This morning I’m sitting near a floor to ceiling window in the UGLI (undergraduate library) looking out on the damp and dreary street and watching students scurry by under their umbrellas. I’m early for my 9:00 class even though I drove into AA from home this morning. I should use this time to get started on my last individual paper for my collection development course, but no. I’m so tired my neck and legs ache. I think it has to do with too many late nights at work and too many very early mornings. Could also have to do with hauling a (very) heavy backpack around everywhere I go these past couple of weeks. I need to remember to weigh that thing tonight. I hope it’s the pack and not my increasing weight that is causing my knees to ache!

Today I have class from 9-12 and then a meeting with my work mentor at 12:30. Then I’m free to work on a project at work and/or the paper due Monday and/or the paper due the next week and/or the group project that I don’t want to talk about. Or maybe take a nap. Eating something would also be a good thing. I’ll see if I can fit any or all of it in. I work tonight from 6-9 p.m. So it’s another twelve hour plus day in Ann Arbor. Not so many of these left I guess. But at the moment there seems no end in sight as I pack up and head toward lecture, knees aching, stomach rumbling, head hurting, eyes tired. School in middle age sometimes feels like this I guess. Heck it probably feels like this even for the youngsters on occassion!

New York, New York, it’s a ….of a town. My two brothers and I are going to visit my siter who lives just outside Manhatten in New Jersey in early May, shortly after I finish with school. It’s something to look forward to, a sort of gift to myself for getting through this semester.

I was in New York last year, as several students and I worked in various libraries. It was such a fun experience that I’m looking forward to being there when I don’t have to work! I loved riding the subway, and wandering around looking at the buildings. I even loved the food, most of which I couldn’t identify! I also loved the vitality and the sense of excitement that was everywhere we went. It’s a great city…but I wouldn’t want to live there!

Two or three days of temperatures in the 40’s and those of us here in Michigan think that winter is over.  Even those of us that have lived here our whole (lengthy) lives think that we are out of the woods.  People were walking around campus yesterday without coats, some in shorts, a few even in flip flops.  Really.  You’d think we were all headed to the beach.

Katie the dog and I made our first around the yard inspection today, poking into gardens long asleep, checking under rotting leaves for any signs of new life.  Mostly it seems that the weeds are doing really well.  I did see a tiny tip of one daffodil, the only one of a few hundred that I’ve planted over the years, breaking through the soil.  The pussy-willow bush has begun to open its buds, way up at the top of the shrub-grown-tree, too high for me to clip a few for inside.  It’s evident that the deer have been using my back yard for a lunch salad bar throughout the winter.  Later on we’ll see what has survived them.

I challenged my sister in New Jersey to a forsythia race last week.   We were both supposed to cut some forsythia branches and bring them inside to bloom.  Of course I forgot I had challenged her.  So today I need to go out and cut some, I’m already about a week behind, and she’s living in a zone warmer than me!  I hope I have highly motivated forsythia that can make up for lost time.

So there’s the news from here for today.  I have a paper to write, and of course that blasted web class homework to do.  But there’s a red winged blackbird on my feeder (another sign that spring is really here) and the sun is out and I just want to enjoy the spring.  Because I know that there just may be one more snowstorm waiting in the wings for those of us that are silly enough to think we are out of the woods here in Michigan!

Spring sure seems to be on the way. But I’ve been wrong before, especially this winter. I am optimistically looking at my garden as I walk the dog, hoping to find little green shoots of anything popping up among the debris of winter. So far <nil/>. But a friend of mine, who keeps a small garden near an elementary school says she has green nubs showing up there against the sun heated school wall, so there is hope!

Spring this year means more to me than some other years, as it marks the end of this academic adventure. Thirty-four more days to worry about papers and presentations and of course the web design class. Today as I ate some supper at an AA restaurant I reflected on why I feel so nostalgic at the realization that it’s all going to come to an end. For one, I had a really good time being a student, and I learned some interesting stuff to boot. And for sure I feel somewhat sad at leaving because I have made some good friends here. But one thing I know is that good friends stay good friends even when school ends. Some of my very best friends are from my undergraduate days more than 30 years ago.

Probably more than a touch of the nostalgia comes from a perception that I will lose another connection with my parents who both went to school here. It’s not as if I can picture them here, as a typical kid I can only imagine them as my parents and never as young single students; but I do see buildings and think that they walked by the same places I walk, climbed the same stairs, looked across the same Diag. It’s been a comforting connection during these past two years, a way to think about them every day, and I will miss that nudge from them daily as I ride past the house dad grew up in on my bus trip in, walk past the bell tower that Mom had classes in, climb the stairs of West Hall where dad studied engineering. But I think it’s a good time to let that go now, another way to move on. They would be happy that I was here, finally a MICHIGAN student, and they would be just as happy to see me move on and start my second career. The connection doesn’t really end, it just adjusts. Being the parents that they were, they’re nudging me out the door now, on to whatever comes next.

So.  I had my infamous practical midterm Tuesday night.  I hate tests that are late in the day, especially after a day where I worked from 9-1, did my internship from 1-3:30, then jogged over to campus (with heavy backpack) to make it for the 4:00 test.

The good news is that I knew exactly what he wanted us to do.  The bad news is I couldn’t get it all to work.  Some of the time I had to stop and make myself breathe.  I turned in a pretty awful looking webpage, but at least I got a webpage to exist!  OK, so it didn’t link to the response page like it was supposed to.  And it was really ugly (I decided to make it blue and yellow because, well you know, this is the University of MICHIGAN!) and it didn’t look just like it was supposed to.  But he knows how hard this is for me, and frankly I’m glad to have ANYTHING to turn in.

I was nervous, hands shaking sometimes, telling myself to calm down, got about 2/3 of it in some sort of sorry shape and feel OK.  He says he’ll have our grades back to us by noon tomorrow, and that it will likely either be 100 if it’s all there or 50 or 30 points.  I don’t really care, 30 points is fine by me!  We shall see. 

I’m just glad it’s over.  But today’s lecture, about “object oriented” code and methods and instances and such made my head swim.   And of course he says this week’s homework is easy.  But he’s said that every week, even the weeks I spend over 12 hours on it.  I reminded him of that in class today and he laughed, and said that for MOST people this week’s homework would be easy.  I told him he’d probably be hearing from me over the weekend.

Sigh.

The practical midterm for the web class is this afternoon at 4.  I can mostly do the work.  Just need to stay calm, breathe, and think.  Things you’d think would come easily.  But may not.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  Wish this was over!

The paper that is due tomorrow has been done since Saturday.  I spent today improving my web/ruby skills in anticipation of the practical midterm on Tuesday evening.  Sometimes I think I get it!  I can do the assignment that the prof says the test  will be based on.  As long as he sticks to that I think I can pass.  Given I don’t forget to breathe.

My presentation on Thursday is less put together.  I wrote the paper that goes with it last week, but one of my group members wanted to edit it, and I can’t get his subsequent edits to open so I don’t know what he wants changed.  Plus the other group member doesn’t want anything changed.  And group member 1 is supposed to supply discussion questions and I haven’t seen any yet.  So that will all get worked out in the next couple of days. 

And I also spent time this weekend working on my group project for the collection class, reviewing other library’s collection policies and pulling out the sections that I’m responsible for writing in our fictious  policy.  I have quite a bit of good data, just need to print it all up to see it as a whole, and pull out the best stuff for our project. 

I even thought some (not much) about my last paper for the professional practices class.  I have my topic and first paragraph ready to turn in Thursday.  So really, I’m sort of sitting pretty this evening.  I’ll be staying in AA again, it makes it so much easier to be at work at 9 if I’m not driving from here. 

All of this has made me very tired.  And started me thinking; wondering how many more days (ie weekends) do I have to spend like this?  Let’s check the calendar and see…(here’s where you hum your elevator music while I’m counting …)  Thirty-eight days (including weekends) and I’ll be finished with my last ever in this lifetime final exam!

On this windy, cold and somewhat snowy Saturday I am sitting in my local library, escaping Katie.  I finsihed my ten page paper that is due Monday night.  Unfortunately it is twelve pages, so I have significant editing to do still.  Most of it was done last night while Katie was sleeping, but this morning she is on active squirrel alert and it wasn’t possible to concentrate much.  Hence the trip to my local library.

I’m sitting at a lovely desk facing a wall of windows overlooking trees and wetlands.  It’s blowing something fierce outside and I’m glad I’m in here just watching the snow swirl around and listening to the wind roar.  The library is only open another hour today, and I’m already anticipating the biting cold as I head back for home.  I am grateful for this quiet haven complete with wireless access.  And no puppies allowed.  I couldn’t ask for more.  Well.  Except for maybe a sandwich or some soup.

I’m at a roadblock on my study for the web design midterm in all its practical glory.  Tuesday night I have to actually DO something (unknown exactly what at this point) to show my skills with Ruby and HTML.  Well.  That should be interesting.  I started assignment 6 with high hopes but got stuck on the second set of instructions.  So as usual, I have an SOS out to my classmates.  So far the answers aren’t helping much.  DO NOT PANIC.  I’m sure I’ll figure it out prior to Tuesday.  I really need to figure it out prior to MONDAY because I don’t have much time once the week starts to do much of anything but stay on track with my schedule.

So I have spent the time here at the library working on my part for two group projects.  One is a presentation next Thursday, the other is the big project for Collection Development that isn’t due till mid April.  Speaking of which, mid-April that is, there are only six weeks till my last ever in my lifetime final exam!  Of course that’s making the assumption I pass the midterm Tuesday…but still.

This morning, as I’m running around chasing after Katie (who hasn’t seen me for a few days and is overly happy to have her Mama back) intermittently playing ball and yelling at her not to bark at the squirrel, while simultaneously trying to gather data through the UM AskUs chat about religion in Cleveland, I notice a pair of cardinals outside my kitchen window.  The male is feeding the female a sunflower seed from my feeder.  I don’t know for sure, but this seems to be a harbinger of spring.  Regardless of the weather forcast for snow.

Let me tell you about my day…and it’s only 11:00 a.m.!

I stayed in AA last night due to the forcast of multiple inches of snow.  Though the total snowfall here in AA was probably less than forcast, it was still significant enough to make the digging out of the car, and the drive of a few miles to the bus stressful.   I was glad I left early;  the bus ride, normally 30 minutes, turned into 50 as it lumbered through unplowed streets, picking up wayward vagabonds, people bundled in scarfs, hats and coats, no faces showing and up to their knees in snow, from the sides of the road.  Still, I was the first person to arrive at the classroom for our exam.

At 9:10, the exam to begin in 5 minutes, the professor asked those of us there where everyone was.  Amazingly maybe half the class was still absent.  Throughout the first 40 minutes students trailed in.  I would have been totally freaked out if I were 30 minutes late to an exam.  But turns out the test wasn’t that difficult.  Sure there were a couple of things that would have been simple had I thought to look at them while studying, and probably stuff I got almost right, but not totally correct; but all in all I know I passed.  Which was, after all, all I was praying for.

So now I am sitting in a study room up in the stacks of the graduate library.  This particular study room has a window overlooking central campus.  The sun is shining, the snow is fresh and white.  From this vantage point, the students who have just been released from classes and are moving up and down the zig zag sidewalks look like ants in some web based computer game.  Wish I had my camera!

I have seven hours before I start my work shift.  I’m going to write a paper for a presentation I have to do a week from tomorrow.  It’s a group thing, and I want to get it done before tomorrow when we meet.  I am so relieved to have this midterm over.  I know I have the practical midterm for the same class next week, and I know that will stress me out even more.  Though I understand the underlying concepts, actually DOING computer coding is just beyond my grasp at the moment.  But today…well…today I’m just going to enjoy the sun, write the paper, eat my lunch…and smile.