Lately…

I’m tired. Since August, I’ve been doing grad school full time and working nearly full time. I get up, I got to work at 8:30, I go to class, I sneak off to a computer lab on campus to do work, I got to class, I get home at 8:30 or 10:30. Weekends are for catching up on work and school, and occasionally doing those basic human things we all need to do, like laundry and sleeping. I’m tired. I’m tired of juggling mutually exclusive deadlines, not enjoying any downtime I take because I’m behind in everything, and putting off responsibilities of all kinds.

But enough bitching…Courtesy of a the new digital camera M and I bought after our apartment got robbed of $7 grand of stuff a few days before Christmas, here is life in our apartment.

Bah. Ok, pictures will have to wait until I can figure out how to make them smaller in wordpress. But they will come…

Countdowns…

24 hours until M gets back from Istanbul. 22 hours until I finish a finance midterm. I’m sure these won’t conflict in terms of my concentration levels.

3 days until Halloween. I’ve already eaten more candy that I did last year.

Three weeks until my birthday. Buy me stuff. What I really need is someone to pay my rent or tuition, but I’d settle for various consumer goods. I am especially in need of some new pants. And size 13 socks.

7 weeks until the end of this semester. I am very tired of having class every night, but need to get used to the idea that I have several more years of this.

8 months until our lease is up. I’m not moving without significant persuasion. Unless we hire movers.

10 years until I can legally run for president. Donations would be appreciated, but are not tax-deductible.

26 years until I pay off my student loans. This had better be worth it…

Also, new post on the other blog….

backpacks and stuff

I started school again this week, this time on kind of a down note.  One of my two planned classes was a statistics class for economists.  Which covered material I’ve already had three separate times in college.  Going over it a fourth time did not seem like a worthy use of tuition.

This led me to spent the better part of the week changing up my schedule, petitioning various people more important than me and generally pondering, completing with looming deadline, how I want to spend the next few years of my life.  Verdict was that I would get transfer credit for the stats class and completely revamp my schedule, with the aim of finishing up my econ masters this coming summer, a year and a half earlier than planned.  This will enable me to either be much better at my current job (being technically self employed, this is important) or to get a job I really want.  I hope.  Then after next summer, I ‘ll only have two more years of night classes  until I get my environmental degree.  Whee!

The last part, the two years of a few night classes a week, isn’t really a problem.  What concerns me is the next 9 months, taking 7 graduate level econ course while working 30 hours a week and dong an increasingly time consuming volunteer job, and attempting to spend some level of time with the girlfriend, and the family, and showering once and a while.  I’m being whiny because its 7 am on a saturday and I’m writing this to wake up before getting some work done.

Oh yeah – $420 for books this semester.  The best thing about econ students is that they always resell their books, making textbook shopping a bit easier on the wallet.

Through the looking glass…

And I’m back, after a reader request.  The last few weeks have been crazy, and in a few more weeks, my life will be very little like it was this spring.  There is no time to explain, let me sum up.

I finished school, and got healthy again.  I managed to pull off straight A’s, keeping the grad school streak alive.  I had to pull out of presenting a project for an urban conference as asked though, due to time issues.  I was also asked to be in an environmental documentary as part of Earth Aid, but that fell through, in part because of a lack of enthusiasm on my part to play someone’s monkey.

Three weeks ago, a fraternity at a local college I’ve been helping advise with for three years officially became a fraternity, built from scratch into a group of 40 great guys.  Big ceremony, I looked dashing in my tuxedo, they gave me a nice watch and I got to stay in a very nice hotel.   It took unending meetings, trips to St. Louis, Columbus, and Indianapolis, countless phone calls and some very late nights, but it was all pulled off successfully.  And chicks flip for guys in tuxes.

I started working again a week ago, as an outside consultant/contract worker for my old company.  I’m in the office a lot now, literally, as I’ve been upgraded from my previous cubicle dwelling.  Also, I no longer have to show up at any particular time or work any set number of hours.  Its weird though, going from being the youngest/newest person in the company a year ago to being almost a veteran.  Some things are still the same – my work hasn’t changed much, they still give us lots of free food and I am still completely clueless as to how to work the phone system.

This past Saturday I put down a security deposit on an apartment, which will be mine if the background check shows that I didn’t kill Jimmy Hoffa.  The new bachelor pad is in a great area, 200 yards from a train to downtown Cleveland, a grocery store, a movie theater, a half dozen restaurants, art galleries, a weekly market and a beer store.  Its also somewhat between work and school.  Added bonuses to the location include the girlfriend moving a block away later this summer, and me being too lazy to cook.  The actual apartment is the top floor of the highest building on the roundabout plaza with all of the aforementioned establishments.  Its got six closets, windows along all three sides, high ceilings, a view of downtown and, I’m hoping on a clear day, Lake Erie.

Living Room  

Not sure if the picture uploads are working…if they aren’t I doubt I’ll care enough to go back and fix it.

Also this week, I have the two nieces keeping me company.  Frequent choruses of “Again!” follow every exhausting game we play, but at least I’m getting in some workouts.  I’m having a great deal of fun spoiling them for their mother.  My favorite was letting the older niece eat ranch dressing with a fork.  Who needs the vegetables when you can just eat the dip?

Nothing was ever so sweet…

as getting sick in the middle of a two week stretch of finals, final papers and presentations.  I am in the middle of three finals, 4 final papers, 2 group projects, three presentations and a research project.  Overloading grad school, as mentioned previously, is stupid.  Things are somewhat confounded by the fact that I feel like I’m being dangled upside down under thirty feet of cold, mildly electrified water, ears messed up, unable to breathe, while annoying group members prod me with sticks.  I’m getting desperate here – I’ve taken every pill in the house I can find, jammed sprays up various holes in my body, eaten nothing but fruit, eaten nothing but Arby’s…and I hate taking medicine.  I had to leave a class last night 8 times in two hours because I couldn’t stop coughing.  I didn’t sleep last night because of pressure in my ears.  I have 4 (FOUR!) papers due today.

When this is all over, at 9:50 pm next Thursday, I am going to drink rum out of a hollowed out pineapple until I fall over.   At which point, if someone could be so kind as to bring me a straw….

A big difference in graduate school…

is that some of the students are established professionals or life-long students.  For the most part, this is positive.  I’ve gotten to work on projects with an atmospheric scientist that did stints in Antarctica, people at the EPA, a director from the Cleveland Zoo, a couple lawyers, etc.  But there are also a few possessing the attitude that not only do they know more than the professors, but that because they are so established and smart, if they aren’t understanding something right away its the professor’s fault and they should proclaim this in a loud, interrupting fashion.

I’ve had idiots in my classes before, no-it-alls, hecklers, sleepers.  Hell, I’ve had (and on rare occasions been one of) the kids that sit in the back with 20 ounce bottles of soda and booze (the infamous “traveler”).  But none of those have made me as ready to jump over a desk and smack someone than the most problematic grad students.  Case in point would be last night, when a woman interrupted the professor at least a dozen times.  We were doing spatial network analysis, which for lack of motivation to describe it I’ll just describe as hard.  This student alternated between berating the professor for their lack of comprehension and interrupting to point out mistakes.  I’m sorry, but if you aren’t following the material, you have no place cutting off someone with a doctorate to inform everyone that the typical speed limit on residential roads in 25 mph, not 35.

As long as I’m bitching….I am in two ideologically opposite degree programs.  Environmental Studies and Economics.  Ying and Yang.  Treehuggers and greedy capitalists.  It amazes me the blind faith people have that their point of view is correct and anything opposing is ludicrous, as are the people holding that point of view.  If you ever want to get open-mouth stares, try explaining to an ecosystem science class that economic factors do protect the environment when used properly, or to an international trade class that the resource limits in combination with “Dutch Disease” can make trade bad for a developing economy.  Its quite amusing.

I feel better now.  I think I’ll eat some cereal.

Bring on the tequila and sunblock…Spring Break is here!

Yes, Spring Break is capitalized for a reason.  As of 5 pm on Thursday, my spring break started.  It’s going to be three days long, but it’ll be worth it, because I’m finally caught back up in school and can relax a bit.  So I have a beer, my couch, and a movie playing.

The real vacation will be next weekend, when I drag M across several states to visit some old friends and relatives.  But we’ll stop off at one of the largest malls in the country and, weather/time permitting, step in the ocean*, so it’ll be a nice little adventure.

*by ocean, I mean the one off the coast of New Jersey, not Fiji, Mexico or the Bahamas