Salt River Tubing and First Day of School

I spent the last day of summer doing the ultimate college break/arizona thing: I went tubing on the Salt River. I drove out with a bunch of friends from the architecture/design house (a minivan comes in handy) and one other car. There were about 10 of us, and we stopped for lunch at a Sonic on the edge of the city and for a second cooler. We drove out to the meeting point where we rented our inner tubes and hopped on a blazing hot bus for a five minute drive out to the beaching site.
It was a scorching day into 108 when we started around 1 in the arfternoon. More experianced people brought sheets they laid on the innertube as a kind of seat. We lashed the coolers to another inner tube and as a huge group, floated gently down the river. The river was mostly filled with 20-30 year olds, and most were holding cans of beer. It's a very relaxing way to meander your way, enjoying the view, working on the tan, and occationally soaking yourself to keep cool. At one point of the river, there was a small ledge that people jumped off, which seemed like a particualrly bad idea considering that the people who were doing it had had a lot to drink.
It was fun though, and we'd occationally hit "rapids" where the water level was so low, you had to raise yourself up on the tube to avoid scraping bottom. We cruised for about three hours, and waded out at the exit spot.
Also there was a young woman with her group who was nearly unconscious and vomiting, either through the effects of heat, dehydration, and booze, or more likely, all three. One of our guys ran over and helped load her onto the bus. We passed an ambulance with lights blaring on the drive back once we got back into our cars.
Today I had studio at 1:15 PM. Predictably, a bunch of people including me, showed up at 12:30. We knew when class started, we were just eager to get going. We were finally let inside and I grabbed a desk a row away from the windows so I got more natural light. It's so cool to finally get a desk. Its a status symbol, a reward for our hard work. We've earned these desks. There are 13 people in my studio, a couple people I know pretty well.
Our studio instructor is Thomas Hartman, apparently the coordinator for our entire class. He's tall, lean, and balding with glasses, looks very much the bookish professor sans a bowtie. He's reserved, but it seems like he's going to be a mild teacher, which is a double edged sword. On the one hand, he'll let you "get away" with more, but on the other, he's probably going to be less critical of your designs. He seems like a good guy though, and he knows what he's doing.
We sat around our big middle table and talked for awhile about the studio before we headed down as a class for the lecture introducuing the project.
There are to be three projects this semseter. The first one is a rectangular box 10' x 12' x 16' as a human habitation. Half of its walls have to be concrete, half framed with wood and clad with transparent material. The final project is to be at 1'=1" scale. Thats' the whole project.
The purpose of the project is experimentation with materials, aestetics, and tectonics (how a building is put togather and how that relates to the larger structure). He wants us to build big, becasue that will force us to look very materially at how a roof meets a wall, or how framed structures join the concrete. It's a fast project, barely three weeks. We actually only have 30 classes before the end of the semester.
Today (right now, actually) I've started work at the library. I'm working M, T, W from 5-10 pm. It's really quiet and I've been familiarizing myself with proceedures, browsing books, and taking a look around. There's a lot of stuff here, a phenomenal resource. This library job can only help me to familiarize myself with it.