Good question. Glad I asked.
So, in the last month, I moved, and that took a seriously unreasonable amount of time. Since we moved just down the hall, rather than even to a different building (I'm a creature of habit and comfort, after all), we thought, "Hey, we can do this all ourselves."
Here's the problem: we lived in the same apartment for nine years. You tend to gather a lot of crap in that time. I felt like I spent far too long just throwing stuff away, and it was insane. I think we both have hoarder tendencies. There were at least three bags of empty glass jars that went down to recycling. I finally got rid of a large amount of cotton ticking I was never, ever going to manage to use, plus a whole lot of fabric odds and ends (for the same reason). Old shoes. Old clothes. Old curtains. Old sheets. Spare computer bits. Worn-out pajamas. Stashes of bubble wrap. Old electronic parts. Gone, gone, gone.
I did the bulk of the moving myself, me and our trusty Canadian Tire dolly. First: that dolly was freaking awesome and it made it totally possible; second: never do this kind of thing all yourself if you're older than like 20 and you have actual furniture and stuff. It took us a long time; it was hot and swelter-y the whole time; and, damn it, I'm too old for this shit. I smashed way too many fingers and toes, and I swear, by the end, I seriously thought I'd broken both my feet they hurt so bad.
But the good news now: we're fully moved and we cut down on our material possessions in a glorious way. The new place is fine. It's sort of a mirror image of the old place (which makes navigating in the dark and finding light switches amusing), and the kitchen and dining room have switched places so now, instead of the dining room and living room being up against each other, the kitchen now abuts the living area, which was weird at first, but I'm used to it.
The other thing is that, since September 8th, I've been going to school full time, and it's been a lot like nearly drowning while trying to look like "No, no, I got this." I'm finally starting to tread water, hence the time to write here.
School has changed a lot since the late eighties, let me tell you. Blackboard is the bane of my existence, partly because many instructors don't use it as well as they think they do, partly because it's surprisingly stupid and pervasive at the same time, and partly because, if it was the only place I needed to go online to work through my courses that'd be one thing, but each textbook also has a wholly separate "companion site" and they're not integrated with Blackboard. Bouncing back and forth between five different textbook companion sites and Blackboard all the time leaves you continually wondering what you've forgotten to do.
Additionally, instructors these days seem to think themselves half instructor and half babysitter, and I'm really not used to being addressed in that "you silly kids need to learn some responsibility!" tone (especially by people younger than I am).
When I was last in school, you went on the first day, gathered up the syllabus which said, "This is what we expect of you," and then you did your readings as you had time, showed up for the lectures if you felt like it or you needed some clarification on what you'd read, and took the exams in the classroom on the appointed time and day, and tra-la-la-la-la, that was it.
Students these days should be so lucky.
The online thing lets instructors track everything a student does, and boy do they. "You didn't spend enough time working that problem!" It really should be OK to respond with, "It wasn't a difficult problem — get off my back, you square!" So many lessons have podcasts or Quicktime videos that would be absolutely just as effective as a simple piece of text, but no, there's no text available to read, so instead I have to spend significantly longer listening to it than I would if I could just read it. And someone needs to teach some of these folk how to use a microphone so that every "p" they utter isn't a minor 'splosion in my earbuds.
But um, yeah, I'm back in school, working toward my (eventual) CPA, and trying to remain mellow in the mean time. Wish me luck?
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