First Choice

Yay! The History Department (thanks to the Historical Administration component) was awarded Eastern Illinois University's First Choice Award. The university got a new president this year, and he has set a goal of making EIU the best graduate-degree-offering middle-sized university in the country. He decided to go through all of the grad. programs and see which ones have the best national recognition at this point. Yep, we're #1! The HA program is "the crowning jewel of the university." That made us all feel good inside.

I'm sad because Mom left for home today, but I'm glad that she made it back all right and that we had sooooooo much fun while she was here. We really did have a great time, and her visit helped the semester not feel as long as it was feeling before. Alyson's mom was happy that my mom brought some Halloween decorations for the apartment because for some reason she thought that Mormons didn't celebrate Halloween. Don't know where that came from! She said she's going to send us some Halloween candy.

Back in the day, a few years ago, I was majoring in Business Education at Utah Valley State College. I completed my Associate's degree before realizing that my heart was in history instead of business. But my time in Business Ed. has not gone to waste! I now have a whole set of skills that give me a bit of an advantage over my history peers when it comes to technical stuff. My good friend and neighbor at home, Carolyn Kuehne, was my Access database course instructor at UVSC, and she taught me many wonderful things that have been useful to me many times. Today was one of those times. I was in my Digital Applications class this afternoon, trying not to pass out or fall asleep (we'll blame it on the cold). I had my Mentholatum, pack of Kleenex, Vitamin C drops, hand sanitizer, and schoolbooks all spread out across my table and was zoning out as our teacher Mr. Riccio was talking about the assignment we having coming up. He said that we needed to complete some metadata descriptions of photographs in Micorsoft Access. I was about ready to kick out and fall asleep when I heard Mr. Riccio, say, "Has anyone ever worked with Microsoft Access?" Everyone was giving him blank stares, shaking their heads, and saying, "No. What is that?" Then he looked at me, and I said, "Well, I took an Access class one time." Everything went silent, and everyone turned and looked at me as if I had just gotten back from the moon. Mr. Riccio hadn't ever worked with Access, so he asked if I would come up to the front of the classroom and instruct everyone on how to use Access. I think it's funny that we have a class assignment that needs to be completed in Access, but even Mr. Riccio doesn't quite know the in's and out's of the program. :-) So I went up to the front and hooked the computer into the projector so everyone could see what I was doing on the big screen. We had a quick 20-minute version of Access 101 and got the framework for our assignment laid out. The other students were grateful that they didn't have to go and figure out how to use Access by themselves, and they thanked me profusely for knowing how to use the program.

Speaking of being grateful, I am grateful that I left "early" from our 3:00 meeting yesterday afternoon. I don't really consider leaving a meeting five hours after it starts as leaving early, but when one considers the fact that the meeting didn't end until 10:00 P.M., I really did leave quite early. A seven-hour meeting??????? Oh dear, what am I going to do with these guys? The whole point of the meeting was to complete the museum exhibit design brief that was due this morning, but there was truly nothing brief about the document. Mr. Riccio said it was the largest design brief he'd ever seen. Yes, I thought to myself, because it took seven hours to write!! We have our weekly class meeting tomorrow night, and I am really, really, really hoping that everyone is getting at least a little tired of meeting with each other so that it can hopefully be a short and sweet meeting. Well, I'm off to bed to see if I can recover from the cold.