God has a sense of humour....

You know what it was last week? Around -5C. You know what the air temperature (not including any windchill) was this morning? -27C.

Coupled with yesterday's problems, I'm guessing either God has a sense of humour, or karma is getting it's own back from me finding a beautiful, cheap wedding dress so easily.

Today's exams actually went quite well. My Historical Archaeology midterm was really weird to write, since it was 3 long answer questions in 60 minutes. I scribbled like crazy, and all my information was good and relevant, but I really don't feel like I answered the questions at all, mostly because they were like this:

Discuss the history and archaeology of L'Anse aux Meadows. How does it differ from other New World colonizations?

Well, with the amount of information I read and we took notes on in this subject, I could have written for all 60 minutes, and I still wouldn't have covered everything i thought was important. Ergo, I didn't get down everything I thought was important :P But really, how much can one write by hand in 60 minutes? And I really spent only 5 minutes of it NOT writing, for turning pages and briefly thinking lines through.

My Engineering Geology exam however went very, very well. I knew the answers and worked them through confidently, and I had MORE than enough information for the last question in particular.

Now I'm studying for Geochemistry, which I have tomorrow. There were issues with the first time he gave the test (which I missed) because...well, first let me explain about the class. It's a fairly difficult subject, and our professor is actually a Grad Student, whose advisor (and usual professor for the class) is currently on sabbatical. The notes he's using are hers, but they're kind of disjointed (apparently the class was very hard to follow when she taught it). To make things worse, our professor is Russian, and doesn't speak English well. It's not that he lapses into Russian at any point, but he translates literally from Russian as he speaks, so that grammar and terms often make no sense. (Think Yoda but worse with a thick accent - cute in a puppet expounding Jedi knowledge, senseless in a complex science class).

Anyway, the initial exam was 12 questions, of which you had to answer 8. Each question was weighted differently, and he stated at the top of the exam "The goal is to get the most marks possible". What he intended was that your exam would only be marked out of 100 if you answered the 8 highest valued questions. Otherwise the highest possible mark you could obtain would be below 100. Since this wasn't clearly stated and the class did poorly as a result, he's reissuing the midterm, and that's when I'm writing it.

I dunno if I'm any good Geochemistry or not, I guess we'll find out tomorrow. I've been doing a mediocre 75 in the labs so far.