bar of soap & skipping hearts

i've finally begun organizing & sharing some photos from my summer trip. i also have a desire to write some in d-land again, provided there's a sliver of downtime. this semester at school is threatening to swallow me whole. (ah the joys of being a doctoral student). right now, the material we're learning in my statistics III class is about as easy to grasp as a bar of soap dropped into the bathtub. maybe it's not THAT bad, but the material IS new to me, so it takes more time to mentally process.

but {warning, rant ahead}, what just gets me is that the professor flies through the material and packs as much as he can into our three hour lecture. it's overload. if you could see my brain imaged on an MRI or something, it would be glowing like a christmas tree. but that's not my main complaint.

i think what bugs me the most is that the weekly homeworks are, shall we say, "labor intensive", and relentless. they involve computing complex statistical output using a software package (called SPSS, for any of your fellow math geeks). in stats I & II, the professors were visual, and showed us step-by-step how to use SPSS and interpret the output. this professor is extremely brilliant and sometimes funny, but is more...cryptic. also, those assignments are getting longer & longer. they're taking me about 4 to 6 hours to complete, even when working w/ classmates in a study group. ugh!

but WAIT, there's more! the professor doesn't actually grade them (that part is fine with me). he just gives you credit for turning them in. the following week, on our class website, he posts a "master" composite homework with the right answers and comments on typical mistakes most students make. while it's fairly helpful, i feel that for all the time and effort i put in, i want, not necessarily a grade, but some individualized feedback on what *I* did wrong (or, for that matter, what was right). in short: i'm left feeling somewhat okay with the class material itself, but i can't gauge how well i'm doing and only way i'll know is on the exam.

and so in the coming week, i have to complete my take-home midterm exam. if you recall from bl0gspot, last spring, it took me ELEVEN hours to complete my final exam for stat II. i stayed up 'til 4am working on it because i was that determined to get an A.

on a happier note (in fact REALLY happy), my cardiology appointment went well. the university doc-in-a-box sent me for an echocardiogram to evaluate my murmur and see if i have the same valve malformation that necessitated my dad's heart valve replacement in may '03. the procedure itself was simple, but what was kind of scary going in was that i felt like i might possibly be looking into a mirror of when i'm old, and finding out my fate and that i'd need surgery in my 60's or 70's. as it turns out, i don't have that issue, and the only thing that turned up was a trace of a leak in my tricuspid valve. but it's nothing to worry about, other than continuing to take antibiotics whenever i see the dentist.

my heart skipped a beat with joy at the news, and will be further filled with joy when my midterm is over.