Chapter 16 - Castles in the Lounge

In which our hero very nearly is late for school ...

Yesterday was my first official ever day of university.  I had one class.  For one hour.  It was slightly anti-climactic.  But it was OK.  Nice quiet start.  We learned a brief history of electromagnetism, and a bit of theory, and that was it.  Then I headed home, did a bit of grocery shopping at the shopping centre, and collected my bike from the bike shop, having decided earlier in the day to go for the heavy duty inner tube.  I made it home for the last 45 minutes of the Oscars, which started here at 11:30 a.m.  I tuned in just as someone was singing a song, and then they announced Skyfall as the winner of Best Song.

Later on munchkin #2 and I got into building towers with blocks.  It started, as I think I mentioned, as building deliberately unstable small towers that would fall over when we launched Hot Wheels at them.  Then, we started doing them bigger, and forgot the Hot Wheels altogether.  We did one using all the wooden blocks, and the ones that wouldn't balance became little houses scattered around the outside. 

Since we were now out of wooden blocks, the Mega Bloks got pulled out -- big ones, not Lego sized ones -- and we did a tower with all of them.  We left it up over night, and it's still up now.

Tonight the wooden block castle was already started when I got home, so I helped finish it.  Here it is:

Tonight's wooden block castle with an army man about to slide down the slide (under the munchkin's hand).

Tonight's wooden castle, with last night's Mega Blok tower in the bottom left corner.

The wooden castle got destroyed to make a new one, which also got destroyed to start another new one, and then it was bedtime.

I should really explain the much more dramatic second day I had.  My phone allows me to set an alarm for specific weekdays, which may not be news to most of you, but my old phone couldn't do that.  So yesterday I set an alarm for 6 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, which are my two 8 a.m. start days.  I woke up at 6:50.  It was wet/rainy.  The bus leaves at 7:20.  It's half an hour walk.  You see the problem?  Luckily, today is the only day in the week when Sarah drives near the uni on her way to work, so she was able to give me a lift.  Disaster averted.  I later examined the alarm settings closer, thinking perhaps I'd set it to silent by accident.  It was set for 6 p.m.  Good grief.  No wonder I didn't awake to the jazzy stylings of the Cantina Band ...

My first class was Maths 2A (It's maths here, not math).  It was interesting.  I'm going to have to do some reviewing to get back up to speed.  I did a couple practice problems, though, and they turned out OK, I think.  First integrals in like three years.  Bit nerve-wracking.

My other class today was the year 1 MATLAB class, which I felt was important to have, as I have no previous experience with it.  I thought it was going to be something like LabVIEW.  It's not.  It's like Octave.  I have a vague memory of someone saying Octave is the Free Ware version of MATLAB, back when we used it.  Most of you have no idea what I'm talking about, and that's OK.  Just ignore it.  You know if you're my previous classmates, but you're probably not, as I'm pretty sure it's mostly family reading this.  That's OK too.

Anyway.  The long and short of it is that I think MATLAB is my new favourite class.  I think I'll enjoy it, and the teacher goes nice and slowly, and explains things, and answers questions.

Tomorrow I have more Electromagnetics.  Now don't be fooled into thinking that my whole schedule is easy peasy one or two hours per day.  It's only because this is the first week, and there's no labs or tutorials this week.  Things pick up rather in week two.