My online classes, psych and english, started on Friday. Psych is cool, I took it in high school and also during my brief stint in college straight out of high school. Easy A's both times and I don't anticipate having much trouble this time either. All my work for week 1 was done within 2 hours of the classroom being open. English is another story. i have never enjoyed english. Never. Writing an essay does not fill me with happy thoughts. In high school I did ok, was in the honors classes and held my own.... but never enjoyed it. And truthfully, I don't understand why I got decent grades, I never put much effort in. The only difference between my rough drafts and final drafts was a run through spell check, and everything was done the night before the paper was due. I would really rather not follow that line of procrastination with this english class. So, I've dutifully signed on to the blackboard, read the syllabus, read the first weeks assignments... and kind of stalled out. Today I forced myself to pick up the text and start reading the first chapter as the instructor wants. Now I'm half way through and have totally lost interest. Instead I'm fighting the urge to go do next weeks psych homework, or maybe preread another bio chapter.

I went to the PICC on thursday and had an interview. It went well, I think. The lady that interviewed me took me back to meet the director of the clinic and gave me a tour of the faucilities. And.... oh the babies!! The sweet sweet, fuzzy headed babies! All so tiny and squishy and wonderful! The pay is garbage, lets just say I came home and had to look up the minimum wage rate for WA cause I thought it was higher! This will not work for my work as few hours as possible while bringing home some money plan, but my heart is pulling me there. Anyway, they said they would be calling my references on friday and getting back to me early next week.

Online classes start on Friday, on campus classes start Monday. It's starting to get real to me now!

After a mess with my financial aid and my last name I have everything straightened out, and when I checked the status of my financial aid online tonight it said that an offer for aid had been mailed out! I was a bad bad adult and did not change my name with the social security department when I got married. I changed it with the Department of Liscensing and banks and everything else... but never got around to changing it with SS. Mainly because I thought it would be a much harder process than it really was. This didn't cause a problem until now... half of my documents were in one name, the other a different name. So, now I needed everything to match. I'm so glad to finally have all these hurdles put behind me.

Remember when I mentioned the Pediatric Intensive Care center located near me? Well, guess what?? They *do* do on the job training for their Nursing Aids, and they are going to have openings for evening and graveyard shifts open in about two weeks!! I chatted with the gal in charge of hiring today and she asked me to come down tomorrow to fill out an application. She said she will look over my application and references with me while I'm there. I'm so excited! getting in at the bottom level with this center is really great. They have openings for nursing students and hire fresh grads at a cool 66k yearly starting salary. And they are less than 14 miles from my front door. Here's a link, if you care to check it out! http://www.picc.net/

Could it be? Are things starting to slowly fall into place?

I made it back to the bookstore today to get the rest of my text books. After showing the Opportunity Grant head the breakdown of cost on my texts, she added more money into my account. She even added enough for me to get the other incidental supplies I will need. So I headed in this afternoon and enjoyed the quiet campus. It's spring break so the bookstore was very quiet, just me and one other student for the whole staff to fuss over. I was able to get the rest of my books used... wahoo for saving money! Then I fugured out how much money was left in my account and spent part of it on some notebooks, pens, highlighters, note cards. All that's left is to get my part of the school armoire set up!

I believe the online classrooms open up on the 27th and instruction begins the 31st. EEEk! I'm getting more nervous by the day.

Mike and I went to the bookstore to pick up our texts for spring quarter. As luck would have it, Mike's books went over his bookstore account amount by $1... I was not so lucky. I need another $90 plus tax to be able to get mine... and that was with picking as many used books as I could. I think I will call the Opportunity Grant gal tomorrow to see what she wants me to do. My grant is supposed to cover the full amount of the books and the gal at the register did say a lot of people were telling her that the bookstore amount wasn't covering it all and she was adding more to their accounts....

On the other hand, we do have that particular text here since Mike took that class winter quarter. So, in theory, I could just use his text and not ask for the extra funds... But, we were planning on taking his books to the buy back and using the cash to get some study guides for this quarter.

It's starting to hit me that I will be back to school very soon. I'm getting a bit nervous. It all just sounds so overwhelming. I can do this... one day at a time.

I finally received a response from the Biology instructor today! He can't overload the class for me, but he told me to print out his e-mail and attend the first day of class and probably someone would drop and I could have their seat. So now the big question... which text should I buy? In a perfect world I would be able to buy both, but I don't have enough of $ in my book account to do that. I'd rather not buy the bio text late... I don't want to get behind right at the beginning.

Wahoo! At least it's a chance!

Well, it looks like my schedule for spring will be Eng 101, Psych 110 and Stats 281. English and Psych will be online and Stats will be a twice a week night course, 7:50 to 10 pm. I'm trying to get excited about it. Right now the most exciting part is getting my two most dreaded classes over with, and the other should be a cake walk.

Maybe I'll have time to continue looking over the biology and anatomy and physiology classes/ web casts in my spare time. It would be really nice to have a little head start on the sciences.

I didn't get into the biology class I needed. I'm so frustrated, I thought about crying, but quite frankly I'm just a bit burnt out on the whole thing. Here is my screwed up way of thinking... There is a nursing shortage. There are a ton of people trying to get into nursing school. Wouldn't you think the schools would make an effort to have a more apropiate number of the pre-req classes available? There just seems to be this bottleneck built into the system. So what are my options now? I can take 2 classes instead of 3, kissing a portion of my financial aid goodbye and pushing the oportunity to apply to nursing school back at least a year. I can take one of my other prereqs, pulling it from later in my academic plan and still pushing nursing school back a year. Anyone else have any bright ideas?

I've signed up for my statistics class in place of the biology so I can still take a full load of classes, but the plan is to continue to try to find a way into the biology class. I've already sent an email off to the instructor asking if he would consider overloading the class. I'm sure he probably wont, but it's at least worth the effort of trying. I'm also refreshing the add/drop a class section of the web site in hopes that someone will drop their spot and I can snatch it up. I really really don't want to take the math class this quarter. Please don't make me.

There is a slim chance that biology may be offered for summer quarter, but it wasn't last year. If I don't get in this quarter summer quarter would be the only way to be able to apply to nursing in the spring of 2009.

I met with my guidance counselor/Opportunity Grant person today. For some reason I thought I signed up for my classes with her today... sadly not. I can't register for classes until tomorrow, so even though we sat there typing different classes in to the computer to see what was available and planning out my schedule, there is the chance that one or more of my classes will have filled today and tomorrow I'll be back at square one. Considering there was one seat available in the biology class I NEED to take this quarter, I'm a bit stressed about it all.

If all goes well I will be taking English 101, Psychology 110 and Biology 101. Even getting my best case classes I'm going to be putting myself in a bind. The biology class that has one seat available starts at 9 am. My kids get dropped off at school at 8:55, they can not be there earlier than 8:45 and their school is about 20 minutes away from mine. Monday's it wont be a problem since that is one of Mikes days off, but every other Wednesday and every Friday he will be at work. So... got to figure out some way to get them to school on those days, plus I need to figure out what I'm going to do with Cam during those times. I went to the daycare on campus to check it out today and even with grants I'm looking at $78 a week. Too much. Trying not to panic. I'm getting quite a bit of pressure to not take a on campus class this quarter, but dang it... I'm pushing myself back a full year if I don't get this science done this quarter and I'm being selfish. Maybe I'll hit a stroke of luck and one of the slightly later biology's will have a seat open when I go in for registration tomorrow.

Since I was at the college anyway I decided to stop by the bookstore to see what my books would cost me this quarter. Well, not really me, the opportunity grant opens up an account for me at the bookstore. I can't wait to go pick up my biology text and lab book! Maybe I can get a jump start on reading! My account with the bookstore doesn't open up until the 15th.....

Totally not bragging, but the opportunity grant lady needed to look over my COMPASS test scores. She was quite literally gushing about my math scores. Yeah, math and science seem to come to me naturally. Honestly, yeah I did well, but I guess I'm used to it so I wasn't feeling overly giddy.

I went in to the college today and took the COMPASS placement test. Funny enough, I had resigned myself to possibly not placing where I wanted to place in math and needing to take math 97. Nope, all that studying was enough to refresh my mind on everything I learned in high school. I placed in math 281, statistics. This class scares me. I also easily placed into English 101. However, since I got a perfect score on both the reading and writing section, I really wish there was a waiver for taking English 101. I do not enjoy writing classes and am really dreading this class.

Tomorrow I go in for my appointment with my opportunity grant adviser and sign up for my spring quarter classes. Yay, I'm really on my way now!