Enemy of Entropy

Semester Is Past the Half-​​way Point!

10 February 2008, 11:12 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under College, Writing.

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.

Adult: FMS from What?

5 February 2008, 11:50 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Geekery, Humor, News, Sex.

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!

1 http://​www​.vil​lagevoice​.com/​p​e​o​p​l​e​/​0​8​0​6​,​s​a​v​a​g​e​,​7​9​0​4​4​,​2​4​.​h​tml

School update

10 December 2006, 10:54 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under College.

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.

I’se a student! But still a crip, too

14 September 2006, 8:22 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under College, Education, Health.

Well, I’m offi­cially in school and off to a run­ning limp­ing start.

I made it to my sta­tis­tics class on Tues­day, but only after a nasty fall. I was only about 20 min­utes late, and the pro­fes­sor was more than under­stand­ing. I was utterly lost for the first part of the class, but by the end of it I felt very com­fort­able. I can do this.

My body took over on Wednes­day, though. I slept all day, despite alarms and phone calls. Seri­ously – I did not wake at all until after 2:30 or so, and I believe that was because my blad­der and need for pain meds finally won out over the need for more rest. So much for the weekly blood test appoint­ment at 11. I didn’t get much home­work done through the rest of the day, either, though I did try. Hope­fully eat­ing the whole day is enough to appease the fibromyal­gia demon.

So today has been given over to doing all of the week’s assign­ments for tomorrow’s course, Comp100. That’s the “learn to use Win­dows, Word and Excel” class that’s required for every­one at this school. I’m really annoyed at hav­ing to take it at all. There are lots of lit­tle assign­ments, and while I know this stuff inside – out even make­work takes time.

Right now, I’m tak­ing a din­ner break. I deserve that much.

The biggest chal­lenge of that course (other than fol­low­ing the *exact* direc­tions rather than doing things in more effi­cient ways) is that the text­book is too bloody big and heavy. I had prob­lems with that at my last school, too. I need a seri­ous book­stand, because hold­ing these big texts really is a phys­i­cal chal­lenge for me. They’re increas­ing my pain, which makes it hard for me to focus on read­ing the assignments.

In hap­pier news, my admis­sions “advo­cate” called me today to tell me that the tran­script eval­u­a­tors had revised their opin­ion of my cred­its and given me another 13 cred­its! So I’m another semes­ter closer to grad­u­at­ing. I think that puts me fairly close to senior level, which means more finan­cial aid eligibility.

Katie and I have fallen into a pat­tern of doing our home­work together every day. That’s nice, and it helps a lot with my miss­ing the time we spent together homeschooling.

I’m hop­ing that I can get caught up and stay there by the end of this week­end, and then have time to breathe and do fun things again. This is just a half-​​time sched­ule, so I really need to build a lot more sta­mina before I try to add two more classes next semester!

You know what I want? A trike. Really. A great big trike with a nice big bas­ket. I think I could ride to school near as fast as I could get there on MARTA. I might have to spend the night there before I could ride back home, but give me some time and surely I’d build up some kind of con­sti­tu­tion again. Eventually.

I know how to ride a bicy­cle, cer­tainly, but my bal­ance has gone to heck thanks to the FMS and I don’t recover from falls well, so I’ll give in and ask the uni­verse for a three-​​wheeler. Surely they’re less expen­sive than the scooter I need, right?

 

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