Traveling can be tough. This is especially true if you packed at the last minute and forgot a few vital things. It's fun to be experiencing things that are out of the ordinary, but you start to miss things like privacy and your own towels.

(As a The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan, I'm embarrassed to say that I forgot to bring along my own towel. Forgive me, Douglas Adams. Forgive me, Ford Prefect.)

Anyway, I am finally back from my trip to California to tour grad schools. It was a really long, hectic trip. I loved the climate in California, but I'm glad to be home. I've gained a whole new appreciation for our lower cost of living. On the other hand, it's so oppressively polluted here that I am very seriously thinking about going to school in California.

When my family was driving through the empty fields of New Mexico on our way back, we actually got to see stars in the sky. Here in Houston, there's so much light pollution that you can only see the brightest stars. I was shocked to learn that the night sky really is speckled with stars. In the past, whenever I saw a sky filled with stars on TV or in a drawing, I would think it was really fake. But now I know the truth...

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the TV Production class I took earlier this summer. My professor was right; I'm never going to watch TV the same way again. Now I can see all the goofs that are made on TV. I never would've guessed it, but TV Production was one of those classes that makes you grow as a person. I learned a lot about myself while forming relationships with my classmates. The class was sort of unusual in that our grades depended not only on our own performance but our classmates' as well. We had to pick our own crews for our final project, a 5-minute live-to-tape interview with one commercial inserted (no editing allowed afterwards, basically). Therefore, it was important to note how certain people got along with others and VERY important to make sure I got along with everyone on my crew.

The class also required masses of organization and management ability. Picture this: fourteen people are assigned to various jobs in the studio and the control room. You have 40 minutes to get these people to do their jobs at the right time so that you'll end up with a 5-minute tape. Some parts you can control. You can have the script written and the theme music picked out. You can have everyone's instructions written for them...pre-program the crew, so to speak. But what it comes down to is you, the director, standing in front of a bank of TV screens, calling for changes and hoping your crew jumps to it. Hoping the babble of voices from the talent, the floor manager, and the assistant director is intelligible...and watching the numbers flash by on the clock as time quickly runs out. The pressure is huge, man.

This year is going to be hectic. I'm taking the GRE in three weeks, so I've got to study for that. I've got the two theses to work on, and I have classes on top of that. And of course, I need to apply to graduate schools. I need a vacation badly. And of course, by "vacation" I mean "uninterrupted sleep for several months."

*Sigh* Well, I'm off to see the wizard...

I met the Hash Brown Goal long ago and have collected about $10 in my Hash Brown Fund.

Helen