Short Update

Hi everyone,

I know it's been a long time since I've posted, but things have been very busy lately. Now that I'm on winter break, I'm taking the time to get caught up on my Master's Thesis work as well as creating a syllabus for my class next quarter (like I know what the hell I'm doing).

Anyway, here's what's been going on (in case you haven't been following me on Twitter):

- I managed to get through teaching my first classes without too much trouble. I had some problems with students not working well together in their groups (and a couple of extra credit assignments that drove me crazy [one person wrote "colored" at least 14 times in his paper about his family's views on race, and the other insulted the poor and people of color while railing for people to eat better so that they don't need organ donors...not exactly the best way to sell people on being organ donors]) but everything worked out in the end. Only one student had to take the final (out of 45 total students) and everyone got an A.

- My husband's job situation went from bad to worse. HR refused to pay him and when they laid off the majority of the design department, he was the only person not to get paid. After smashing the HR person's family photo against a wall (bad idea, I know), we filed the case with OSHA. I'm going to have him call to do a follow-up with the federal branch tomorrow, and that branch is supposed to force the regional branch to get to work, so we'll see how this goes. At least now he qualifies for unemployment, so we'll finally have some $ coming in for the first time in months. My pay is not enough for just one person to live on, let alone three, so this is help we needed.

- I got sick during finals week last week, and I'm still on the mend. Since I won't gross anyone out with details, let's just say this was serious when the people at the Student Health center booked the appointment for 30 minutes from when I made the call, instead of for the next day.

- We've gotten Christmas photos done & I will be scanning and posting them soon. What pissed me off, however, was the fact that the girl who was helping our photographer (who was doing her first day of sales) kept trying to do a hard-sell with us that almost resulted in us not getting any photos. The girl who normally does our photos had a death in the family, so they had two people in as replacements. One who had been a photographer for years but had never worked on sales for the company until that day, and the other was a hard-assed bitch who kept trying to sell us $200 and $300 packages. We barely had enough gas to get to the damn session, and we weren't trying to spend more than $50, so when she kept coming back into the room to change what we were ordering from 5 sheets to 9 so we qualified for some stupid package or another, I was about to lose it. I had to fight for a montage photo I wanted, because it was the only way we were going to get some of the shots, but when the girl came in and said a montage photo was extra (which wasn't the way they did packages in the past), that was when I finally got upset. We got the photos we wanted, but to add insult to injury, a bulk of the images were thrown away. Usually, they make all of the images from the shoot available online, and there were some that I could have gotten my m-i-l to order, but Bitch-Ass probably only kept the ones we ordered photos from. If our regular girl doesn't come back, I'm taking my business elsewhere.

Anyway, I have a syllabus to write, a house to clean, and a headache to get rid of. I wish I felt better about writing a syllabus, but all the help I've gotten so far is to look at what others have done in the past. Unfortunately, people don't say what they taught in their syllabus; just what books they covered. I'll figure out something.

Happy Trails, Happy Holidays, and all that good stuff.
~ Kay