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,

Almost flat-lined for a second, didn't I?

Hello, faithful reader. We almost lost this blog... two weeks between posts? That's unacceptable. As it turns out, pharmacy school is time-consuming. To this point I haven't run into anything that's hard, but I've had to devote significant amounts of time to study and assignments. I'm still working 30 hours a week (although that goes down to 23 this week, and then we'll see), and I like to spend time with my wife and son, too. There are times when my wife works, and I have to spend time with Xander (I'm not complaining about that "obligation!"), and it's pretty hard to say no to some family time if we're all home. I end up with very little time to do the studying. You can see how I have even less time for the blogging. So now I am blogging from Science Foundations class.

This course covers all of general chemistry in like three weeks. It's pretty intense. I see why they make you take all those prerequisites, because if you were seeing this for the first time you would be in way over your head.

I didn't get the class president position. That may turn out to be a good thing (see above paragraphs about not enough time). I did, however, get the student ethics committee position. I told almost nobody that I was applying for this because it all happened at the same time as the student council madness, but this is actually the position I wanted more. The ethics committee is a student and faculty body that meets to decide issues of ethics violations within the school of pharmacy. Most of these end up being academic issues, such as cheating on a test. The ethics committee reviews all the facts of the case and then makes a recommendation to the Dean about what sort of disciplinary action should be taken. For those of you who didn't know me then, I did a similar thing in my last year of undergrad. It was called the judicial board (J-board) at CCU, and most of those cases were student life violations, but it was the same principle (and we dealt with a really hairy academic dishonesty issue that probably shouldn't have come to us at that point). I love doing this. I think one of the greatest ways to serve a student community is in pursuing justice and figuring out how best to apply the rules to a variety of situations. I guess I could have been a lawyer, but for the fact that lawyers represent their clients, not the truth.

We sold our house. That was exciting. We close next week, but the buyer has agreed to rent the house to us for an extra month. His mortgage is better than ours, so we save some money in this deal, and have until the end of October to get out. Now we're doing house-hunting, which takes up so much of my time. It's exhausting. Hopefully we'll find the perfect house today.

Football started yesterday. That was great. It was a good game, too. The reigning Super Bowl champions always get the first game of the year, and the NFL used to schedule them an easy opponent to sort of guarantee a win. The last time the Patriots won the Super Bowl, they got to play the Raiders in the kickoff game. That game was over almost immediately. Now they give them a really good non-divisional opponent. It makes for much better football. Even though it was a 13-10 overtime game, the game was fun to watch. There were key turnovers, blocked field goals, drives that picked up steam only to abruptly end in a defensive stand. I loved it, and I'm glad football is back. Especially because Sunday night sees the regular-season debut of Mr. Jay Cutler in a Chicago Bears uniform. He looked like his usual self in the exhibition game in Denver, and I look for that to continue (although the Green Bay defense should be a little better) this week. I was especially encouraged by the way he handled himself under the surprisingly strong pass rush of the Broncos. I think all those guys just wanted to knock him out for skipping town in the offseason, but he remained composed under the pressure. That's a good sign. He also hit a bunch of different receivers, often in pretty tight coverage, and managed the game well. Plus, Matt Forte is a stud in that backfield. I'm excited.

Well, I'm starting to get rambly right now. I think I'll leave you here and save some of my other thoughts for another post. Hopefully it won't be two weeks from now. Thanks for reading, and come back soon.

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?