Sounds of a Storm

It was so hard getting out of bed this morning.  First off, I’ve been going to bed later than usual because my new school schedule is throwing me off.  Second of all, it is now officially still dark when I get up.  When did that happen?  What happened to my early morning sunrise?  Sigh.  Third of all, a lovely late summer storm blew in just as my alarm went off.  I turned my alarm off and stayed in bed and watched the lightning and listened to the thunder and rain.  It was heavenly but I wanted nothing more than to just stay in bed and drift off to sleep to the sounds of the storm.

Class last night was good but man; I am in for it as far as class work goes.  The class I had last night is a design class and there is a ton of reading and writing in addition to photo work.  Every week we have to write an essay on some aspect of design and there will be a review/biography of a photographer of our choice.  The nice thing about this class is that there are no tests. Whoot!  Something that surprised me is that students are not allowed to bring laptops to class.  Nor are they allowed to bring cell phones, pages, beepers, or blackberries.  AND we can’t bring personal listening devices to the computer labs.  I guess they have found these things to distract students from the business of schooling.  Who knew?

Another nice thing about this program is that I’ve been making connections with classmates.  It’s nice that I have many of the same people in my Monday and Tuesday classes since it helps me get to know people and put names to faces.  Last night I was able to chat and find common ground with two 18-year old young women.  I like that.  We bonded over the wonderful attributes of Flickr.

I really wondered how I would do in this program and I think it’s going to be great.  When I checked out Brown College and was told that their degree is a Bachelor’s and the program furnishes a Mac Book Pro laptop and Cannon Rebel xti, I really wanted to go there.  However, they didn’t have any evening courses and their program costs approximately $17,000 per year.  That doesn’t include the cost of books and fees.  The program where I’m currently enrolled is at the local tech school.  It’s a two year degree and teaches you to use your own camera to start.  I like that even though the majority of students have the obvious Cannon or Nikon, there are other students with Olympus, Sony, Pentax (me), and Fuji.  We all have different cameras which lend to our different perspectives and eyes.  I also like that we can get our own computers.  I will probably get a MAC since that is what we will be working on at school but right now I am trying to decide if I should get a laptop or desktop.  This program is practical, helpful, hopeful, encouraging, and so far…fun!

Tomorrow I have a lighting class and that’s my last class this week.  Well, it’s the last class unless I can get into the digital darkroom class that has been full since I registered.  I NEED to be in the digital darkroom class yet when I look at my workload right now I see that there is a lot more work involved than I would have anticipated so maybe it’s OK that I start out with only 3 classes right now.

I am looking forward to this weekend.  We are working at the annual MDA Labor Day Telethon.  It moved from the Mall of America to a local casino so we will be spending Sunday night at the casino hotel.  I am the unofficial official photographer and Bob is the unofficial official runner/guy Friday volunteer.  I’m not sure what we will be doing Saturday but I do know our apartment needs a thorough cleaning, we need to pay bills, and I need to give some attention to my patio garden.  Not to mention I now have homework.  So, we won’t be lacking for things to do.