What is this skool of which you speak!?

Back in the saddle again. Back where a friend is a friend. Where the long-horn cattle, um, OK never fed on the lowly gypsum weed, at least not to the best of my knowledge here in California. But tomorrow I start my classes, hence, the Back in the Saddle medley!

A renewed sense of purpose! A new zeal for learning! Um, maybe. Not gonna lie. I really enjoyed my break. After several years in retail and the healthcare industry, where apparently time does not stop for festivus, it was nice to have a long stretch of "me time."

Christmas was awesome, but bizarre. It was weird getting urban planning books from my grandparents. Especially as I hadn't requested them. But the titles were on my amazon.com wishlist. Am looking into digging into them, especially Boomburbs: the Rise of America's Accidental Cities by Robert E. Lang and Jennifer Lefurgy.

This will coincide nicely with my urban demography class and my Smart Growth and Sprawl class, which is being taught by Bill Fulton.

I am unabashedly excited that I am going to be studying under Professor Fulton, who is the mayor of Ventura, author of the (definitive) Guide to CA Planning, and wrote several other (!) books including the Regional City with Peter Calthorpe and also wrote the Reluctant Metropolis. Yes, it sounds like brown-nosing, and probably is, but he is one of the heavy-hitters in the field and it's exciting to be able to say that he was one of my professors. Hey, our department head studied under Kevin Lynch- this could be a pattern!

More to come. Have to head over to the bookstore, see if our books every got stocked. The irony kills me. Here's to an exciting new year!