I spent last weekend in the town of Town of Brutus, NY. I am glad it was not the middle of the month.

Also, while there I ate much delicious food, so while my look may have been lean, it was not hungry.

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This evening was the first rehersal for University Chorus. The concert will be on December 10th at 8 PM, feel free to mark your calendars.

I was apprehensive, as I've not read music in several years, nor performed outside the shower. I got to the rehersal room, was surprised to see a friend I didn't know sang, and was pleased at the large number of other men there.

When we started, I initially decided I was going to be quiet and follow along until I recovered my musical chops. I abandoned that plan after 30 seconds, the time it took me to realize that no one in the bass section had any chops whatsoever. Sure, it's a non-audition, open-to-the-community choir, but I've been in it some years where we were really excellent. I was with a subset of the choir that sang in Carnegie Frelling Hall. This year? Not good.

So I sang out lustily, to give the others someone to follow. I did OK I think, except for some reason I am currently incapable of producing an ascending fourth interval. That is not a skill I expected to have lost. It caused me much embarassment as I led the section off-track, but hell, when I tried not leading them off-track, no one lead them at all, and the other guys mumbled themselves into silence. I believe in being wrong loudly and proudly, rather than being to scared to step up.

But hey, don't let my criticism discourage you! We've got a good conductor, I am confident he'll whip us into shape by the time December 10th rolls around.

In non-choir related news, I have now purchased all but one of the books I'll need this semester. The sum total was $512, exactly $32 per credit hour. When I break it down that way, I feel less depressed about it.

Amusingly, at the bookstore, a clerk came and offered to give me a hand. We fell to conversing, and it turned out he is a freshman planning on being a history major. He helped me grab the ten books required for one particular class, then became distressed when he realized that all ten books were, in fact, for a single class. I assured him that one learns to read them faster with practice. He still looked a little nervous as I left.

UPDATE: The new GI Bill contains a book stipend, currently worth $41.67 per credit hour. I'm coming out ahead on books, woo hoo!

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I got my schedule finalized today, hooray! I had to drop an interesting class with a good lecturer in favor of a boring class with a mediocre lecturer, because the boring class is necessary. Bah.

Anyway, I'm at 16 credits, and will have to take 15 credits next semester to graduate. That's why I'm "only" at 16; sure, I could take another class and get to 19, but then I'd have less to do in the spring. And keeping my hours down means I can spend more time on each class.

For the curious (Hi Mom and Dad!) I'm taking Victorian History [satisfies "modern history" requirement], Modern Korean History [satisfies "Asian/African/Latin American" requirement], German 101, and a seminar in Historiography. Also University Chorus, just because.

Next semester I'll take German 102, another seminar (maybe, it might not be needed), and two other upper-division history classes. And then I walk.

Of course, I need to pass everything first. Mustn't count my metaphorical chickens et cetera.

Also, Thursdays are going to be a bit strange, because I have one class that ends at 11 AM, and my next class starts at 6 PM. I don't forsee myself staying on campus that entire time.

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This is one of the best ads I've seen.

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Classes resume Monday. Three weeks of vacation sure went by in a hurry.

The history department is offering 36 upper-division courses for the upcoming semester. At the moment, 33 of them are closed. The three remaining have a total of four available seats between them. I'm already enrolled in one, another conflicts with another class I must take, and the third conflicts with the other history class I'm enrolled in this semester.

Which is to say, I'd like to take a third class in my department this semester, but I guess I'm going to have to go begging to the professors to let me in. They may or may not be able to, as sometimes class size is set by the professor's preferences, but other times it is a function of the assigned classroom and the fire code.

"Greek Civilization" and "Modern Korean History" conflict. I'd rather take Greek Civ, but I need to get a Asia-focus class in, so Korea it is.

UPDATE Sunday at 6:54 PM: Those four open seats are full. I've sent an email to a prof for a seminar I'd like to take, trying to balance the tone to "supplication" without slipping into either or "obsequiousness" or "dictation".

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My eldest sister's family got a new (to them) TV. They were going to throw out their old one, but I protested, seeing as how I have no TV at all. And while I've not been pining away for lack of entertainment, it would me nice to flip it on and see the weather reports. Yes, I can check weather on the internet, but around here bad weather often causes brief power outages that knock the university's routers offline for an hour at a time.

Anyway, I got their TV, which has a giant-seeming 27" screen. It came with the warning that it was slowy dying, but what the heck, I can toss it in the electronics recycling bin when it finally gives up the ghost. It's a 1990 Zenith, CRT of course, and it weighs a ton. Well, probably only 50 or 60 pounds, but it's ackward to carry.

First issue was cleaning. I mean no insult to my sister's house, but on the drive back to Buffalo, I could not help but notice the inside of my car was beginning to smell like dog. I arrived back at Buffalo on a rainy evening, so I left the car packed, but the next day I made with the unpacking. I set the TV outside, removed the plastic frame, and cleaned it the best I could with wet rags and canned air.

While I was working away, my next-door neighbor's three-year-old daughter came outside, along with her visiting cousin, who is about seven I'd guess. The girls were very interested in what I was doing, and also curious about the inside of a TV. There was a great deal of "why" and "what's that" and so forth. Their parents were mightily amused, in that the girls had gone outside to get loaded into their car for a specific reason. A guy cleaning a TV was so interesting that it made the two little girls forget all about a trip to get ice cream– in August!

I got it as clean as I could without risking damage to the circuit boards, put it back together, and lugged it inside. Next step was a trip to Sam Walton's Olde Tyme Shoppe for a cheap TV stand, as it didn't look too good sitting on the floor. That assembled, I went online to find the manual for the universal remote, and now it's all working. Hoorah! I get the university's cable network, which has a lot more channels now than it did in the mid-'90s.

I am confident the TV will not distract me from my studies. It was too big for my room, so I set it up in our (largely-unused) great room. Now I need to buy a more comfy chair for in there, so I can sit and fold clothing while watching the Buffalo Bills lose this year. Which they will. I have faith in the Bills and their ability to choke anytime, anywhere.

Today's project: I'm building some bookshelves in the greatroom. As noted above, I've decided to improve this neglected room.

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I finished my courses for summer session at UB, and am now have three weeks of vacation. Plans thus far include visiting both parents and one sister. Some friends and I are thinking about camping, but we've not decided the method yet: car camping in Letchworth, car camping in the Adirondaks, canoeing in the Adirondaks, or "other". I'm pushing Forked Lake, but we'll see what we end up with.

Yesterday some friends were outside looking at the Perseid meteor shower, but I didn't bother. Sure, I could drive an hour to get away from the city lights, but all of upstate NY has light pollution. I've seen the stars for real: a moonless night, on a blacked-out ship, five hundred miles from the nearest land. When it is truly dark like that, on any gived day you will see a meteor every couple of minutes, more than I could spot in at the height of a shower here. The big disadvantage was that I couldn't do any astro-photography on the ship, for obvious reasons.

On a totally unrelated and probably uninteresting note, I ate vegetarian today. I had pancakes for brunch, green pea and vegatable soup for dinner, and I'm about to make an apple crisp for dessert. Life is good.

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No, not me. My cousin Russell. My congratulations to him and his prospective spouse.

I suppose I should run off to the nearest church for them and post the banns. Or maybe that's the side effect of reading too much history.

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A buddy of mine was part of a group that put together costumes as the characters from Team Fortress 2. Follow this link for photos, you'll be impressed. (The only one I know is the Soldier, Chris S.)

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It's summer orientation season! Next year's crop of eager young freshthings are pouring onto campus for four days of basic training.

I know this because the other class I'm taking this half of the summer is "History of the Italian Renaissance", which is somewhat mistitled in that it's really "Renaissance Italian Humanist Thinking". It could easily have been in the Classics department, except it's set a few hundred years late.

Anyway, today we were going over the status of women in the intellegencia of the time (hint: not good), and our very loud professor was reading aloud excepts of one of the letters in the class reading, in which a prominent (male) humanist compliments a young woman who has some learning herself. In this ecominum, which is typeset in less than a single page, the Italian guy manages to mention the young lady's virginal status six times. It went from funny to creepy in a real hurry.

It amused me to wonder what the kids in the next classroom over, getting their mandatory Sexual Harassment Is Bad Mkay training, thought while hearing our professor boom out "You have so mastered philosophy that you sharply defend and strongly attack set propositions, and you, a virgin, dare to compete with men!" and "May I be allowed, O virgin, to contemplate your chaste face, that I may marvel at your appearance, learning, and carriage!"

Of course, the recipient of the letter (Cassandra Fedele) outlived the sender (Angelo Poliziano) by many decades, in that she managed to not get murdered. By poison. Also confusing the issue is the likelihood that Poliziano was gay, making the creepy-stalkerish style of the letter even more peciliar.

Later in the class, we discussed a dialog on who was more at fault, Adam or Eve. Yeah, really. At this point I suspect the neighboring kids thought it was a theology class. ("What about free will?" "But what about temptation?" "Is a person responsible for his own actions?" "Is a person responsible for encouraging others to do evil?")

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