I have a headache today, so today's news is probably going to be pretty short.

What's been happening in my classes? Not too much, except for in my Early Life on Earth seminar. I'll talk about that last, though.

In my humanities class, we just finished talking about Thoreau and Walden. Now we're moving on to Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring . The reading has been a lot as usual, and I've been skipping a few readings -- that shouldn't hurt me much though. Oh, I did get my midterm back... I got a B+. I was hoping to get a solid A like my last paper, but I'm satisfied with a B+. Not too shabby. :) We already got our topics for our final paper (7-8 pages, I think), but we don't need to worry about them until after Thanksgiving break, which is good. As for Winter and Spring quarter IHUM, I have to pick my selections before December break, which is still a long way off, but there's an "IHUM open house" which I should go to tonight at 7, but it's going to be hard seeing as I have a math review section tonight at 7:30, too. I hope to get a really interesting IHUM class, as this one hasn't been terribly interesting.

Math: a lot of stuff that you guys probably don't care much about. :P We're doing line integrals right now. For a lot of the stuff we do, I don't really know how to apply it to practical situations, but I'm not really doing it for that. As I said, I have a math review session tonight, and we're going to have one during regular class time as well, tomorrow. And then our actual midterm is 7:30 PM tomorrow night. Ugh, but it'll be good to get it over with.

Italian: we just learned the "passato prossimo", which is the past tense. Now I can talk much better, seeing as I have another important tense to work with. We've been learning some pretty useful stuff, and I hope to be able to converse much better with my gramma in Italy when she (hopefully) comes over this December. We also listened to a new song, which wasn't that bad either. Overall pretty good.

So now for my Early Life seminar. I gave my talk on archaea today (I think I mentioned that I was giving a presentation on them). I (stupidly) put almost all of the synthesizing of the information, creating of an outline, and copying of all the papers off until the last minute, which was Sunday. I spent all of the afternoon reading my best source and a Scientific American article from 1981 (surprisingly informative for such an old article), and then I spent the night synthesizing it and creating a nice outline for the class. I have it posted on my website now, so you guys can know all about archaea too. My outline is pretty detailed, so you should be able to learn everything that I talked about just by reading it.

The presentation itself went pretty well, so I'm happy. My professor said it was really good and that it allowed enough time for discussion, too. I'm glad its over, though.. what a stressful Sunday. I don't recommend putting off work on a major presentation until the last minute, but I did a great job, considering (if I may say so myself). Archaea are really interesting, so I suggest you take a look at the outline.

Anything else that I should mention? Oh, right... I saw the Leonids (I think that's the name) Saturday night (Sunday morning at 2 AM, actually). The meteor shower was pretty spectacular -- nothing like I've ever seen, and some of them were pretty big and long, too. I haven't seen so many "shooting stars" that were so big in my life. Supposedly they come every 50 years, I think. Anyway, we went to the middle of Lake Lagunita to lay down and look at the shower... there weren't very many lights and the lake is (of course) dry right now, so it was fun. Hopefully I'll get to see something like that again.

OK, that's enough for now. I need to take a nap.