A Student Once More

Ah, it's back to school for me as well. Not seriously, but I am taking a few fluff classes this fall.

On Tuesday nights I learn how to ice cakes. It's just a Wilton class, but it's taught at a local cake supply shop, so I have access to all kinds of tools and tricks of the trade. Like how you add a ton of TRANS FAT to your Crisco to really make your icing do what you want it to. So beware of that little fact, any of you who express excitement over sampling my cakes.... They should really have a health warning on them, like "You must be capable of burning an extra 1000 calories a week" or "Do not combine with nacho cheese consumption in the same week". If Obama knew what was in these cakes, he'd try to tax me. Anyway, I digress... Jordan is as excited as I am about my cake class. I get home after she's gone to bed, usually, but this past week she heard me come home and had a few questions for me:

"Mama, you go to cake school?"
"Yes, honey"
"Did you bring home a cake?"
"Yes, I brought home a cake this time" (last week we had a class cake, not individual ones, so she was most disappointed about that)
"Mama, did you already eat it all gone?"
"No Jordan!! I haven't even cut it!"

Hmmpff. Indignation. Why does she think me capable of such crimes??

I'm also signed up for a beginners' Photoshop class, and I just got home from my first session. It's taught at the community college, it's an informal class, and OMG!!! It's an exercise in patience!!! I know I'm an education snob. I haven't been in a classroom (either at work or at university) not comprised of engineers in over a decade. And this is obviously not an overly technical class, but a class for people who have hobbies that warrant some photo-editing knowledge. Which implies they know something about photos. (BIG assumption) And, it's a COMPUTER software class, implying that people taking it should how to use a COMPUTER. (An even bigger assumption) I thought I was going to pull my hair out. If I hadn't paid money, I would have walked out. I don't know how the instructor does it, he teaches this class all the time and I'm sure he has to deal with the same stupid crap every single time. Here's a few class highlights not in the syllabus:

- When you DOUBLE CLICK something, it does something different than if you just SINGLE clicked it
- Those downward arrows next to menu items are additional drop-down menus
- There's a difference between SAVE and SAVE AS (OMG...)
- In Photoshop, Ctrl-Z means undo, just like in every other windows-based application
- You have a LEFT and a RIGHT mouse button, and guess what, they do different $hit (tah-dah!)

I really, really am a snob.