Home Alone

My wife and son are in Seattle this weekend. They left yesterday afternoon, and I miss them already. It turns out that a three-bedroom house is awfully big when it's empty. It's just me and our dogs right now, and I feel like there are tumbleweeds rolling by when I walk into a room. On the one hand, it was really nice to be able to study all night and watch some TV without interruption, but I was pretty much over it by the time I went to bed. Bedtime is the worst, actually. It's really hard for me to fall asleep in an otherwise empty bed. I curled up on my wife's side to get a bit of her scent, and that helped, but it wasn't the same. Anyway, my weekend is pretty rigidly structured, and I have myself pretty much sleeping or out of the house all of the time, which should be all I need to keep my mind off of it, but I'm still counting down the minutes until Monday afternoon.

I need a hair cut.

Pharmacy school is harder than I thought. I got my test results from the exams I took last week and the week before. I got a B on one and a low A on the other, so I'm hardly at risk of failing out, but that's not what I wanted. My whole life I've never really needed to study. I mean, right now I'm blogging from a lecture, and I'll retain enough of it to pass the related questions on the exam. But I need to start reviewing a little bit more for these exams. Other assignments haven't been an issue at all; so far it's only been the tests. I wanted to make the Dean's List this semester, and to accomplish that goal I'm going to need to find ways to study both harder and smarter. Also, the material is getting more challenging as we go on, so the effort I put in for the B and the A- will quickly become only enough for a C+ or a B. I don't think I need to draw you a graph to show you where that will get me. (If I do, let me know, and I'll make up a presentation for my next entry.)

Short blog today, I guess. We made an offer on a house, and we're waiting to hear back about it. I'll post again when I find out. We find ourselves once again in a multiple offer situation (same thing happened two weeks ago and we didn't get it), so it's not a guarantee, but we have a better chance this time because we're not contingent on the sale of our house (I go to the closing this afternoon) and we offered a lot more than their asking price (last time we were already at the top of our budget).

That's it for now. Thanks for reading, and come back soon.

Thanks for reading,

The Final Countdown

This might have just been an excuse to put that sweet picture in a blog post. But we are in the last week before classes begin. Friday is orientation! Technically, the first class class will be next Monday, but I'm sticking to my original August 14 date. After all, if I fail to appear on campus and get my ID that day, I will lose my spot and and it will be filled by someone from the wait list. I thought that was a rather harsh policy. And honestly, how many people are sitting around waiting for that call? "Yes, this is the CU School of Pharmacy. Can you be in Denver in three days? I know you've been waiting for four months for this call and made a bunch of other plans for next year, but if you happen to have $18,000 lying around to pay for your tuition, you can totally start right away!" I'm guessing they have that policy just because it's the only way to guarantee that students show up to get their IDs that day.

My son won't eat meat. This doesn't really bother me other than the fact that he wants to eat everything else he finds. Dog hair? Yep. Batteries? Sure. Live spiders? You betcha. I'm extremely grateful that I was asleep for this one. My wife got to witness him pick up a sizable spider by one spindly leg, look at it, and try to put it in his mouth. Of course this would scare the crap out of anything, so the spider took off down his arm, causing Xander to laugh, probably because it tickled. Just thinking about it gives me the heebidy jeebidies.

I got CPR certified Wednesday morning. I was a little intimidated about going to a CPR course for health care providers, but it turned out not to be so bad. It was also very asocial, with almost no student-student interaction. I'm glad to get that out of the way. Plus, if you collapse in front of me, I have a vague idea of what to do about it. It would really help if you were a limbless torso that clicked whenever I compressed your chest with enough pressure to pump your heart.

We have our first showing of our house tomorrow. It was pretty exciting to get that call. We actually got a call Thursday evening, but my wife and I were both going out with my brother watching Xander for us, and the house was a mess, too. I didn't want him to have to get out of the way of a showing, and I didn't think it was in very good condition to show, either. We did a total cleaning/painting/organizing blitz and now we're all set. Hopefully the potential buyers will fall in love, but I'm realistic. It's going to take a good deal of time to sell this house, if it sells at all, and that's fine.

The official countdown to school is five days, including today. Also, I have homework! I guess I'd better get working on that. Well, I still have five days. That's a ton of time, right?