If you're reading this, thanks for not giving up on me during my month-long hiatus from blogging. Great news: I'm not dead! I just didn't have time over the holiday break to keep up with the blog. Between working at the children's bookstore, watching 'Arrested Development' with my family, eating string cheese, and watching 'Lost' with Rouxski, I didn't have time. Not to mention, there really wasn't anything terribly interesting to write about. I decided not to bore you with blog entries like "Today I Went To The Safeway!" (Although, for the record, my mother and I have plenty of exciting adventures at the grocery store that are borderline blog-worthy.) The most entertaining thing that happened was the saga of Louie the Christmas Mouse, but that's for another day, after I've recovered from the first week of classes.
As usual, the university has wasted no time in trying to make my life as difficult as possible, even going so far as to sabotage my tuition payment plan, telling me I owe them oodles of money by the end of the week or they'll disenroll me from all my classes and deactivate my student ID card and meal plan. Ah yes, it's good to be back. Sadly, that whole debacle has been taken care of, so I have to stay here.
This semester was the first time I managed to schedule all my classes without any egregious problems or extreme emotional distress. (Of course, this suspicious lack of obstacles inflicted its own paranoid disturbia.) I suppose then I should have been comforted by the frustrations brought on by my second day of classes. Here's some background to get you up to speed: My university has a Nursing School. The Nursing School buildings are located at the far end of campus near the hospital. (So far, everything seems pretty logical, right? Wait for it...) To clarify: I am not in the Nursing School, nor have I ever been in the Nursing School. Despite this point of fact, I have had a class in a Nursing School building for five out of my six semesters. In case you weren't aware, I live pretty much as far away from campus as you can get, so walking to the Nursing School, which is essentially located at the Edge of the World, is quite a trek. (Seriously, between the traffic, the construction, and the pointy-umbrella-wielding pedestrians, it's like Frodo's journey to Mordor, for God's sake.) I was not surprised to find that my required Spanish Translation class is located in the Nursing School, but at least it's in a familiar part of it. My Religion class, however, meets in a building I had never heard of. (That happens a lot here: buildings just randomly pop up in new and inconvenient places.) So I looked up the Claude Moore Nursing Education Building on the map, and found it to be even farther away than any other Nursing School building ever created.
I left 45 minutes before my class was scheduled to start, giving myself plenty of time to get lost and confused along the way. Or in case I ran into that Gollum character. After passing through the Candy Cane Forest and answering the bridge troll's three riddles, I finally came to the Claude Moore building, only they had mislabeled it the Claude Moore Nursing Library. With ten minutes to spare, I opened the door only to find a very polite and friendly sign informing me that I was in the wrong building. (Don't even pretend to be surprised; you totally saw that coming.) The sign read, "If you are looking for the Claude Moore Nursing Education Building, turn around, then make a left on Lane Street, and it's on your right!" but what it meant was, "Ha ha! You're an idiot."
And that's how I learned where the Claude Moore Nursing Education Building is located. But really, did you run out of names for buildings? Is it really necessary to have two Claude Moore buildings? Or are you actually trying to confuse the students? Frankly, I think that's pretty selfish of Claude to have two buildings named after him when some of us don't even have one. Share the wealth, buddy.