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The euphor(b)ia of the garden show is fading now, and I find I miss how it took over my life those last few weeks. Hopefully we'll have some sort of "cast party" soon to celebrate. Meanwhile, I've plunged into another quarter of classes. This quarter, I'm taking the second design class, the second construction class, business practices, and badminton. No "slave labor" class this time (unless you count construction); I figure I'm due a break after last quarter! Whereas last quarter's design class was really drafting lessons, this quarter's class is already moving more into the abstract world of design. Our first assignment--due tomorrow--is a collage using landscape materials (plant material, tile, stone, wood) to represent our emerging views of landscape design. Dan specified that the collage was not to be a miniature landscape. While the first incarnation of my design skirted a bit too close to representing a landscape, I think I've been able to move back into the more abstract design arena within which we're supposed to play. |
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We haven't done much in construction yet; just listened to Dan talk about grading and measuring sites correctly. This quarter we'll get into masonry and advanced carpentry, too. Business Practices is taught as part of the OH department by a guy who's been taking classes with us as well as teaching this course. He was in my tree class last fall, and I have good memories of him as a fellow student. Brian (different Brian than Brian-the-Garden-Show-Designer, 'though that Brian also teaches part-time) has a really sarcastic sense of humor, and he's not afraid to use it. That alone should keep the class from getting too boring. He also really knows his stuff--his background is marketing, and he runs his own landscape maintenance firm after upper management positions in other fields. The big project for the class is to create a business plan for a real or hypothetical business...so far, we've narrowed down what our businesses are and written mission statements. I figure our mission statements have one advantage over most of the fluff I usually see for those--ours aren't written by committee. Then there's badminton. I played it in high school (on the team one year, but only because they let anyone who came to practice be on the team), a quarter in college, and once since then almost ten years ago. I was pretty sore after Thursday's class! But I'm really enjoying getting back into it. There were so few sports I ever really enjoyed; it's great to have the opportunity to play one of them again. There are times I can tell I'm 15 years older than the average college student, though. There were a few other classes I considered taking this quarter, but I decided I needed to spare some time to work on our website. There's been another project that's been on my back burner for a loooooong time that might actually get going, too: our kitchen. When we moved in to this house eight years ago, the kitchen floor had to be replaced due to water damage. We said, "we're going to redo the kitchen, so don't bother putting in new flooring." Hah! We've lived with increasingly stained underlayment since, and I am sick of it. There's a bunch of stuff around the house that I'd really like to replace, but the kitchen is the worst. I'll talk more about that in another post soon. Cheryl |
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