YES!!

I know, I know! I'm a horrible, terrible, no good person. Excuse: completely forgot my password. With the whirlwind that was my life those last weeks, submitting papers, biting my nails till the last moment, I let the blog go. I'm sure it was a very sad event for the five people who actually read my words of wisdom. To catch up: I did finally get my masters. I received it in a nice flat envelope and it has yet to do me any good. I apply for jobs everywhere on a regular basis and there are no interested parties as of yet. I still have my fingers crossed. Yes, I still work at Barnes & Noble, but as a Children's Department Lead. This is fun because a) teen books are becoming leagues better than they were just five years ago and b) the pay is better.

Beyond that, nothing is really new in my life. Back to the boring grind of a bookseller who deals with customers I want to strangle half the time. I really, really want to go back to the UK. It's a need that is reaching critical mass. However, the timing has been off recently for both scheduling and financial reasons. So I'm stuck for now.

That's it for now. I just thought I'd do a quick update now that I've cracked my password. Yeah!

At Last!!!

I'm done printing and binding my final journal paper!!! Tomorrow I will hand it in and be forever done with school, homework, bi-polar professors, clueless university administrative staff, and countless hours reading articles, books, journals that are so boring my eyes want to roll into the back of my head and die there.

What I am going to miss are the people I meet and the travelling that came along with much of my studies. I know I could have stayed in Washington, gone to a cheap state school and never left the Pacific Northwest if I had wanted to. However, I did not want to study in one place, and I had the means to travel. I have a friend, Ray, from archery who has come to call me the Gypsy Scholar, and he's not half wrong.

The process that lead to my final journal paper involved all of this:

Which I consumed in about a 2 week period.

I had a few mishaps too. The first one was getting off a bus. I made a sharp right turn off the bus and smacked my head into the side mirror. I now have a noticeable mark on my forehead when I have no make-up on.


The second was this:

It's cinnamon all over my floor. I was making french toast and the container got away from me. The upside was that my room smelled scrumptious for a whole week.

Needless to say my mind has been really preoccupied with this final paper/project. I'm just glad it's done. And in 5 days I'll be home in Washington.

How long I'll stay in Washington though, is any one's guess. Seriously, I'll take any Human Resource job that's not a scam anywhere in the continental United States.

Bank Holiday Idiocy

Today I had 3 things due: re-submit a paper for a class I flubbed last Fall, consent forms from my interviews, and the rough draft of my dissertation. However, I had one LARGE obstacle to completing any of this: Today is a Bank Holiday.

If you are unfamiliar with this concept, it's a holiday that no one has an explanation for other than it's the last Monday in August, so of course the whole country closes down. Why didn't I think of that! This also means that the university is shut down, including libraries which house the printers. Thus I had to track down a computer room with a printer in the Medical School attached to the hospital. Yes, a hospital.

I walked approximately 2 miles to get there, then another mile to the Jubilee Campus to turn in the papers. Luckily the building was open, but the box to drop the papers into was locked. Yes!! Locked!!! Needless to say I was slightly annoyed. Why would they make a due date on a holiday when they know EVERYTHING shuts down for the weekend. I could email the dissertation to my advisor, but the other stuff I'll have to go in at 9 am and make a slight fuss over the idiocy of their system. Which I hate to do, but I walked three miles (because the buses weren't running) only to NOT be able to turn in the papers at the time that THEY specified. And did I mention that I haven't slept in over 24 hours? Now you can understand that my tolerance level for idiocy is very low right now....

Okay,

I'm done venting.

Just saying...I'm getting a degree from nitwits apparently.

Sharing Some Tech Advice

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Alan! Alan! Alan!

Favorite clip from BBC this week: