at 5:30, walked to Tesco's for groceries, came back to Mount Charles and cooked together. I made Mom's spaghetti sauce, Dawson and Layla put together a salad, Arne cooked the noodles, and Linda heated up some garlic baguettes. Eoghan popped in to join us, and since he couldn't help fix the food, he washed the dishes. The food was SO good, and I enjoyed being able to relax and chat after eating.

Sometime before the end of the week I will be signing up for a membership at Queen's Sport facility. My general plan is to start going perhaps twice a week to swim some laps, and to go maybe once a week to do something fun with friends like rock climbing, badminton or volleyball. Having a set time to go swimming each week will help me get some grounding to build on, because right now I'm floundering with all the free time!

It's a good thing I HAVE lots of free time, though, because there have been some issues on campus which have required a good deal of it.

Take, for example, an hour-long fiasco just to get a book out of the library. Yeah. An hour. I needed to get the book to do some reading for class, and there was one copy left. Fine. I went to Seamus Heaney Library, but couldn't get in. The security system requires you to swipe your student card to let yourself in, and mine for whatever reason was not working, so a librarian had to let me in. Once inside, I spent a good while looking for the book, and finally asked for help. It appeared the book was lost because it wasn't on the shelves and the records said nobody had borrowed it for a month or so. Turns out someone HAD returned it, but the book was in the wrong place. Anyway.

I went to check the book out, but ran into another problem because it also required the student ID (which would not work for that purpose either). The librarian wrote down my information so I could take the book out, and I left the short loan section ready to be out of there.

And realized I couldn't get out.

Yeah, you have to swipe your ID to let yourself out of the library too.

Stupid #%&^*@# technology.

~Catherine