I have all sorts of things around the house that need to be done (and have needed to be done for ages), not to mention the fitness and diet regime I have been putting off for too long, and I just keep procrastinating. I keep finding a reason to put it off. Mostly, it's because I'm tired, and I suppose a bit down in the dumps about one thing or another. I think if I just got some things around the house accomplished (like turning our cellar into a place that is semi-pleasant to spend time in, rather than feeling claustrophobic the whole time) and started exercising and eating better, I wouldn't be so tired and down in the dumps. It's a vicious cycle, and no one is going to be able to break it but me.
I just really feel like I need some support. Not that Andy isn't good support, but he doesn't understand some of the stuff. He's never had to deal with weight problems. He's always been one to live amongst a ridiculous amount of clutter and quite happily procrastinates doing...well....anything and everything. Asking him to help me stop procrastinating and to get myself in gear would be like asking Willy Wonka to help me kick my addiction to chocolate.
Not to make excuses, but part of my problem is my daily battle with allergies and frequent battle with headaches (tension, sinus, migraine...take your pick). My allergies really do just leave me feeling drained and tired much of time, particularly when my eyes are on an itching-spree. Allergy pills, sinus sprays, eye drops...they make a bit of an impact (and keep me from having an all-out migraine) but don't eradicate it fully. I usually have a low-grade headache thanks to my allergies, which just furthers the wiped out feeling and makes me want to go to bed. My mom may be able to make herself do whatever she thinks needs doing despite feeling like her head is swollen and about to fall off, but I just can't do it. And I'm tired of feeling this way every single damn day. I've had allergy scratch tests before, and they can't even figure out what the hell I'm allergic to. I have allergies every day of the year, worse during hayfever season, but they can't actually tell me what is causing it. I've had CT scans on my sinuses to see if there is something wrong with them, and there's nothing. I've tried different allergy pills and such since living here, but nothing is as good as the Allegra D I took prior to moving to the UK.
In other news, I went to see The Zutons at Westonbirt Arboretum on Friday night with Andy, Miriam & her son, and it was brilliant. It rained a bit, but overall, it wasn't too bad weather-wise, and of course, Westonbirt is always a lovely place to be and a fab concert venue. The Zutons were fantastic, and the concert was well worth the money.
Sadly, it's back to work tomorrow and then a meeting with the Graduate Dean of the Faculty on Tuesday about my complaint to the university. I could really use another holiday!
Sunday 22 June 2008
Thursday 15 May 2008
My poor little car....
As I was getting ready for work this morning, I heard the doorbell ring. Andy answered the door, and it was our neighbor from next door. He and Andy went outside and were talking about something, and it wasn't until Andy came back in that I realized that it was our car they were talking about. One of the builders next door cut the corner into the drive too close, ran into our car, and ripped the front of our car off. It sounds rather dramatic, and it looks even more dramatic.
The lollipop man (crossing guard to most of you) that works outside our house saw the whole thing happen, so if the builder hadn't confessed, we had a witness to tell us who did it. Luckily, once the guy saw who the car belonged to, he came straight to the house and rang the bell to exchange details. Andy says he thinks the poor guy expected Andy to shout and scream at him, but it was an accident. No one was hurt, and the guy owned up to what he did. It's inconvenient and a pain, but it could have been much worse. We'll see what the real damage is once the garage has had a look tomorrow (it was towed off this afternoon), but hopefully it won't be nearly as bad as it would seem from the pictures. The only really annoying thing, other than the car being ripped apart of course, is that we haven't gotten a courtesy car. The worst case scenario is that we won't get one until Monday, but we're hoping to get one tomorrow. Andy has an awards ceremony to go to tomorrow night, and if we don't have a car, he probably won't be able to go since it's not in Swindon. With no car over the weekend, it's going to severely limit what we can do, but hey, let's face it....we're pretty lazy and probably wouldn't do anything that involved us going long distances anyway! Besides, if we were going to go out of town, we'd probably take the train anyway if we could.
So.....that wasn't a great way to start off the day, but I'm sure it could have been a lot worse!
The lollipop man (crossing guard to most of you) that works outside our house saw the whole thing happen, so if the builder hadn't confessed, we had a witness to tell us who did it. Luckily, once the guy saw who the car belonged to, he came straight to the house and rang the bell to exchange details. Andy says he thinks the poor guy expected Andy to shout and scream at him, but it was an accident. No one was hurt, and the guy owned up to what he did. It's inconvenient and a pain, but it could have been much worse. We'll see what the real damage is once the garage has had a look tomorrow (it was towed off this afternoon), but hopefully it won't be nearly as bad as it would seem from the pictures. The only really annoying thing, other than the car being ripped apart of course, is that we haven't gotten a courtesy car. The worst case scenario is that we won't get one until Monday, but we're hoping to get one tomorrow. Andy has an awards ceremony to go to tomorrow night, and if we don't have a car, he probably won't be able to go since it's not in Swindon. With no car over the weekend, it's going to severely limit what we can do, but hey, let's face it....we're pretty lazy and probably wouldn't do anything that involved us going long distances anyway! Besides, if we were going to go out of town, we'd probably take the train anyway if we could.
So.....that wasn't a great way to start off the day, but I'm sure it could have been a lot worse!
Wednesday 14 May 2008
It's been a while since I last blogged...
And sadly, that's because I haven't had a huge amount to say!
My birthday was good, but uneventful. I had meetings in the morning in Bath, so Andy took the day off and joined me in Bath in the afternoon. We had a nice walk around, did a bit of shopping, and had a fab dinner at Wagamama. I ended up getting Wii Fit on my birthday, so that was quite a nice surprise.
Other than that, I've been dealing with the complaint I made about one of the units on my course and have been helping to prepare for the inspection at the College. I lead such an exciting life!
I've been pretty down lately, too, which is part of the reason I think I haven't felt to chatty, blogging-wise. I'm not really sure why I've been so down. I think part of it is being tired of the weather, but thankfully the sun has been shining and the weather has been warm for the last week. Tomorrow, it cools back down and rains all day, though, so I won't be a happy camper!
I also think part of it is just being disappointed in my weight-loss efforts and not feeling comfortable in my own skin at the moment. Every time I lose some weight, something happens to stress me out, and I fall off the wagon, so to speak. I know I'd be a lot happier, and probably a lot less stressed, if I could drop the weight and get in better shape. I actually do enjoy going to the gym and working out, but getting motivated to do it in the first place is difficult. I wish I could be one of those people who is obsessed with working out and wants to work out all the time, but that's just not me. I guess if I started seeing some results and felt like it was actually doing something, I'd be more motivated. The Wii Fit is good fun, but I haven't used it for a few days because weighing is too depressing!
I think part of being down is also because my job just feels like a soul-destroying task at the moment. I feel like I'm beating my head against the wall all the time. In fact, sometimes I think that beating my head against a wall would feel better than doing my job.
I think another part of it is that I miss my friends and family. I've made two really good friends in the UK, and I love them dearly, but I really miss my best friends back in the US. It's even worse when I know that my best US friends and best UK friends would get along famously. I wish I could build a teleporter and just teleport around the globe, collecting people as I go so that we can all get together in one place. Someone build me a teleporter now!
My dad has retired, and I'm hoping that this means that my parents will come visit at some point this year. I miss my parents and would really love to get to show my dad (finally) some of the places I've been talking about since I've moved here. This summer will make four years of marriage and four years of living in the UK, and it would be nice to see him over here since I've been living here that long.
Finally, one of my good friends has been going through a rough patch with an on-and-off boyfriend, and I finally had to stop giving my opinion because I'm sure she's sick of hearing it, and it's not helping anyway. I've really hated to see her get hurt, and that's been bothering me as well.
Well, this has been a depressing and rather boring post! Feel free to ignore. :P
My birthday was good, but uneventful. I had meetings in the morning in Bath, so Andy took the day off and joined me in Bath in the afternoon. We had a nice walk around, did a bit of shopping, and had a fab dinner at Wagamama. I ended up getting Wii Fit on my birthday, so that was quite a nice surprise.
Other than that, I've been dealing with the complaint I made about one of the units on my course and have been helping to prepare for the inspection at the College. I lead such an exciting life!
I've been pretty down lately, too, which is part of the reason I think I haven't felt to chatty, blogging-wise. I'm not really sure why I've been so down. I think part of it is being tired of the weather, but thankfully the sun has been shining and the weather has been warm for the last week. Tomorrow, it cools back down and rains all day, though, so I won't be a happy camper!
I also think part of it is just being disappointed in my weight-loss efforts and not feeling comfortable in my own skin at the moment. Every time I lose some weight, something happens to stress me out, and I fall off the wagon, so to speak. I know I'd be a lot happier, and probably a lot less stressed, if I could drop the weight and get in better shape. I actually do enjoy going to the gym and working out, but getting motivated to do it in the first place is difficult. I wish I could be one of those people who is obsessed with working out and wants to work out all the time, but that's just not me. I guess if I started seeing some results and felt like it was actually doing something, I'd be more motivated. The Wii Fit is good fun, but I haven't used it for a few days because weighing is too depressing!
I think part of being down is also because my job just feels like a soul-destroying task at the moment. I feel like I'm beating my head against the wall all the time. In fact, sometimes I think that beating my head against a wall would feel better than doing my job.
I think another part of it is that I miss my friends and family. I've made two really good friends in the UK, and I love them dearly, but I really miss my best friends back in the US. It's even worse when I know that my best US friends and best UK friends would get along famously. I wish I could build a teleporter and just teleport around the globe, collecting people as I go so that we can all get together in one place. Someone build me a teleporter now!
My dad has retired, and I'm hoping that this means that my parents will come visit at some point this year. I miss my parents and would really love to get to show my dad (finally) some of the places I've been talking about since I've moved here. This summer will make four years of marriage and four years of living in the UK, and it would be nice to see him over here since I've been living here that long.
Finally, one of my good friends has been going through a rough patch with an on-and-off boyfriend, and I finally had to stop giving my opinion because I'm sure she's sick of hearing it, and it's not helping anyway. I've really hated to see her get hurt, and that's been bothering me as well.
Well, this has been a depressing and rather boring post! Feel free to ignore. :P
Thursday 1 May 2008
Which Greek Goddess are you?
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Which Greek Goddess are YOU?! (great pictures) created with QuizFarm.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| You scored as Demeter You are Demeter goddess of nature
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Tuesday 22 April 2008
Somehow, I became trendy...
Or at least my hair has, apparently. I saw a blurb on my email homepage today that said that frizzy hair is the new trend. This is something I have tried to combat all my life, and now it's trendy? Even though I try to avoid all things trendy when it comes to fashion, my hair has managed to become trendy all by itself. Amazing.
Sunday 20 April 2008
It's been an Ikea-tastic weekend.
For their 21st anniversary, Ikea had a 21% off sale yesterday. They also threw in free breakfast for Ikea Family members (which we are) and 21p hotdogs. Yum! The stores were opening early at 6am and staying open until midnight.
When I mentioned this to Andy, saying we should take advantage of this since Ikea do not do sales and since we had several things we'd been talking about getting at Ikea, he looked less than interested....until I told him that we'd get free breakfast. Food...that's definitely way to my husband's heart and a most definite way of getting his attention and interest.
Andy had grand plans of us getting up at 5:30am, leaving the house straight away, and driving to Bristol so that we could be at Ikea by 6:15 or so. Since we can't even get out of bed when our alarm goes of at 6:30am during the week for work, I had my doubts about this. However, we were up by 5:45am, I think, and out of the house by 6:15am. Because it was so early in the morning, we made it to Ikea in a record time (usually takes us about 45 minutes), and although it was clearly busy already when we arrived at 6:50am, we were still able to get parking near the entrance in the covered parking area. Our first mission...to have free breakfast. We then spent the next 3 hours shopping until we literally could have dropped.
Ikea Bristol expected to have 40,000 people descend upon their store yesterday. They had actually hired police officers, EMTs and their ambulances, and extra security staff to ensure everything went smoothly. They must have had every single employee in that day; every single till was staffed and open, and even though we got to the store really early and got through fairly quickly (considering that there were huge queues of people waiting to order things like kitchens and bathrooms and people simply loading up cart upon cart with stuff because of the sale), we still had to stand in line a fair while because not only were there a lot of people, but there were a lot of people with a hell of a lot of stuff in their carts. Saturdays are extremely busy, of course, but I doubt that many people come to the tills with the sheer volume of stuff that most people had. The guy in front of his had every centimeter of his flat bed cart packed full with flat packed furniture boxes. He could barely move the cart by himself it had so much stuff.
Once we bought all our stuff (two display cabinets to be mounted on the wall, two small bookcases, two CD/DVD towers, tons of shelf brackets, a laptop table for my friend Theresa, and a myriad of other odds and ends), we got it all in the car (all I can say is thank goodness for the Micra...it may be small, but we can fit an amazing amount of stuff, even really large stuff like what we had yesterday, with very little problem), and then went back in the store to have something to drink and some hot dogs before we left.
Overall, it was a really successful shopping excursion, and although we saw the usual obnoxious and rude people stealing carts from one another and the like, we didn't see any real trouble-makers, which was nice. The biggest annoyance came when we finally were trying to leave, and some genius had to block in our car and all the traffic in our row of parking with his enormous SUV. The idiot had backed into the space, knowing he'd be buying quite a bit of stuff to load into the back, so he had to pull his SUV out to load, blocking us all in. Even after having to sit around waiting for this guy to move, it took us quite a long time to get out of Ikea because of the mass exodus of people. Then, we found they'd blocked off the road we needed to take to get back to motor way, so we had to go on this long and convoluted route to get back to the motor way. In the end, I had to sit in the back of the car, crammed in with the stuff stretching from the trunk of the car to the front seat and just fell asleep. I was soooooo exhausted!
So...we now have numerous Ikea boxes sitting around the house. We put together the DVD and CD towers last night, and I'm going to sit down this morning and put together our small book cases. Andy may go out today to one of the DIY stores to get some wood cut for the shelves we want to put in the cellar and in one of our spare bedrooms (that's why we bought a ridiculous amount of shelf brackets), so hopefully sometime in the near future, we'll have a significant increase in our shelving space. We have books just stacked up, and we have so much clutter in our cellar...these shelves and bookcases are definitely welcome!
My mom couldn't understand why people got so excited over a 20% off sale, so I had to explain to her that Ikea is cheaper than most places anyway, and they just don't do sales. They occasionally mark a few items down and do give discounts on a select few items for Ikea Family members, but they don't do sales. So, if someone is wanting to redo their kitchen, their bathroom, their wardrobes, redecorate, whatever, a 20% off sale at Ikea is definitely something to get excited about.
Anyway, I'm off to put more new furniture together. Hurrah!
When I mentioned this to Andy, saying we should take advantage of this since Ikea do not do sales and since we had several things we'd been talking about getting at Ikea, he looked less than interested....until I told him that we'd get free breakfast. Food...that's definitely way to my husband's heart and a most definite way of getting his attention and interest.
Andy had grand plans of us getting up at 5:30am, leaving the house straight away, and driving to Bristol so that we could be at Ikea by 6:15 or so. Since we can't even get out of bed when our alarm goes of at 6:30am during the week for work, I had my doubts about this. However, we were up by 5:45am, I think, and out of the house by 6:15am. Because it was so early in the morning, we made it to Ikea in a record time (usually takes us about 45 minutes), and although it was clearly busy already when we arrived at 6:50am, we were still able to get parking near the entrance in the covered parking area. Our first mission...to have free breakfast. We then spent the next 3 hours shopping until we literally could have dropped.
Ikea Bristol expected to have 40,000 people descend upon their store yesterday. They had actually hired police officers, EMTs and their ambulances, and extra security staff to ensure everything went smoothly. They must have had every single employee in that day; every single till was staffed and open, and even though we got to the store really early and got through fairly quickly (considering that there were huge queues of people waiting to order things like kitchens and bathrooms and people simply loading up cart upon cart with stuff because of the sale), we still had to stand in line a fair while because not only were there a lot of people, but there were a lot of people with a hell of a lot of stuff in their carts. Saturdays are extremely busy, of course, but I doubt that many people come to the tills with the sheer volume of stuff that most people had. The guy in front of his had every centimeter of his flat bed cart packed full with flat packed furniture boxes. He could barely move the cart by himself it had so much stuff.
Once we bought all our stuff (two display cabinets to be mounted on the wall, two small bookcases, two CD/DVD towers, tons of shelf brackets, a laptop table for my friend Theresa, and a myriad of other odds and ends), we got it all in the car (all I can say is thank goodness for the Micra...it may be small, but we can fit an amazing amount of stuff, even really large stuff like what we had yesterday, with very little problem), and then went back in the store to have something to drink and some hot dogs before we left.
Overall, it was a really successful shopping excursion, and although we saw the usual obnoxious and rude people stealing carts from one another and the like, we didn't see any real trouble-makers, which was nice. The biggest annoyance came when we finally were trying to leave, and some genius had to block in our car and all the traffic in our row of parking with his enormous SUV. The idiot had backed into the space, knowing he'd be buying quite a bit of stuff to load into the back, so he had to pull his SUV out to load, blocking us all in. Even after having to sit around waiting for this guy to move, it took us quite a long time to get out of Ikea because of the mass exodus of people. Then, we found they'd blocked off the road we needed to take to get back to motor way, so we had to go on this long and convoluted route to get back to the motor way. In the end, I had to sit in the back of the car, crammed in with the stuff stretching from the trunk of the car to the front seat and just fell asleep. I was soooooo exhausted!
So...we now have numerous Ikea boxes sitting around the house. We put together the DVD and CD towers last night, and I'm going to sit down this morning and put together our small book cases. Andy may go out today to one of the DIY stores to get some wood cut for the shelves we want to put in the cellar and in one of our spare bedrooms (that's why we bought a ridiculous amount of shelf brackets), so hopefully sometime in the near future, we'll have a significant increase in our shelving space. We have books just stacked up, and we have so much clutter in our cellar...these shelves and bookcases are definitely welcome!
My mom couldn't understand why people got so excited over a 20% off sale, so I had to explain to her that Ikea is cheaper than most places anyway, and they just don't do sales. They occasionally mark a few items down and do give discounts on a select few items for Ikea Family members, but they don't do sales. So, if someone is wanting to redo their kitchen, their bathroom, their wardrobes, redecorate, whatever, a 20% off sale at Ikea is definitely something to get excited about.
Anyway, I'm off to put more new furniture together. Hurrah!
Tuesday 15 April 2008
I thought this day would never come.
My dad has officially announced his retirement. He turned 65 last year and celebrated his 25th anniversary at the Bank. Several months later, I was told that the Bank had been sold and that he would stay long enough to settle in the new owners and make sure his employees and customers were ok, and then he'd be retiring. I know my dad, and I know he's a complete workaholic, so I really never thought the day would come when he'd actually set a retirement date. However, he has finally announced that April 30 will be his last day. I can't believe it. As morbid as this sounds, I always thought (and so did my mom) that he would probably die at his desk - that he would never leave the Bank.
Don't get me wrong...I'm absolutely ecstatic that he's finally giving up work. However, I'm not sure how long it will last. He's good at what he does, and he is well-known for it. He has apparently already been asked if he will train employees at another bank. I know the new owners of his Bank have asked him numerous times to reconsider and to stay, but he's said no. I'm sure he could get some consultant work with very little effort, so I'm not entirely convinced that he's giving up work for good. As long as he doesn't go back to a full-time gig anywhere and get as heavily involved and invested as he was in the Bank, then I think he'll be ok. In fact, I think doing some consulting and keeping active will be good for him and keep him going. However, I also hope he leaves himself time for some hobbies, some relaxation, and some travel. Apparently he has already mentioned getting a passport to my mom, so I'm hoping he'll get on with it so that they can both come visit this year. My mom hasn't been here for over two years, mostly because of her back and leg pain (which thankfully the surgery has fixed), and my dad has never been here, so it would be very nice to have them both here.
I've tried talking my mom into getting a Nintendo Wii, because I think my parents would really enjoy it. There are fishing games that I'm sure my dad would LOVE. Hopefully if they do visit, we can get them to have a go on our Wii, and I bet they'll enjoy it. I think my dad will probably start being more interested in a lot of things my mom and I have tried to get him into in the past now that he's going to be retiring. I thought he'd really enjoy having an iPod; he loved playing with my iPod last time we visited them. He'd probably enjoy reading more and possibly playing around on the computer more; he does so much of that at work, he doesn't really want to spend much time doing that sort of thing at home. My mom thinks he should join a gym, and I just doubled over with laughter at the mention of that. I just can't picture my dad on a treadmill or rowing machine. First off, with his horrid smoking habit, I think he'd end up in a coughing fit the first time he tried to use one of those machines, and second, I think he'd need to take a smoke break every 5 minutes. I just can't see him being interested in it, but hey, you never know. My mom works out three times a week at Curves and does yoga twice a week, and who would have ever expected that?
Anyway, in other news, I met with my personal tutor today and had a chat about the mandatory course we've had to take this semester. It's been an absolute shambles - completely unacceptable. I know my fellow students have complained verbally, and apparently they have also submitted a written complaint on behalf of the rest of the students, which is fine with me. However, I told my tutor that I am going to be writing my own formal complaint, and I will be requesting (demanding?) compensation for loss of earnings and travel expenses for the time and money I've wasted on this class this semester. I also said that although we only have two classes left, I want to leave the class and retake it next year. I don't see any reason to attempt to write the essay; none of the essay questions are very clear, specific or interesting, but more than that, I really feel that to make an educated attempt at writing any of them, I should have had the mandatory History & Theory course last semester. The part-time students were told we could wait until next year to take it, but I have found that I really needed it to do a couple of the courses I wanted to do this semester, including this mandatory course. However, I was told I didn't need it to do the mandatory course this semester; I've found that this hasn't necessarily been the case. I've felt a bit behind the rest of the class at times, and most of the essay topics would certainly benefit from the History & Theory course. Yes, I could read a couple of History & Theory books, but I really need the experience of the class discussions and instruction to feel confident. Anyway, both my personal tutor and the department administrator agreed that it was a sensible idea to take the class next year, and the administrator even offered to email the tutor for me. So, hopefully I will hear back in the next few days that it's not a problem for me to do that. No one seems to think it should be an issue, but who knows what the course tutor will have to say. I'll feel much better once I've heard that he's not going to try to object to me leaving the class.
Other than my meeting today with my personal tutor (which has made me feel much better), I've made chicken fajitas for dinner, and Miriam and her son came over for dinner and to play on the Wii. It's been a nice evening. (That's Mexican food five nights in a row now, and probably for at least another one or two nights, with leftovers!)
Don't get me wrong...I'm absolutely ecstatic that he's finally giving up work. However, I'm not sure how long it will last. He's good at what he does, and he is well-known for it. He has apparently already been asked if he will train employees at another bank. I know the new owners of his Bank have asked him numerous times to reconsider and to stay, but he's said no. I'm sure he could get some consultant work with very little effort, so I'm not entirely convinced that he's giving up work for good. As long as he doesn't go back to a full-time gig anywhere and get as heavily involved and invested as he was in the Bank, then I think he'll be ok. In fact, I think doing some consulting and keeping active will be good for him and keep him going. However, I also hope he leaves himself time for some hobbies, some relaxation, and some travel. Apparently he has already mentioned getting a passport to my mom, so I'm hoping he'll get on with it so that they can both come visit this year. My mom hasn't been here for over two years, mostly because of her back and leg pain (which thankfully the surgery has fixed), and my dad has never been here, so it would be very nice to have them both here.
I've tried talking my mom into getting a Nintendo Wii, because I think my parents would really enjoy it. There are fishing games that I'm sure my dad would LOVE. Hopefully if they do visit, we can get them to have a go on our Wii, and I bet they'll enjoy it. I think my dad will probably start being more interested in a lot of things my mom and I have tried to get him into in the past now that he's going to be retiring. I thought he'd really enjoy having an iPod; he loved playing with my iPod last time we visited them. He'd probably enjoy reading more and possibly playing around on the computer more; he does so much of that at work, he doesn't really want to spend much time doing that sort of thing at home. My mom thinks he should join a gym, and I just doubled over with laughter at the mention of that. I just can't picture my dad on a treadmill or rowing machine. First off, with his horrid smoking habit, I think he'd end up in a coughing fit the first time he tried to use one of those machines, and second, I think he'd need to take a smoke break every 5 minutes. I just can't see him being interested in it, but hey, you never know. My mom works out three times a week at Curves and does yoga twice a week, and who would have ever expected that?
Anyway, in other news, I met with my personal tutor today and had a chat about the mandatory course we've had to take this semester. It's been an absolute shambles - completely unacceptable. I know my fellow students have complained verbally, and apparently they have also submitted a written complaint on behalf of the rest of the students, which is fine with me. However, I told my tutor that I am going to be writing my own formal complaint, and I will be requesting (demanding?) compensation for loss of earnings and travel expenses for the time and money I've wasted on this class this semester. I also said that although we only have two classes left, I want to leave the class and retake it next year. I don't see any reason to attempt to write the essay; none of the essay questions are very clear, specific or interesting, but more than that, I really feel that to make an educated attempt at writing any of them, I should have had the mandatory History & Theory course last semester. The part-time students were told we could wait until next year to take it, but I have found that I really needed it to do a couple of the courses I wanted to do this semester, including this mandatory course. However, I was told I didn't need it to do the mandatory course this semester; I've found that this hasn't necessarily been the case. I've felt a bit behind the rest of the class at times, and most of the essay topics would certainly benefit from the History & Theory course. Yes, I could read a couple of History & Theory books, but I really need the experience of the class discussions and instruction to feel confident. Anyway, both my personal tutor and the department administrator agreed that it was a sensible idea to take the class next year, and the administrator even offered to email the tutor for me. So, hopefully I will hear back in the next few days that it's not a problem for me to do that. No one seems to think it should be an issue, but who knows what the course tutor will have to say. I'll feel much better once I've heard that he's not going to try to object to me leaving the class.
Other than my meeting today with my personal tutor (which has made me feel much better), I've made chicken fajitas for dinner, and Miriam and her son came over for dinner and to play on the Wii. It's been a nice evening. (That's Mexican food five nights in a row now, and probably for at least another one or two nights, with leftovers!)
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