While I was read­ing friends’ updates at Face­book today, some­thing remind­ed me of a girl I knew back in high school. She went to my high school, and as far as I know she was in my grad­u­at­ing class. I did­n’t meet her at school, though, and I don’t think our paths crossed there. I knew her from church. She intro­duced me to the guy who became my first hus­band (who she had dat­ed in the recent past).

Now I’m dri­ving myself nuts, because I absolute­ly can­not remem­ber her name! I can see her face, plain as day. I remem­ber that she had a some­what uncom­mon last name. I think she had an old­er broth­er who had been a big deal on the foot­ball team a year or three ahead of us. Why can’t I remem­ber her name?

I’m real­ly bad with names, hon­est­ly. A Face­book appli­ca­tion was ask­ing me to ver­i­fy 130+ peo­ple as high school class­mates, and tru­ly, I did­n’t rec­og­nize many of them at all. I did­n’t remem­ber most of the peo­ple I saw at our five year reunion. After 25 years? I’m hope­less.

Maybe I should get my old year­books out and look at Face­book and the year­books at the same time. I don’t know that I’d be any bet­ter that way, either. I need con­text for most people—not just a face and a name, but also some­thing like “that guy from home­room who was always draw­ing cars in his note­books” or “that sopra­no who bathed in Emer­aude” or “the cute geeky drum­mer who sel­dom made eye con­tact with any­body” (okay, him I’d rec­og­nize, and I do remem­ber his name).

Our year­books aren’t the sort that list­ed peo­ple’s activ­i­ties with their pho­tos. You would have to search through all the activ­i­ty list­ings to find out who did what, which is much more annoy­ing.

Today’s entry, Home­school­ing High School in Col­lege?, is over at Acad­e­my Car­i­tas. I expect to update there more reg­u­lar­ly, now that we’re offi­cial­ly home­school­ing again.

A 17-year-old run­ning back assaults a high school teacher for doing her job.¹ He toss­es her around and breaks her fin­ger.

Who would you wor­ry about? The attack­er, or the vic­tim?

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 won’t be going to Drag­on Con unless a tick­et (or pass — hey, I’m will­ing to do pan­els, ya know) falls out of the air. Sam will be run­ning games and the girl will be work­ing the con, so they both got pass­es. 🙂

I’d hap­pi­ly meet out-of-town­ers for lunch or some­thing, though. Jean­nie, you still com­ing?

I expect lots of fun pho­tos (with you in them, not just of the crowds!) and sto­ries from y’all next week to make up for not going, of course.

I’m try­ing to plan some self-care so I don’t get too lone­ly and grumpy over the week­end. I’m fig­ur­ing in stitch­ing time, def­i­nite­ly, but could use some sug­ges­tions as to movies to watch while stitch­ing. I nev­er go to the cin­e­ma, so you can safe­ly assume that if it’s been out in the last two years, I haven’t seen it (except Seren­i­ty, of course!).

Oth­er sug­ges­tions for the week­end?

My cur­rent “fun” read­ing is Wid­der­shins by de Lint, but I’m not real­ly get­ting into it for some rea­son. I need to see if the library has some­thing fluffy like the “Undead and ____” nov­els. Yeah, they’re eas­i­ly bought, but I read them like lit­er­ary M&Ms, so the high cost of paper­backs just does­n’t seem jus­ti­fied. Dekalb’s library does­n’t suck, but I miss Gwin­net­t’s far bet­ter selec­tion of genre fic­tion, as well as liv­ing close to a branch of the PINES sys­tem as we did in Cobb.

I did some­thing for me today, though: I put things in motion to return to school. If all goes as the school thinks it will, I could actu­al­ly be doing some online class­es next week! That is, if they give me the finan­cial aid pack­age I want. If not, I’ll wait ’til Jan­u­ary. But I’d real­ly like to go back now, as I’m feel­ing extreme­ly emp­ty-nest­ed with Katie gone back to school. I don’t want to do just online class­es, because I real­ly miss the dis­cus­sions of a “real” class and I think it would be good to have some­thing reg­u­lar for which I have to leave the house.

On the oth­er hand, online class­es take lots less ener­gy, which leaves more for the actu­al aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit and the rest of my life.

Hap­pi­ly, Katie prefers doing her home­work next to me rather than hol­ing up in her room as I did at that age, so I get a fair amount of time with her when she’s home. That real­ly does push the need for a lap­top, though, as she can’t be online (or just typ­ing) and be in the liv­ing room with me and Sam. When she had one she made real­ly good use of it.

I real­ly like the fact that she’s attend­ing a school with a good loca­tion and com­mu­ni­ty ties. We could­n’t real­ly ask for bet­ter than where she is in that respect. I’m look­ing for­ward to mov­ing clos­er to the school, though.