I tried to go to class, but the firemen wouldn't let me.

Yesterday at a little before 10 I headed to the Chemical Engineering building to go to Design. I was early because I had to ask the teacher not to put me in a group with my stalker. People were congregated outside the BioMed building, and some firemen and police officers were taping off the street. The BioMed building was evacuated last year when a student opened a container of a dangerous chemical, and they had to make sure none was wafting through the halls. So I thought the ChemE building would still be open.

Not so. According to the Facilities guy who was herding students away from the buildings, there had been a gas leak and both the buildings were blocked off. After being further herded I stood on the corner with some other kids who'd been trying to go to Design and we waited around twenty minutes before deciding they weren't going to let us in and leaving.

And that was my Monday.

Today I actually made it to class. First was "Drug Design, Development, and Delivery", also known as "D4" for fairly obvious reasons. It's a cross-listed class so there's ChemEs, BioMeds (Biomedical Engineering), and Chemistry majors of both undergrad and grad. The funny foreign grad student from last semester's BioProcess class came in and sat right next to me. I suppose I should start referring to him by name, Johan. Swedish. I confused the heck out of him because he said, "Oh, we must be the only grad students" (the Biomed grad students had been sent to a different classroom by mistake and weren't there yet) and I said, "Oh, I'm undergrad this semester," which if you don't know about the 5 year BS-MS program I'm in, where as an undergrad I take some master's classes, it would be very confusing. When the teacher was explaining that Dr. B, the professor we'd had for BioProcess, would be coming in to lecture for the Drug Manufacturing section of the course, Johan whispered in my ear "He's going to expect us to know everything, then!" which was, I'll readily admit, the first time a Swedish grad student has ever whispered in my ear. Much better than being licked on the face by a gay trombonist.

At lunch I was taking the school Trolley across the freeway to meet Karen at the burrito place for lunch, and saw the guy from my undergrad research who turned red whenever he had to talk to me, and didn't think I'd like Rush Limbaugh. I thought he'd graduated but he must still be around. That's one thing about Tech. People never really leave.

Surprisingly, I still don't have homework. I know that won't last long. I'm in Unit Operations, where there'll be a fun amount of lab reports and oral presentations. D4 won't have many homeworks, but has a big report toward the end of the semester. And then Design will, according to everyone I know who's taken it, consume my life.

But not yet.