A Fridge of One's Own

I've got my own apartment now. 

It's kind of a weird feeling. As much as I kind of had the run of the house while living with my parents over the past year and a half, the situation was what it was--living with my parents. Before that, two years of roommates and two years of weird pseudo-isolation in single dorm rooms. I've never been in a situation where everything from the front door to the toilet was mine and mine alone. And I have to say, it is really goddamn nice.

It's weird to have a full-size refrigerator to myself. Weird to realize how many gaps there were in my collection of kitchen utensils. Weird to be able to shower with the door open. Weird that I don't have to worry about guys peeing loudly in my bathroom while I'm trying to sleep (this was actually a major issue in Garghouse). Sure, I'm rapidly getting used to it and certainly will soon be taking it for granted, but it's fun to marvel at while the novelty lasts.

Grad school has been flying along so far. It's pretty intense, especially for my big foundation class, SI 501 - Contextual Inquiry and Project Management. It basically subscribes to the "throw your children into the middle of a lake filled with horrible lake monsters in order to teach them to swim" school of thought. My group is going to be working on improving patient processing flow for U-M Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Cool! Do any of us know a single thing about how to do that? Nope! But I've got to draft 15-20 useful interview questions for them by Tuesday anyway!

Other extremely intimidating things I'm supposedly going to do this semester include very quickly becoming Python-literate, making a database-backed portfolio website using the Google App Engine, developing a working knowledge of cognitive psychology, and having social interactions with a lot of people I've never met. We'll see how those all pan out. One thing I've already become really good at is making events in iCal. Oh, also drying and preserving tomatoes. But that's a different thing.