FULL BORE

We've been back in school for 3 days now - had 6 hours of physiology lecture, 4 hours of neuroscience lecture, and 6 hours of other lectures. Oh, and 2 hours of lab, too. INTENSE. Physio and neuro are coming at us at 100 miles an hour. For a couple classes, we didn't find out about required textbooks until the first day of class... but we're supposed to read before we come to lecture. My physiology textbook (all $150 worth of it!!) had an estimated arrival date of September 20 - thankfully it arrived today. Buying online is significantly cheaper than in the bookstore, but we then have to wait for the books to arrive.

I spent the rest of my break working and relaxing. I worked Tuesday through Friday evenings, and it's really amazing to see things Stephen learned in even that short amount of time. It's very intensive and very rewarding. The weekend was spent recuperating. I swam again on Saturday - the undergrads are definitely back. The pool deck was jam-packed, I got the last chair. If you look back to my August 19th post, you can see that I nearly had the place to myself. It was funny to realize the reason it seemed like a high school pool party to me - most of the kids around the pool were probably freshman and only a couple months out of high school, anyway!

Another way I can tell school's back in session for our class - we played volleyball yesterday afternoon. It felt good to get out and hit the ball again - it had only been a week and a half, but it felt like months.

In more fun and exciting news, my early Christmas present from my parents arrived yesterday! Hooray and THANK YOU for my new iPod Touch! The main reason I wanted one is because we sometimes get emails in the middle of the day relating to our classes or other on-campus activities. I don't have a smartphone and don't want to pay for a data plan. With free wireless on campus, the iPod Touch solves that problem. The first thing I did (after connecting to my home wireless) was to link my school email account to it.

This morning, I discovered another potentially VERY helpful feature. One of the free apps that comes on it is "Voice Memos." With this handy tool, I can record lectures. This may prove invaluable for both physiology and neuroscience.

This evening, our anatomy professor (and Program Director) Dr. Kapasi took us to see the Bodies exhibit at Atlantic Station. For those who have not seen a Bodies exhibit, it's a display of incredible dissections of the human body. These bodies have been preserved in such a way that they will "last a lifetime" according to the docent. It was fascinating to see much cleaner dissections than we had done, and cool to be able to identify almost everything we saw. You can read more about the exhibit on their official website here.