The first day of classes is surprisingly uneventful.

I woke up at nine, after sleeping a mere 6.5 hours. But my body feels like it wants to be up, so I let it. Showered, read some news on the web, and went it to school around noon time so I can have lunch and stop by the bookstore to pick up a couple notebooks.

Class was short today. irod has some "superficial problem with [his] right arm" and couldn't write on the board. So after a brief discussion of logistics of the class, and a brief introduction on what will be taught, we were dismissed after 20 minutes.

Recall that I've decided to take my French language exam as soon as I feel confident. I went down to the library to grab some text books to help me prepare. The thing is, I can't use an analysis text, because I know all about the material and it doesn't help with my French, and all of the Nicholas Bourbaki books we have in French are really old, they are bound 2 chapters to a volume, so for example, the one on Algèbre is divided up in 4 volumes, and thus doesn't interest me much. So I ended up deciding to read Grothendieck's Elements de geometrie algebrique for practice. One problem though: I am absolutely unfamiliar with the language of algebra in French. With the help of the Wikipédia, L'encylopédie libre, I manage to learn that Anneau == Ring, Corps == Field, and I sense that the French Wikipedia will do me much good in the next few weeks.

I left a bit early from the department today: need to do some grocery shopping as I am almost out of vegetables. So I pushed my cart in ShopRite, and got myself a loaf of bread, some deli products, and some miscellaneous vegetables. While I was getting the vegetables, I just left the cart near the head of the aisle. So I dropped off the vegetables and went back into the aisle because I wanted to pick up some broccoli. Well, after I picked out the four broccoli crowns I wanted, I turned around, walked back to where I left my cart, and it was gone. Someone had obviously made a mistake and pushed off with my cart! I looked around, and don't see any suspects. There is one other cart near where my cart was, so I thought: most likely the owner of this cart took mine, I will just wait here for a while. I was so sure that the other person will realize his or her mistake very soon (it is quite unlikely that he or she will have the exact same items on the shopping list as mine, and given what is in the car in front of me, the list would appear to be quite different). Well, it turns out that while I was right on who took my cart, I was wrong about human nature/alertness. I waited there for five minutes and no one at all came to claim this cart in front of me. So I had to find myself a new cart and start over. So I put down the bag of broccoli where the other crowns were, went back up to the store entrance, got myself another cart, and came back, and guess what, someone took the bag of broccoli I picked out. -sigh-. I guess I lucked out that I got a different lady serving me at the deli counter, or it will be embarrassing trying to explain why I have to come back and get the same things I just got 10 minutes ago.