Spring Break

Well, I made it through the 2 weeks from hell.  This previous week has been a whole lot of school, studying, and work and not nearly enough sleep.  5 exams, including a hands-on practical test that all pretty much went stunningly.  I’m definitely in need of a break, but how much of a break I’m actually going to get or ‘take’ for that matter is a big question mark.

I got a lot of my data together for another case study I have to do for class and I’m thinking I may take the plunge and go ahead and get it knocked out so I don’t have to deal with it after the break.  A built in breather for lack of a better term so I have a little more time in the semester to come.  I also need to spend some more time with my MCAT prep course as that test is coming up sooner than I would like!

Outside of that, I’ve finally gotten off my ass and begun working out almost every day again… It’s been a slow road back, but I feel like I’m making some progress anyway.  Hopefully I can continue to increase the distances and lengths of training and get back to a decent state of health.

Just a short entry today… think I’m going to go grab some grub and run some errands.

Namaste.

The Beginning of March

Well, March is now upon us and this year has been FLYING!  School and work pretty much take up 90% of my time with the other 10% being left to things like sleeping and taking the occasional shower and every now and then getting to fire up the ol’ PS3.

So, the next couple of weeks are going to be KILLER! This week I’ve got 2 pretty major papers due along with the usual class stuff.  We meet with our priest to go over our FOCCUS test we took to see how ‘compatible’ we are according to some pen and paper test.  That should be interesting to see… the last one of those I did said we were great together and then we got divorced a few months later, so I don’t give it a whole lot of credence.

Next week is the week of death.  If I make it through unscathed, the heavens will open and rain sweet golden ale upon us all.  You see, I’m taking 16 hours this semester and next week all of my professors decided it would be an outstanding time to have exams.  So, I’ve got a total of 5 exams plus a skills validation/hands-on practical just to add some variety.  To say the least, I’m not looking forward to this at all.  One would think that professor’s might actually look at this sort of scheduling, but alas, no.  They are all completely oblivious to anything but the little biosphere that is their little class.  I’ve pretty much got a test every day next week, except Wednesday when I’ll be at the hospital all day.

The funny thing about all this is after death week is spring break.  I am looking forward to spring break, but not for any typical debauchery or the like, but rather I plan on getting some sleep and actually getting ahead in school for the first time this semester.  I also will probably be spending the majority of that down time studying for MCAT which is creeping up slowly.  It’s not like I’m some 20-something looking for some strange…

Oh well, thanks for reading… comment. comment. comment… I had > 50 readers on my last post with a whopping 2 comments… come on! I am interested and would love to see who’s out there… outside of my usual 5 readers (and you know who you are).

Namaste.

February 2009

Well, it’s seemingly been forever since I’ve updated or posted anything on this, but it seemed like a good time to do so…

School: I’ve pretty much stopped work on my Master’s degree… I was having no luck with getting motivated to do my thesis and the time was just never really there.  I applied for and got accepted into ASU’s nursing program back in 2008 and I am currently in my second semester of nursing school.  It’s been really busy trying to fit in work and this program, but I’m making it through as always.  I was really excited about getting into the program and being back in the hospital, but I want more from it than I am currently getting.  I’ve wanted to be in healthcare since my time in the military and my time as a paramedic, but being in the nursing program and being around the hospital all the time has really opened my eyes.  I just ordered an MCAT prep book yesterday and I think I’m going to bust my ass studying to see if I can get a competitive score and if so… I’ll be tossing my hat into the medical school admissions process.  I’ve always wanted to be a physician and I’ve been putting self-limiting restraints on myself due to my financial status and having to provide for my daughter.  I just couldn’t figure out a way to pay for medical school and keep up to date on my obligations to my daughter… all without working while I attended medical school.  After talking at length about this issue with Amanda she essentially told me to go for it and we would figure out a way to make it work.  So… I’m going to continue in nursing school and get my license as an RN as sort of a plan B if I can’t get into med school.  If I do get in, it will be pretty much about the same time as I get my license and I figure I can at least pick up a shift here and there as an RN on some weekends while I’m in med school. If I don’t get in, I’ll continue down the nursing path in the CRNA direction that I’ve been planning.

Career: I hate my job.  I say that with venom dripping off my canines and acid in my stomach.  I would change jobs, but the only upside of my current position is the ability to make my own schedule, work from home, and the flexibility that I’ve got that allows me to go to school… which will allow me to finally get out of this I.T. business and on to something that I actually want to do.  It’s a constant source of stress for me and I just keep telling myself that in just over a year I can turn in my laptop and my badge and be on to something else.  I’ve been in this ‘career’ for almost 11 years now and while it has had its ups there have recently been a lot more downs than ups.

Wedding: Well, one of the first posts of this blog was that I had got engaged.  That was over 2 years ago and due to the extremely drawn out process of getting my former marriage annulled through the church it has taken us this long to get here.  We have an August wedding and that’s just under 6 months at this point. One of the major stressors I’ve currently got regarding this wedding is choosing a best man and groom’s men.  I had it in my head who I was going to choose back when we got engaged, but a couple of years have passed and alot has changed.  One of the people that I had thought of originally as a best man didn’t even invite me to his wedding and the only reason I even knew he got married was due to an announcement in the paper! A couple of more of my friends that I had originally thought of to be in the wedding have pretty much dropped off the radar and that’s disheartening.  One moved away and the lack of communication has been pretty large.  Essentially, I’d drop him a line, he’d reply and that was it.  One-sided communication sucks.  The other has pretty much dropped off the radar as well… he got a new job and I can’t even tell you the last time I saw or heard from him.  Many of my friends have moved away and they’re more acquaintances than friends at this point… I barely know what is going on with them most of the time.  I’m at a loss as to who to ask and the clock keeps on ticking…

Friends: This may be a repeat of what is written above, but it deserves saying.  Over the past few years many of my friends have moved away and many that are still in town have just grown distant.  People who I have been interacting with through school are nothing but acquaintances and seem to have their own agendas regarding how I fit in… i.e. what can I do for them?  I’m tired of this… for example… we started going out after exams with some of my school friends to celebrate/drown sorrows after a major exam.  This semester, I overheard that those same friends were planning on doing something after the exam, but I had not been invited or included.  To say this was hurtful would be a major understatement.  To say the least, I’m pretty much done with these people and I’ll just be doing my own thing.  That seems to be the trend though… My pool of friends has declined over the years and I’m not 100% sure why.  Maybe it’s due to people getting older and moving on with their lives and new family structures… maybe it’s the strange work dynamic that I’m in due to working at home… maybe it’s due to being a non-traditional student and not being able to foster true relationships with my school peers who are so much younger than me.  I don’t have a solid answer… all I know is that for the first time in a very long time I’m kind of lonely and it is not a great place to be.

Well, that’s enough for now… I realize this reads like a big pity party, but I’m in kind of a down place right now and I just needed to vent.

Wedding Dancing…

Well, from what I can tell, most if not all grooms dread the whole wedding dancing thing… well, if you’re not all metrosexual man or whatever, but this guy had the right idea… check it out…

People Can’t Drive!!!

So… this week in San Angelo has been weather crazy. Not just your typical west central Texas weather with the crazy temperature swings and raining on one side of the street and not the other, but rather, it’s been friggin’ crazy cold here.  It all started this past weekend ~January12th with cold weather and some rain, but it hit super crazy on Tuesday January 16th i.e. it actually snowed a couple of inches during the day.  That, mixed with some sleet and the sub-freezing temperatures caused the roads to freeze… People in this town are notoriously horrid drivers anyway, add a little rain to the mix and it’s just scary, but add frozen roads and it just gets ridiculous.  I was coming in to work on Wednesday morning and my usual 15 minute drive took about 45 minutes.  That’s because I was actually taking it easy coming in, unlike many of the other morons on the road.  Fortunately I didn’t see any accidents on the way in… a lot of near misses and a lot of stupid stuff, but no accidents… By the evening (Wed.) most of the frozen-ness on the roads had subsided and it was easy driving home…

Now, that brings me to this morning, Thursday, January 18th… It’s still cold, granted, the streets are not currently in a frozen state, but it was raining on my morning commute.  I don’t know what people were thinking, but on the way in I saw 3 wrecks!!! I guess people decided that since the streets were ‘only’ wet, they could go back to driving like normal… it’s truly sad when I see more wrecks when the streets aren’t frozen than when they are frozen.  And due to the locations of said wrecks, it took me as long to get in to work today as it did yesterday when everything was frozen. 

If our public transportation system was worth a squat I’d seriously be thinking about taking the bus at this point since people seem to have about as much sense as a cracked out monkey behind the wheel…

On that note, I guess I’m going to end this…

To my 5 readers, have a shiny day and try and stay warm… oh, and watch out for all the id10ts on the road as they truly are out to get ya!

A New Year

Well, here we are in 2007…. it came on so fast… I’m literally in shock that a new year is upon us.  This year’s going to be a BUSY one to say the least…

Working on and finishing up my thesis so I can graduate (hopefully!) in May with my Master of Science in Biology. 

Running the Beach to Bay Relay Marathon down in Corpus Christi again in May with the team that I’m training up.  This one’s going to take a lot of time as I have about 1/2 my team that are ‘new’ runners, that I’m actually training… kind of a scary proposition, not that they’re new, but the fact that I’m training them to do it.  I’m looking forward to the challenge and hope that they all go above and beyond in succeeding at this… seeing them all do this will make me proud beyond belief.  I’m also training for the San Diego Marathon in June… concurrently with the Beach to Bay training… kind of funny, well at least from a runner’s perspective, that I’ll be doing that relay marathon during my taper for San Diego! 

What else… oh yeah, wedding preparations will be underway in full force by this summer… that’s always a time consuming venture, but in a good way.   Hopefully it will go without too much incident… planning one of these always seems to bring out the crazies in people… guess that’s why there’s that show ‘Bridezilla’… hehe, hope we don’t get to that point

The change in jobs/employers that’s going to occur at the end of August when we all are no longer employed by our current employer and change over to the new contract holder… that’s a BIG one… especially since I’ve been working for this company since 1998!  That’s a long time… I guess it’s time for a change though since these people pretty much take advantage whenever the opportunity to do so presents itself.  I won’t even get started on that one, as that’s a post in and of itself, let’s just say that I’m not the happiest individual when it comes to my current job title and paygrade as I’m working at a level far above what I’m currently titled/paid!

Studying for and taking my MCAT… gotta get moving on this one as I need to get a GREAT score on this puppy in order to get my booty into medical school.  Medical school… that’s a long journey, but hopefully one that will be worth it.  More school is just a bit depressing at this point, but at least I won’t be working in this stifling industry anymore and I’ll ‘only’ have to go to school and not have to do this full time school and full time work thing that I’ve been doing seemingly for as long as I can remember…

Whew… just thinking about all that makes me tired.  I want to go take a nap, but alas, guess I ought to get back to the grind stone…

Happy New Year to my 4 readers. Hope it’s all you want it to be… etc… etc… etc…

Rant of the week…

So, there’s this jack ass in my statistics class… let’s call him nursey man (because he’s a nurse and a man and about 45 years old and just deserves a stupid name).  Nursey man is one of the most annoying people that I am forced to pseudo interact with on a weekly basis…

Let me illustrate this point with an example.  In statistics there are a number of hypothesis tests… in these tests you essentially make a hypothesis and then, um… test it… yeah, so… anyway, during the testing of your hypothesis, based on the values you end up with you either reject or fail to reject said hypothesis.  During class, the professor said “Therefore we reject the null hypotheses” and nursey man says “aww… wouldn’t it be sad?”  Everyone looks at him for the moron he is and he misinterprets this as non-understanding and goes on to explain that the null hypotheses would be sad for being rejected and potentially need therapy… OMGWTFBBQSTFUDIEDIEDIE!!!

This guy totally wears me out and he has that same kind of verbal diarrhea every single class period.  From talking to some of my fellow students, he’s like that in ALL of his classes.  I mean, does he honestly think that he’s funny by doing this? Even the professor just looks at him like ‘what did you just say?’ and he is just oblivious to the whole thing. 

Today was actually relatively amusing in that I had enough of his verbal diarrhea and after one particular round of ‘let’s try and look like I really understand what I’m talking about by analogizing this to something’ by nursey man… I pretty much flexed my statistical muscle and stated to the prof… ‘this is actually just based on the power of the situation and since it’s not a beta situation we’re really basing these assumptions on alpha to reduce the incidence of making a Type II error’… to which she replied, ‘yes, that is exactly correct’.  It was so silent you could hear a cricket… and ol’ Nursey man didn’t say another word for the entire class.

So, that kind of leaves me hanging… verbally I can shoot down ol’ Nursey man and that will shut him up… but what does that make me…?  Is it better to shut him up or in doing so do I become him? ARGH!! granted, my one comment was actually course relevant and not simile/analogy, but still… I certainly don’t want to be ‘that guy’ because ‘that guy’ sucks!

On that note, I bid you adieu… have a good one my faithful 3 readers. (yay it went up by one)…

p.s. I have nothing against nursing or the nursing profession in general… it just so happens that this one imbecile is a nurse, and that’s why he got the name Nursey man

This is so random…

So I was surfing around (when I should have been studying) and found this random genealogy site where you upload your pic and it tells you what famous folks you resemble… my results were a bit ‘odd’ for lack of a better word… all I know is that I should probably put on a suit of armor, strap on my side arms, and go try to convert some country to socialism! Drop me a comment on this and if you’re a fellow blogger/writer do one yourself… it’s incredibly amusing… and without further adieu…

Why do I run?

This question has been on my mind a lot lately… all the miles, all the time spent putting one foot in front of the other… the pounding my feet and body take, especially on long runs… the inevitable soreness after a marathon or a ‘long’ training run…

The act of lacing up my shoes, strapping on my Garmin… it’s almost ritualistic at this point. It’s hard getting up early in the morning to go put myself through the paces or coming home after a long day at work/school… but it’s truly cleansing. All the things that bother me in my life just seem to fade away when I’m out there… the stress from work, the constant, seemingly never-ending studying… all of it just disappears while I’m out there. It’s incredibly freeing… the freedoms we all take for granted are very clear to me when I’m out there.

I run to keep my sanity. We’re all balancing on a tight rope and teetering either way can push us over the edge to insanity… my running helps me keep that balance.

I run to keep from being one of the masses… that’s kind of an ironic comment, now that I really look at it. The growing problem with obesity, an epidemic in our nation many would say. I, like many of the masses, sit behind a computer for hours a day, yet I eat much like my forefathers… a heavy diet without the daily caloric burn that would have been accomplished by ‘actually’ working instead of working my fingers as I am now. I fight the battle against the ‘bulge’ of my abdomen by strapping on my running shoes…

I run… because I like it. When I was a child, I didn’t like to run. I was never super athletic guy… But here I am in my mid 30’s and I’m running marathons. How many of my peers can say the same thing. Maybe I used to do it for the attention, and that is still a positive thing… but that’s not a driving force these days.

For my 2 readers, run on…

The hotel saga continues…

So, I called the Hyatt up in D.C. today and they said that my problem was being looked into by the accounting department.  After I got off the phone I got called back by the accounts executive manager… he was extremely apologetic. blah blah blah… what he did do, on top of getting my account squared away, was he set me up with 15000 gold passport points.  Gold passport is the Hyatt’s reward points system which I’ve been using for some time.  The extra 15000 points will essentially get me a few nights free at a category 2 hotel… which, in this case, includes the Hyatt Regency Dallas, Houston, and Austin where I’ll be travelling to over the next few months… so that’s a plus.  The accounts manager also asked if there was anything else he could do to contact him, and I may be asking him to bump my passport account up from gold to either platinum or diamond level which essentially will net me more points at any Hyatt I stay at as well as getting me better rooms when I do stay there… that’s just a wishful thinking thing, but all they can say is no. So, looks like this one may be resolved at this point.