School daze...

There are many advantages to doing college at an advanced age, besides the obvious, that my partying days are long past, and I can concentrate on the subject matter ever so much better. I no longer worry about how I look most of the time. If I am tidy, without spots or hanging threads, and my hair is clean, I feel fine heading out the door. I have adopted the tacit uniform of college students; dark sweatshirt or jacket, jeans and athletic shoes. I sometimes opt for my clogs or my little witch boots, and even my Ugh knockoffs. It doesn't really matter, because I am invisible, anyway, to other students. My teachers, on the other hand, often recognize me, as I am their contemporary, and often, their elder. And I am a good student. Well, I should be, it is all I have to do, besides the minimal housework and walking the dog. This semester heated up really fast, though. I am doing my study guide for geology today, and spending Saturday in the library with a bunch of minerals, trying to be able to identify 31 different ones. I already have about 10 of the obvious ones down: graphite (it comes off all over your hands), talc (soapy and pearly), kaolinite (white and powdery), sulfur (bright yellow and stinky), flourite (purple and transparent), halite (salty), calcite (double refraction), hematite (rusty red), quartz (duh), garnet (double duh), corundum (barrel-shaped), magnetite (magnetic, of course), azurite (bright blue), olivine (greenish), pyrite (fool's gold). Wow, that's a lot! Maybe this won't be so very hard, after all. There are a lot that are white or black and look a lot alike, though. Fun to play with, but my hands stink afterward, I noticed. And these are just minerals. Rocks are next, composites of minerals. Next comes quiz in Western Civilization, homework and then big test. And a report due in American History, and a midterm there, too. Well, no one said it would be easy, and of course, I think I should be perfect, which I am not most of the time. I do try, really I do.