Enemy of Entropy

A week into Spring semester, I finally got my Winter semester grades: 99.7 in the career class, 97.6 in the project management class. I should still have a 4.0, then.

I’ve got to get my and Katie’s FAFSAs done. I should have already done it. It feels so weird to think about the fact that she’ll soon be in college, too!

Nope, not Sunday. Mostly. Well, maybe sometimes. Damned earworm!

I was trying to be Very, Very good today as I wrapped up my assignments for the semester. Unfortunately, I got completely distracted by the fact that I hadn’t done a bloody thing with Pagan Parents since adopting the site. I got it working at a minimal level, so it should be easy to add content now.

Hint Hint: Content! I need content! Collaborators! Seriously, if you have opinions about parenting as a pagan, or you know of resources that I should link to, please let me know. If you know somebody who might want to write an article or blog with us there, have him or her contact me.

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And so far, I’ve only lost one point in my Project Management class, none in the other class. That was due to a stupid mousing error - bad hands! Oh well, if that’s all my hands cost me this semester, I’ll be happy.

The career course required us to do “long-term career planning” this week. I don’t know how useful their idea of career planning is, to be honest, in today’s economy. There aren’t many people who can count on moving up steadily in one path, due to the fact that the economy changes so much more quickly than it did 30 to 50 years ago. Do I feel sanguine about making predictions as to where I’ll be, professionally, in 30 years? Um, no. For one thing, I’ll be 71 years old then! For another, I’ll be happy just to get back to work, period!

Today’s Thing-a-Day time was spent coloring. It was nice.

I have a happy Sambear dancing in front of me, because he just posted Chapter 17 of Heart of the Hunter. He already hit his word target for the novel, but happily, he isn’t stopping ’til the plot is wrapped up.

I have a Google Alerts search going for “fibromyalgia,” because if there’s something out there that will make this crap better, I want to know it yesterday. The alert brings in all sorts of nonsense from quack remedies to naysayers, in addition to the actual content.

Today’s alert takes the cake, though. Somebody wrote to Dan Savage’s Savage Love column asking, “Can I Sue Somebody for Fisting-Induced Fibromyalgia?”¹

Savage’s medical expert is out of touch regarding the latest FMS research, but I have to agree with his reply to the letter-writer.

Sam and I tried to game a little tonight, but he was sleepy and I’m fading, too. I did some writing today, and more webifying, and worked on a couple of school assignments. Then I got all-too-obsessed with trying to figure out how to make the output of a couple of WordPress plugins work nicely with my template.

I hope y’all had a lovely weekend!

School is going along fine. In fact, another semester is almost done for me, and Katie’s almost at the end of her semester, too. She’s kicking ass and taking names. Now that she’s settled academically, she’s stretching out into some extracurricular stuff and making more friends. We’ve managed to connect with a Girl Scout troop, (finally!) despite silly paperwork slip-ups.

I think I need to rearrange my classes for the next part of the semester (I’m already registered), but this unit’s classes are going very well, and I’ve actually learned useful (in one class) and interesting (in the other class) stuff.

I had told the school when they initially did my transcript evaluation that I didn’t have as many upper-level credits as they said I had, but they insisted that I’d done my major work and wouldn’t really listen. Weirdnesses kept coming up, and I kept pushing about things like the Hope Scholarship not coming up in my financial aid package. Someone finally said, “Oh - you aren’t eligible because you already have a bachelor’s degree.”

What? Um, no. You see, I’m in the Bachelor’s Degree Completion Program because I don’t have a bachelor’s degree yet. Capiche?

Well, it seems that when Mercer University sent over my transcripts, they couldn’t manage to just pull the transcripts for Cynthia Roberson (my name when I attended that school) with my Social Security Number and my Mercer Student ID. No, they also sent over Cynthia Armistead’s transcript - someone whose name was Cynthia Armistead when she attended Mercer and got a bachelor’s degree, someone with a different SSN and MSI and middle initial. And instead of noticing these discrepancies, my school blithely entered this transcript in and gave me credit for her work!

So there’s been a whole big deal about getting all of my transcripts again, and re-evaluating them anew, and changing my planned classes to reflect the results. I’m getting two sorts of attitude from the bureaucrats I have to deal with in straightening out this nonsense: people who obviously think I should have shut up and taken the credits, and people who think I was trying to pull a fast one (hence the business about them getting all my transcripts again, directly from my old schools) and re-evaluating them).

Fortunately, the classes I’ve taken so far are classes I needed to take. Yay. The classes that start in a couple of weeks are in question, so I need to talk to my so-called “advisor” about them. The “advisor” is the person who deals with everybody who is in the bachelor’s degree completion program. She doesn’t do individual advising, really. She doesn’t give a flyin’ flip about me or my plans, abilities, background, etc. She meets with students once, when they enter the program. That’s it. That’s the plan. She doesn’t want to see us again. She’s not happy that she’s had to talk to me more than once.

I was just way spoiled by my marvelous advisor at Southern Poly, Dr. Mark Stevens. Nobody else can live up to that standard. But this woman shouldn’t have the same title. She’s a paperwork-stamper.

I’m actually enjoying the database portion of my current business/computer course so much that I’m looking at which technical concentration in the bachelor’s degree completion major would give me the most opportunity to go deeper into the topic.

Oh - with the other person’s bachelor’s degree transcript, I had something like 91 transfer credits. That’s the maximum you’re allowed to transfer into the school. Without her transcript, just using my credits, I’m coming in with 79 credits. The science class I’m taking now should have been my last “core” class, but this school counts “Science, Technology and Society as a 400 level class. The STS class I took at Southern Poly was a 200 level class. So one more core class, some business and management stuff required for my major, and then the technical concentration courses. Three full semesters, at least, maybe four, since there may be prerequisites required for some of the technical concentration classes that I don’t have yet.

That’s not too bad - just another year of school, really. Wow. I can see the end.