well! will you look at the time. . .

More than half a year has slid past since I have updated this blog. Since I only have twenty-one minutes to shift change, and a full itinerary for the evening, I will do my best to summarize the important stuff:

First things first, I graduated, with honors. I got a B in the dreadful Capstone course. I have already forgotten the professor's name. All's well that ends well.

I made it all of two weeks after that class before I started itching to do something else with school, so I signed up for two additional online courses with Excelsior. The eventual goal was their MBA program, as yet unaccredited. The courses were uninspiring, and I was having trouble getting access to a computer during downtime at work, so I wound up dropping both of them, to the tune of eleven hundred dollars. But that is what overtime is for.

I have set my sights far higher for my next academic adventure. After some prolonged waffling, I decided that it is time to expand the scope of practice again. Columbia has a very well respected acute care NP program. If for no other reason, I should go because I can tuck and roll out of my bedroom window and be on a bus across the GWB.

Naturally, Columbia commands a bit more per credit hour than Excelsior. I get a little dizzy when I think of what the tuition bill would look like. However, there is a synergy to be exploited with another project in the works. I have my application into the Air Force Reserve, and if it agrees with me, I might trade a couple years of active duty for tuition plus a stipend. We shall see.

SCTU haiku #1

On Discovering that the L&D Patient Was A Little Further Along Than We Thought

where's the bulb syringe
four centimeters, my ass
now it's a NICU

getting down to the wire, again

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate nursing school. It's almost over, even if I don't quite stick the landing on this last class.

I'm ready for at least a twelve-month personal moratorium on higher education. I'm ready to cheer others on from the sidelines for a while. Serkey starts medic school in a few weeks, Klohe has one Nursing Concepts exam under her belt, and Strange is spending his summer gamely doing battle with the vagaries of survey psychology and sociology classes. I'm proud of all of them.

I plan to OD on Joseph Campbell as soon as I have the chance. The History Channel had a program that featured an interview with a scholar from his library. I have always loved mythology, and got a little taste of Jung in college, but never got around to reading Campbell. Hell, I want to read Harry Potter. I want to read the newspaper.

I like purple goats on whole wheat toast

If you type that into Google, you get about 124,000 hits. It's still fair to say I thought that one up myself.

If your professor uses Google to determine whether you've been plagiarizing, you'd better have an APA format citation to the literature if you say the sky is blue. Or if you say other self-evident things, such as nurses practice in a highly regulated environment. Anybody who's worn a hospital ID in the last twenty years can tell you that sure as the sky is blue, your manager doesn't give a good god damn what your personal nursing theory is, so long as you can quote this year's National Patient Safety Goals chapter and verse.

Then again, we're dealing with a nursing PhD here. I told her not to worry, she wouldn't see an original thought from me for the remainder of the class.

naive

Remember how, a few weeks ago, I dared to be hopeful that Capstone wouldn't SUCK?

That's all I have time to write. . . . I have to go read up on my nursing theory so I can cough it back up for the discussion board.

strange little girl

I was poking around online, rather than work on my Capstone course, when I found this video. I have always loved this cover of the song, and the sort of misplaced misfit it describes.

This was, as I have mentioned, a fairly uneasy spring. But things are getting better. I haven't hit the lottery, but the wolves aren't pressing their noses to the second-story windows, either.

when geography majors dream