full-time student: a progress report

One of the biggest things I have been looking forward to with the new, simpler, stress-free me is having more time. Once I no longer had to commit 10-12 hours of my day getting ready, driving to work, working, rushing through the grocery store, etc., I would have so much time, i wouldn't know what to do with myself. Yes, I would simultaneously be taking a full load of classes but that shouldn't be a problem. I would just substitute working on that during the times when I would normally be in school.

So far, I'm still waiting for that shangri-la to come to fruition! Don't get me wrong - I absolutely love being able to get up when I'm ready (the time has fluctuated between 6am - 9am, depending on how late I was up the night before) and having time to take the dogs for walks and to the park. I am also still playing catch-up to a certain extent for the first few weeks when the beginning of school coincided with my extended family all coming to my place for a reunion that lasted a full 2 weeks for some members. So maybe I am speaking too soon but I've noticed this trend before.

No matter how much time you have, stuff comes along and fills it up.

Eventually (once that "catch up" all happens) maybe I will have everything done by 5 each night and be able to take the dogs to the dog park without the uneasy feeling that there is more work that should really be done today....or maybe I'm devoting too much time to my studies. I'm sure most people are not doing all the reading + taking notes + creating blog entries for each. (From what I can tell, some of them haven't even cracked a book yet!) But one of the main reasons I wanted to do it this way - quit the full-time job, etc - is so that I could really immerse myself fully, sucking every drop of learning I could get out of the experience.

In that respect, the experiment thus far has been a resounding success. I feel like I understand the material fully and it has been absolute heaven to be able to go to the park to do some reading or type a paper while sitting outside at the picnic table.  So maybe I'll never be the type of person who can turn off the "should've" script in my head, life is pretty darn good right now.

New Butterfly!

This Gulf Fritillary held still...but the picture is still blurry!

The insect population in my yard was buzzing this morning with the news that the jasmine bushes are all in bloom, which was a nice surprise since yesterday they were mostly just buds. So I just took some time to enjoy the heavenly smell and observe all the activity going on. It's amazing just how many creatures that I can see with the naked eye are partaking of just one bush. Just while I stood there I saw a lizard, 2 Gulf Fritillary, 1 Giant Swallowtail, 2 new butterflies and 1 very fat bumblebee. And that's just the ones I could actually see! I wish I had the kind of camera that would capture them. Their size and speed, unfortunately, just result in blurry pictures - even when they sit still for me. (The picture at left was taken very early in the am when the butterfly was still sleeping/warming up for the day.)

Online image of a Long-tailed Skipper Butterfly

For a while I kept a journal of the butterflies I saw in my yard but after a bit, I was only ever writing down one name: Gulf Fritillary (I can find them in the yard, it seems, anytime I go out.) I've seen the Eastern Tiger, Zebra and Giant (which I mistook at first for a bird it's so large) and the Florida Sulpher at various times but after identifying those, I kept seeing the same types. So I was excited this morning to spot a new type: a Long-tailed Skipper. I would have thought it was a moth due to the monochromatic wings but after observing it more closely, I realized the body was not fuzzy like a moth and that no self-respecting moth would be so active with the sun blazing down on it. I narrowed it down to one of the skippers based on the shape of it's wings (plus its erratic, "bouncy" flight) and finally identified it after looking at actual pictures online. (The drawings in my guide can be somewhat misleading on wing patterns & actual coloring.)

I still have not been able to lure a White Peacock here and my attempts to attract Monarchs with milkweed plantings have all ended in failure (e.g., plant is destroyed by the caterpillars but the butterflies don't stick around afterwards). Speaking of plant destruction, something is making a go at eating my bouganvillea that I can't find other than the evidence of the huge holes in the leaves. I suspect grasshoppers or maybe snails.  On the plus side, the orchid and passion flower both seem to have recovered from their recent bouts of serving as dinner for someone. The orchid is actually blooming again already. Hopefully the bougainvillea is as lucky.

countdown to full-time student: 10 days

I spent the day yesterday over at USF for orientation (yes, an entire day - from 9 in the morning until 5:30 - let me tell you that that is a *very* long day of a lot of repeated information.) The afternoon session was for the Lib Sci program and it was good to meet the professors and get a better feel for the people I've been emailing & talking to via phone. The student organizations seem to be very active which is also good since I've been worried about too much alone time with so much of the program online. Brown bag lunches every Wednesday and all kinds of things to do scheduled from sporting events to canoeing trips to museums.

As a result of all I learned, I came home and completely reorganized my classes for fall, switching to get another core class under my belt and signing up for one that looks like it will be challenging but very rewarding: Human Rights Librarianship. I just looked through the syllabus and the class requires participating in one of the local human rights groups and submitting a paper to one of the major publications as a large part of the grade. Which is very cool since the work will be done for something real and not just another paper that lives only on my hard drive but also makes me feel a bit intimidated.

It's certainly going to make the first few weeks challenging as there is a lot of reading and interaction required even in the first two weeks and my house will be filled up with 8-9 people (!) but hopefully I can work ahead a bit since she has everything online already.

Only a few more days of work now to go! I can't believe how much I'm looking forward to the start of a new school year ;)

happiness and health and well-being

I went back to see the holistic doctor on Thursday without much optimism. I debated cancelling the appointment altogether but I was curious to find out the results of the tests he'd ordered (blood work, saliva testing, the works). I assumed the visit would center around the gyn. issues that were behind my initial visit only to discover that everything apparently stems from the way that I handle (or rather mis-handle) stress. Technically this has resulted in Low free-T4/thyroid, low B12 and low progesterone plus cortisol and DHEA levels that were all over the place. The doctor talked through everything but I just couldn't quite take it all in at first. He gave me handouts with information and prescribed several things and sent me on my way.

Over the next few days, I spent time researching and discovered that I have a fairly typical case of adrenal fatigue which is basically what happens when you take a system designed for responses to immediate, life-threatening conditions (e.g., Fire! Large animal attacking me!) and keeping it turned on for months and years on end. As I began to learn more and reflect, I realized that though the recent stresses at work exacerbated things, I have not managed stress well for a very long time.

So I picked up one of the recommended books (The Core Balance Diet by Marcelle Pick and Genevieve Morgan from the Women to Women clinic) and began following the recommended plan for adrenal fatigue by and even in just these few intervening days, I've been absolutely amazed by the results. The food recommendations are more or less basic good health sense – lean proteins with every meal, complex carbs, lots of greens and no sugar, caffeine or processed foods among other things – on a *very* regular basis (every time I even start to think about being hungry, it's time for another meal). But the book is so much more than just a diet plan. Not only do they recommend the meals you should eat but the schedule your day should follow (which includes breaks for tea and “deep breathing”) and there’s a whole section on the mental wellness which includes a strict rule of no multitasking – including (and this is a toughy for me) no eating and doing other things like watching TV, reading, etc. That restriction really made the problems with my current lifestyle so apparent. I could not stop the mental worry list, jumping from one thing to the next and thinking about how I was going to fit in everything I still needed to do that day.

The first full day I felt slightly ill but by Monday, my body started to adapt to the new food and new routine. For the first month, you are supposed to turn off all electronics by 7:00pm and start winding down to prepare your body for the 9:00 bedtime – every night! It seems so impossible to do but it’s actually helped me prioritize and let go of some things. Luc The most amazing part is that it seems to be working! I’ve always been notorious for “never sleeping” and even when I do sleep, it is very lightly with frequent waking but since starting this, I’ve been sleeping 9 hours a night straight through. It’s staggering to realize how closely physical and mental well-being are connected.

We’ll see how things go since I haven’t even completed a full week yet but I'm hopeful that the 6-wk follow up visit will be a completely different story.

responsibility

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. - Martin Luther King, Jr. 

I really need to be working on Paper 3 (due Monday...after Paper 2 was due last night - ack!) but had to get out my...annoyance over the drama that went on at work yesterday. It was such a complete fiasco - to the point of being a farce if it weren't for the people being affected by it. Knowing that I am on the way out helps give me some detachment but I am conflicted as to the best way to help. I feel that I have a responsibility to do something, but what?

It really has been ridiculous. First M. has been "training" the new guy, A.,  for the last few weeks. She apparently decided early on that he was not going to be able to get it, making it obvious from the get go in the way she talked down to him. It bothered everyone in our area because it was just so horrible to have to watch & hear the way she would publicly humiliate him all the time (Great training technique, btw).  So that had been building over the last few weeks and then yesterday it all blew up. Apparently she & D. were working to prove to HR that it was not going to work out so they were collecting data every time he didn't get something. Then they apparently staged a set up yesterday which culminated in M. running down the hall screaming  that she was going to HR because A. was a liar.  Exit M for her weekend mini-vacation. He (A.) then comes back to his desk and proceeds to tell us his side of the story, also getting visibly upset and practically shouting by the end of the story. Apparently emotions run high in the world of writing code.

He sat there a while and then announced that he was going to HR, saying goodbye to everyone. Exit A., apparently for good. It was so absurd all of it and so extremely unprofessional. I think the part that upset me most (on top of really screwing up that guy's life, at least temporarily) was finding out how gleefully M. had viewed her part in it all. She apparently had done the same thing with Joe, recounting to someone else in the office how she had gotten rid of Joe by scouring his code for errors and documenting every little thing. It's so messed up - esp. considering how she always talked him up to me and pretended like it was all out of her control.

I said as much to Joe and he was, of course, not really surprised. I honestly can't believe he held out for as long as he did, considering the way she treated him. He said his primary goal those last few weeks was to avoid doing anything, even by way of a facial expression, that would trigger her b/c she would explode at him at the slightest provocation. At least he did talk to HR in his exit interview. One would hope that eventually the mounting evidence will compel them to do something about this mess because surely this cannot be what they want to have happening.


So why then do they keep letting this kind of thing go on? This is just one example of the kind of unprofessional behavior that seems to run amok there, at least in our department.  It's extremely detrimental to everyone's work and I know that several of the newer people have been completely disillusioned by the events of the past few weeks and are already considering other job opportunities. People keep telling me that this is just the way things are in the cut-throat corporate environment but it makes no sense to me.  How can that really be more effective than an environment where people are enthusiastic about their work and working together on projects, instead of spending all their time focused on survival. 


So back to my dilemma: what can and should I be doing? I was planning, certainly, on saying something at my exit interview but in the meantime it seems as though something should be done now. We have a "focus group" on why employee morale in our area has been declining on Tuesday; however, it will be somewhat difficult to address there as two of the primary problems are part of that group. But then isn't that what we criticize people living under the Third Reich for doing? If I know the problem exists and that the people who have a responsibility to address it may not be aware, isn't it my responsibility to say something -- even if I don't think it will affect anything?