UG!

hellish week.

Between the funeral, classes, interviews, meetings and getting hit by "the sick" again, this week has been quite hellish.

Lets start with school.

Ah.  Graduate school.  Its a love hate relationship, really.  I've effectively buried myself in student loans, spend hours in the library studying stream ecology and the finer points of technical writing, I've read over 400 research papers on parasitoid wasps and am now trying to organize that information into a sort of review paper (more for my own good at this point than anything.)  I don't have a stipend or a scholarship, (not for a lack of trying here though.)

This summer I'm planning on getting some actual data, but I can't do that without a car.

So I'm planning on purchasing a car.  Probably a very used, not always reliable, inefficient one at that.  (see note about no stipend and student loans above)

What I WANT is a smart car.  (of course)  As I'm struggling to make rent as it is, that's highly unlikely.

Funeral:  A close family friend passed, peacefully, this past week.  The service was Wednesday, at the church I grew up in.    It was the first Catholic funeral I've ever been at, surprisingly enough.

Thursday I went to an on-campus employment fair held by the new tutoring center (TASC.)  Interestingly, it was the first job fair of any sort I've been to.  There was an hour long presentation about the tutoring center, then an initial interview.  If you did well there (and I did) you were asked to evaluate your interviewers and wait for a second interview with someone higher-up in the department.  So I waited, and was then interviewed by the director of the program!  That went well too, I'm hopeful.  I may have good news sometime tomorrow or Tuesday.

Friday I sat in on a board meeting.  It was long and tedious and I came out of it feeling a bit defeated.  I'll leave it at that.

And now I've got "the sick" again.  I don't know if I have some recurring sort of flu or I've got perpetual food poisoning or what, either way, I've got a bit of a fever and can't keep anything down.  Maybe it's the stress, or some combination of stress and bad luck.  Either way, I've got to get over it soon, I've got too much to do!

Here's to hoping--