Life Is A Highway; I'm Going To Drive It ALL NIGHT LONG

It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and wrote from the heart what has been going on in my life. Turns out I’ve been busy.

It’s been nearly one full month since I’ve last posted, here is the rundown:

  • I got a new job. Yeah, it turns out that I was wrong about my last job; I really did hate it and so I scooted. Ironically enough, my current position is back with the university that I left not some seven or eight months ago. I work in a different position now, however, which makes things a lot better. At 5pm we close up and I’m OUT. No more worrying about what is going on at night if I happen to leave (which brought on a lot of trepidation in the previous position). Really what I like best is that I can freaking stand up and walk around if I want. I have a work computer, but I also bring my laptop so I can work on auxiliary things meaningful to the position (and I found an old monitor in the closet; I’m rocking a sweet tri monitor set up). I have a WINDOW and SUNLIGHT comes through it because I work during THE DAY. It’s awesome. Plus the school will pay for school; I might get another bachelor’s. We’ll see.
  • Outside of work, the condo I live in now is not too shabby. One of the things I complained a lot about at my old apartment is that it was freaking loud; all the time. If it wasn’t the pigeons being loud as hell it would be the grounds keeping mowing and leaf blowing from 8am-5pm. Of course, then I was working nights so the results of the noise was that I could never get a good night’s sleep. Since then I’ve moved to a less snooty place and have been pretty happy with the result. Not only is the rent cheaper, but it’s also waaaay quieter. It’s extremely surprising. When I learned that the condo was labeled with a letter instead of a number I could only think that I was about to enter slumtown and Mel Gibson from Mad Max would roll by in front of the window. Such is not the case. Given, the residence is older, but there are no pigeons and I’m at work when grounds keeping comes by during the week. The loudest thing, honestly, is my cat, who has decided to meow all waking hour because she likes to go outside and watch the birds and other animals that run around. Sometimes I want to punch her face with my fists, but I know she gets kinda bored during the day when everyone is gone, so I don’t.
  • On the show front, I just grabbed a new theme for Pressed & Bound and added Google Analytics to the site to help track visitors. I’m hoping to add some new things to the site to drive some traffic. We’ll see; I haven’t fully figured out what needs to be done, but something does. I think we have a good thing going and just need some tweaks to get more eyeballs on the site and the show. I don’t care if we ever make a cent, but if we can get some people to pick up more novels I’d call it a success.
  • Speaking of novels, I just signed up for the National Novel Writing Month challenge. Basically you take November to attempt to write a 50,000 word novel. If you succeed, the site will give you a .pdf certificate that certifies your awesomeness. If you don’t, no worries, you’re not out anything. You just happened to not finish a novel. 50k is about 1,666 words per day. If anyone wants to join me on this challenge, please say so. Once you sign up, you can add writing buddies to keep track of friends’ progress. I’m trying to get a friendly challenge going with the guys at P&B, so we’ll see how that goes.

So that’s really about the gist of everything that’s happened in the last month. I’ve been trying to get all settled for the most part with the apartment and work so it’s been kind of slow, but hopefully everything will continue to go better.

Interesting Changes Are Afoot

This may very well be the last post I make from my digs at the school I formerly attended. As of today I have given my two week’s notice and have left the school. Two things that I didn’t think I’d do for at least another five months. This is not going to be a long post because I have to pack more, but I will say that I have found a pretty bitchin’ apartment, and I will upload pictures (and maybe video) soon. I will also have a more detailed account of what is all going on here. I know you’re all riveted to your seats, but you’ll just have to sit tight for a little while. Have a good weekend.

Midterms Really Did Suck

So after all of that B.S. I wrote about last week concerning midterms and all of that nonsense, this week is the aftermath of all of that. I had thought that I probably would have done ok, but it turns out that I was wrong. I’ve seen all of my exams this week, and to my horror, these have been the worst midterms of my life.

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Hell Week Day 5

Since Wednesday was somewhat of a day of rest, Thursday was back to exams. I had one Marketing exam at 11:00am which the night before I studied for for about an hour. The questions didn’t seem too difficult, as they all revolved around most of the same subject matter, but there were 34 of them. The exam was a random picking of 6 of those questions, so you had to know everything. Fortunately, the questions that were picked came from the 24 or so questions that I actually studied, so it was not too bad. I don’t think I made a 100, but I don’t think I did too shabby. We’ll know next week.

And that really wraps it up for the Hell Week series. I’ve missed a lot of sleep and I got frustrated more than one can count on one hand, but it’s over and with that the weekend brings much joy. I figure that I should probably start doing a little homework here and there so that I don’t get so backed up, but I don’t know; that just sounds silly.

Hell Week Day 4

Wednesday was not as hard as the preceding days, as all I really had to do was turn in the exam I spent so much time on, the exam that I finished at 12:40 in the morning. I made a fairly poor decision after I finished that exam, and I ended up staying up until about 4:00am. I was riding this high of having finished that exam that my body didn’t require sleep until I could not stand it anymore. Because of that, I woke up at 11:00am, which isn’t necessarily a strange thing, and went to lunch then class at 1:00pm. Afterwards, because Pressed & Bound is late this week, we shot the show, which we got to complain about something that has been happening around here (I’ll write about that later), and then I ate some dinner.

I began to study again after dinner, and that lasted all of five minutes. I was so tired from staying up the previous night that I crashed about 7:30pm until 9:30pm, leaving only a couple of hours to really look things over. And so I did. Then I went to bed. I never said this was going to be interesting.

But seriously, this weekend I’ll see if I can’t summarize what has been pissing me off (outside of midterms) recently. So wait for that, or just check out the show this week. There’s only one more day of Hell Week.

Hell Week Day 3

Yesterday, I took you through my anger that I could not return my textbook during midterm time, and today I’m going to turn that anger and point it right back at me. I’m angry with myself for not taking a little more time to flesh out my knowledge of the topics covered in my Finance exam.

Sunday when I started studying, everything seemed to be going my way. The questions that we were supposed to have done for the class were not especially difficult, and of course having the book right there helps (although not a ton; the book is poorly designed), but my professor happens to be of the sort that likes to do “fun” things with their tests. For this one, it was split into five sections and we were supposed to pick two to do, and those would be the only two that she grades. And while that doesn’t sound too awful, the sections were split up not by topic, but rather haphazardly. So, for instance, instead of having a full section on one topic, it would be split into maybe two, making it so that you had to know how to do both things in order to get the maximum amount of points. Yes, I’m sure that I should have known how to do everything, but that didn’t happen. I ended up not finishing some parts of the exam because I kept second guessing myself on future values of annuities, so we’ll see how it all turns out. If the horrible circumstance arises that I have to take the class again based off of this exam, a new professor I shall choose, but that decision won’t be based solely on this test, and I’ll leave it at that.

Afterwards, I spent a good long time finishing up my Management Science homework and take-home exam. From about 7:00pm until 12:30am I was busting my hump to work all of that stuff out. The first question on the exam became the bane of my existence for a while. All of the other problems asked you to solve, but this one just asked for the equations to solve. For some reason that threw me for a loop. It was like the question was enticing me into a trap or something. But oh well, it’s done and forgotten. The really hard part of the week is over now, I just have one more exam to go.

Hell Week Day 2

Monday marked the first school day of Hell Week. Fortunately it was rather light in actual class time. Unfortunately it was incredibly long in terms of homework time. Hell Week Day 2 was the day I started all of the homework for my Management Science class, and before I was able to do start anything, I had to buy the book.

I woke up at about 10:30am that morning, ready to spend my hard earned money on a text book. I thought I was smart, and here’s why: during the normal class session, you can buy a book and take it back two days later for a full refund. Armed with this knowledge, I went to the bookstore thinking everything would be fine (I only needed the book for two days), and that I’d be made in the shade. It’s too bad I was wrong. DEAD WRONG. I took the book up to the counter, sullen with knowing that I was about to waste $171, and plopped it down. I made my purchase, to my chagrin, and took the book back to my apartment. Retrieving the receipt from the bag, I looked upon it to cement the feeling of being broke again. At the bottom of the receipt, where it normally gives you the information on when you can get a refund, were the words: NO REFUNDS DURING MIDTERMS. Total crap. I hate our bookstore, have hated it for at least six years now, and now I will never buy from them again. I’m sure they’re not too upset, I only have a semester left and they’ve stolen thousands of dollars from me in the past few years.

So anyhow, I bought the book and started doing homework in Management Science. For this class, I actually have to turn in the homework, so I at least need to have some of the things finished. The rest of the day would be left to do the 40 some odd questions about linear programming that I’ve neglected and to start the take-home midterm in the same class; so about 45 problems.

I spent the rest of the day after class let out at 2:15pm until around 9:00pm working on the questions. I finished 2 of the problems on the exam. About seven hours of sitting in one space nearly did me in, so I stopped then. At this time I was dead tired so I relaxed instead of studying for my Finance final for the coming day. I’m pretty smart. Tomorrow, though, you’ll see that I’m not.