T minus 2 days…

It’s Sunday evening. Tomorrow is my last day of the “old life” as it were. Therapy appointment in the morning, gym in the afternoon. Trash and recycling need to go out tomorrow evening.

Then it’s all about getting everything ready for Tuesday morning. Making sure I have my clothes ready to go. That my two alarms are set so I can aim to leave the house at 6:30 am (!) Breakfast and lunch ready to go. Backpack packed. Hell, I might need to give myself a checklist so I’m not freaking out in the morning.

The drive should take about 45-60 minutes from our home to College Park — going through the District of Columbia at the very beginning of morning rush hour. As long as I can get on I-395 early enough I should be able to make it in with time to spare. And once I’m in, it’s all about moving against rush hour to travel northeast out of the city. (In the 1990s we didn’t have I-695 as a connector; I would have to head across the Sousa Bridge and wait several cycles of a traffic light to turn left to continue on my journey.) I also didn’t have Waze as my co-pilot in the ’90s — so this will likely be even more helpful.

That should get me to campus by 7:30 am. Parking in Lot 1 (plenty of space available, and I assume getting there at 7:30 should be fine in getting a space relatively close to the front of the lot). From there it’s a 10 minute or less walk to the ESJ Building where my 8:00 class and 9:30 classes meet on Tuesday/Thursday. I’ve already read through the syllabi and familiarized myself with the introductory slides from last semester.

Might as well share my schedule: Tuesday and Thursday mornings are pretty standard: PSYC300 (psychology research methods) lecture at 8:00 on the first floor, then fifteen minutes to get downstairs to the basement for BSCI170 (A 100-level biology class for science majors) lecture. On Thursdays that’s where my day ends. On Tuesdays, however, I have a 90-minute, one-day-a-week seminar – IDEA258C (Designing Ethical Campaigns) at 3:30 pm in a room called “The Loft” in the same building (which, I hear, has a ball pit!) and then my BSCI171 lab section from 6 to 8:50 pm in the Chemistry building. (I haven’t been back in the basement of that building since my advanced chemistry course exactly 29 spring semesters ago.)

And Fridays — well, my PSYC300 lab/discussion section meets from 8 to 9:50 am in the Biology/Psychology Building, a classroom building I’ve never been in. I have, however, been in it when it was called the ZOOLOGY/Psychology Building, so I assume I won’t get lost. At 10:00 I can head back home and possibly put in some hours of coursework or employment work. We shall see.

This is a whole lot for a first post. We’ll get to the details and how I’m feeling as we push onward…