The Pace of Nature

I don’t know why, but the beginning of the year is always rain or shine for me. Some years January ends up being a wonderful month of productivity and excitement. Last year January was 27 hour flights into a combat zone, frigid desert temperatures with no cold-weather gear, and sand storms. This year… well, this year I must have made the calendar gods angry or something because I was run over sideways.

First, I have last minute problems getting registered for grad school again after taking off for two semesters. Despite my best efforts to communicate that I was going to be deploying to Iraq and unable to take classes, when I got back and tried to resume my degree I faced a hallway of red tape. You would think a school in Texas- purported to be the most military-friendly state in the country- would be more apt to cut a guy some slack? No.

Not only did these guys make me re-apply, but they required me to repay the registration fee, and even tried to make me retake the GRE!!! Now, let’s just consider that one for a moment. The scores I had last year were apparently good enough to get in to the school. So, somehow me leaving the country and bumming around in the desert for 11 months somehow made my scores invalid? Did they think I got stupider during the year away? (Well, I was running around with some pretty interesting characters out there…)

Anyway, after I thought that headache was resolved, I started a military training course that was guaranteed to take all of my energy- physical and mental- for the remainder of the month. Classes happened to start while I would be gone to this training, so I had to hope that the first week would be typical first week stuff like orientation modules and class startup lectures over grading policies, etc. I left lots of notes for my wife before leaving, assuming the worst I should expect would be a “Send us an email telling us who you are and what your favorite color is” kind of assignments. As it turns out, while I was gone both classes decided to start off with a bang and assigned four assignments each, along with some hefty reading! My wife, being the virtuous woman she is, did the only logically moral thing she could- she took down the assignments on a notepad and kept them for me for when I returned…

Meanwhile I was… well, officially I cannot tell you exactly what I was doing because the course is classified. Let us just say that I was learning about survival and leave it at that. Needless to say, the course is very intense, very realistic, and leaves one VERY worn out. Here is a mugshot from just after graduation.

The aftermath

So I finish with this arduous course of instruction and return once again to civilization physically and mentally exhausted only to find a stack of homework waiting for me. Due date? Yeah, the next day! So much for catching up on lost sleep.

Thankfully I had the weekend to try to recuperate before heading back to work. When I did waltz back through my office door, I found pretty much what I expected- chaos. Despite my out of office reply being on, I still had people leaving several emails requesting time-sensitive work. My voicemail was completely full, and there were sticky notes EVERYWHERE on my desk! By the end of the first week back I barely felt like I had touched the stack of work in front of me.

January was a bit much as far as new beginnings go. I am hoping the rest of 2010 runs a little smoother…