That whole Monday morning blog thing? Yeah, that's not really happening so much.

There is some irony, I suppose, that I announced Monday morning as the time for my blog posts to come out (after happening to write one every Sunday night for several weeks) and haven't posted one on time since. Well, I'm sorry for that. It did let me know that I actually have some readers, though! Thanks for that, both of you.

One week of classes is in the books. The nature of this program, however, makes it seem like nothing has really been accomplished. So much of the course work is didactic lecture (ungraded), independent reading and study (ungraded), and a few exams (graded). Next Monday is the first exam; we also have weekly quizzes in Skills and our first quiz in Health Care Systems next week. But Skills is pass/fail, so that doesn't feel like a big deal, and the HCS quiz is online, so it doesn't feel like real classwork. There are basically no papers in the first year of pharmacy school (at CU, anyway). That's been a huge adjustment for me. Each of my English classes had a final paper of 10+ pages due, and a lot of my literature classes were discussion-based, not lecture-based. This whole going to class, sitting and listening, and getting no feedback on my comprehension of the material until the exam business is pretty new to me. I'm not complaining - they definitely don't load you up with busy work - just pointing out how different it is.

Either the hammer has yet to fall or this semester is more manageable than last. I'll let you know which when I figure it out. I think I made enough adjustments to my study habits - like staying on campus to study after class instead of going straight home - to have a fair chance of avoiding burnout.

In case you were wondering, this weekend was not so productive. I'm OK with that. I didn't get behind on anything, and I spent some time with friends and extended family that I don't normally have available. Still, it would have been reassuring to be ahead of schedule in something.

For whatever reason, I never shared my struggles with my intern license on this forum. That's odd. Anyway, pharmacy students are granted intern pharmacist licenses while students in order to learn the profession in experiential fashion. Under the supervision of a state-recognized preceptor, these interns can do just about anything that a full pharmacist can do, and the idea is that supervised practice is the best preparation for unsupervised practice. Well, most of my class received their intern licenses about a month after school started. A portion of the class, however, had theirs delayed due to the background check portion of the application. Most of these, including mine, were due to repeat traffic offenses. I had two speeding tickets and a "defective vehicle" charge (standard plea bargain for a careless driving charge that isn't a serious case) from 2000 to 2002, and then another speeding violation in 2006 and another defective vehicle in 2008. Apparently that causes concern that I may not have an appropriate respect for the law. I'm not going to get into the various reasons why that isn't the case with me. All I'm going to say is that I finally got my intern license. This means that if I had time for it in my schedule I could get a job in a pharmacy. I'm going to try to get one in the summer, but right now it would just take me away from my family and get in the way of my school work, so for now it's just a fancy name tag that I can show off at parties.

In an hour, my wife and son land at the airport. They were only gone for three days, but I missed them a lot. It's not that I'm so dependent on my family that I can't function without them for a weekend. I'm just a much better person when they're around. Having someone to come home to makes me come home faster, and having someone to play with makes me do my chores sooner. I wasted a lot of time this weekend. But I am quite nearly a Wii Tennis pro, which ought to count for something.

That's all the news from my otherwise uneventful week. Thanks for stopping by, and keep checking back on Mondays (or Tuesdays, if there isn't one Monday).