The End of Summer

Hi and welcome back to my blog. I should welcome myself back. It has been a long absence, full of work, school and some fun spliced in. Since I wrote last May, I have completed 14 units. It feels like a race, but I can’t blame anyone for the hectic schedule except myself. It just seemed that if I had taken a break, or gone at a slower, more reasonable pace, or only attended one school at a time, the end would have never come. It is kind of like getting into a pool of cold water. I can torture myself by going in slowly one body part at a time, or I can take the plunge, feel the shock for a few seconds, and then it is over. Granted, the school thing is not a few seconds; it is a year.

I am in the second to last class and have finished taking two classes at once; doing my electives online at the community college, while concurrently enrolled at Ashford University, which claims their schedule is full time. Even now that I only have to take one class at a time, I can see that it is harder to motivate myself when I have a couple of evenings free. When I know that I have to do homework every night, and there is no choice, then it is easier in a way.

Summer was crazy-busy. There is one thing I can point to that demonstrates how busy I was. It was the travels my 1,000 page Strategic Management text book had to do. I dragged it and others all over the country so that I could study at night after working. It came with me for a week in Sacramento, 4 days in Dallas, 8 days in Chicago, a few nights in South Lake Tahoe and a few days in Tacoma, WA. All this in five weeks! During the summer, my company puts on large institutes. I was an event lead and had to be on the ground in Sacramento, Dallas and Chicago. I also spent 8 days in Orlando, but with a different set of textbooks. It is fun to be out of the office and in a new city, but it requires 12 hour work days. I would finish up, take the elevator to my room, order room service and do homework for 3-6 hours a night.

Scott, Ben, Mikayla and I spent a few nights in South Lake Tahoe together for a short vacation. It was the first time that the four of us had gone somewhere together in a long time, and as Mikayla has pointed out, it is going to be a long time until we can do that again. Mikayla is leaving for Spain for her semester abroad in January, and Ben will be heading off to do his stint in the Peace Corps probably while she is gone. We cherished the time we had together, hiking to a waterfall, parasailing, gambling, and renting a speed boat on the lake so some of us could wakeboard or water ski. Not me…I could not fathom submersing myself in the glacier-fed lake. Give me a year of working full time and going to two different schools full time at the same time and I’ll plunge right in, but when it comes to cold water, I am the one-toe-at-a-time type of person.

There are only 7 more weeks until I am done. So many people ask what I will do when I don’t have homework. The list is long: sleep, catch up on movies I’ve missed, read some good books, get exercise, reconnect with friends and family, check out some volunteer opportunities, and pay attention to some of the paperwork that has grown like weeds on almost all the flat surfaces of our home. Oh...did I mention that I am going to sleep? I also want to go through my pictures (my camera has been full for months and I haven’t had time to upload the pictures), and get back to writing creatively, not just research papers that have to fit into an APA format, have at least 5 references, a title page and thesis statement. Stay tuned…