Actually, the weather has been refreshing the last couple of days — in the 70s and low 80s with grey skies and light showers. So it’s been much more tolerable than it was before. Unfortunately, there are no 24-hour labs here as I thought. Well, I guess the labs are theoretically open, but you are supposed to swipe the GoCard through this machine for the door to open. But we have the new and improved GoCard which, apparently, does not work with any of the old and still unimproved card-reading machines.

Which means I’m more or less limited to the library for blogging. And they’re closing off access to the computers at least at 5:30 p.m. There are these three Macs in the student center which doesn’t close until midnight, but you have to stand up to to use them, and with only three they are occupied much more often, naturally.

So far, work has been fun. Working at KRT is kind of a meritocracy. The editors aren’t going to say, “No, don’t work on that — we don’t have space,” because it’s a wire service and they can move as much copy as they want on to the wire. But it’s a meritocracy because however good or timely your story is determines whether it gets picked up by the member papers.

So I’m pretty sure I had a story about Senate Democrats attacking Bush’s Social Security plan published yesterday, but I have to look it up on Lexis-Nexis to make sure, as KRT does not track its stories.

And I’m working on four or five other stories right now and also wrote a couple of very brief Web site reviews for this “Hotlink” feature they run.

As for classes … they’re three-hour lectures, and they’re tough. Tuesday and Thursday nights from 6 to 9 p.m. I have economics class. That’s after an 8-hour working day. And these are lectures, all the way through. The chairs are uncomfortable and there’s no time to eat or change into comfortable clothing after work. Those 12-hour days are killer.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday morning we have a guest speaker or speakers every week, followed by a three-hour class in ethics. That’s pretty brutal. So I have no energy to do any reading for class during the week, which means I’ve got to do it all on the weekend, in addition to laundry, shopping, etc.

Jeez, don’t I have it terrible? And here I thought all those kids dying of AIDS in sub-saharan Africa were badly off.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. The boss of one of my roommates, Daniel Epstein (who’s from Houston, by the way) , apparently started the IPJ program and he told Daniel that pretty much everyone who applied was accepted. No surprise, really. I always thought the application process was a little less than rigorous.

Once you’re here, though, they wear you ragged. We are told repeatedly that these seven weeks will just fly by. Well, it’s just more than a week since I’ve arrived and it feels like two or three. So I hope it does start flying by soon. I want to get back home.