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.

Funny how everyone but me believes I’ll do OK on this web design midterm coming up.  Somewhere inside of me I don’t think people recognize just how far behind  the learning curve I actually am.  Or.  It could be that once again other people have higher beliefs in my abilities than I do.  I think that is something I’ve needed to work on most of my life.  I have always been surprised when people told me I was smart.  I wonder why that is.  I must not have received enough validation growing up; I guess that is what happens when you grow up in a big family.  Sometimes you are just part of the larger clan, less individual, one of the kids.  Most of the time that was OK with me.  Most of the time it is still OK with me.  But we were  individuals, all good at different things.  It’s odd that it’s taken fifty years for us  to figure out just what we are each good at.  I’m pretty sure computer skills are not ever going to be one of my specialities.  And I’m OK with that.  As long as I pass the course and graduate on time in April I’m OK with it.

The midterm is Wednesday morning.  Stay tuned.

I took a moment this morning to scan through a listing of library job postings.  Of course I saw nothing near me, but did forward a couple of promising posts to a friend looking for academic librarianship in the south.  Georgia and Tennessee sound nice about now as I look out over my snow covered yard criss-crossed by tracks of the deer who ate my shrubs last night.

I’m headed to my local library shortly to begin working on the cheat sheets for my Wednesday midterm in complex web design.  Can’t do it here, as Katie (the dog) has a new name:   KATIE-NO!  The only way she will settle down is if I open the slider and let her snif the fresh (and freezing) air outside.  Meanwhile the furnace is running nonstop.  So I’m abandoning ship.  At the library I can have heat AND peace.

 I need to find work, and I need to get more serious about looking soon.  Maybe sooner than later.  Wish I could spread my wings and fly to some new interesting far-away place, but reality says I need to find something here.  Hopefully something will turn up if I am patient.  And if I get my resume out there…anywhere within a 30 minute commute would make me happy.

I drove through a blizzard today on my way to Ann Arbor and a tutoring date with a fellow student.  It was worth it!  Turns out my whole problem (well most of it) was that I didn’t save a change I made way up at the top of the assignment.  So OF COURSE there was nothing there for my next processes to work with!  And the good news is, I came to this conclusion almost by myself as we worked around what I thought I had done, trying to figure out why it wasn’t working.

I made it through to the end of the assignment with quite a bit of navigational help.  I can’t say for sure if I could do it again myself, though I think I could right now.  Right this second anyway.  I’m going to try it again tomorrow to see if most of the logic of it sunk in.   Plus I’ll be spending most of tomorrow studying for the written exam which is Wednesday.

I was reading a couple of older blog entries.  There was one not so long ago when I said I was enjoying my classes, even my web class, but to remind me of that when I’m stressing over the midterm.  It would be very good if some of you would remind me that I’m enjoying school.  I need that confirmation now!

I am so stressed by the web design study for my midterm, and this morning  particularly by assignment 7 that I can’t seem to figure out how to even start, that I decided to come back to this blog and figure out how to make my photo in last night’s entry fit better.  When I wrote the entry last night I noticed the picture was way too big, but I was so far beyond tired that I didn’t want to dink around with it then.

Today, I got so mad at my assignment 7 I decided I was going to prove that I could fix a stupid image in a blog, so I came back here, went into edit and for the first time noticed the “code” tab.  Clicking on that I found, to my surprise (Da!) HTML!  🙂  I KNOW HTML! (ok, just a little, but still!)  So I read along that and found my image tag and the stuff about the size of the photo and I changed it and GUESS WHAT?  The photo is a much more effective size and no longer overlays all the other data at the right! 

WOOHOO!

Now…for those of you that don’t struggle with this stuff you have no idea.  I have begun to doubt why I am even in school if I can’t get this stuff with so much help from so many people.  I am beginning to wonder why I even try, and then I get an opportunity to use the tiny bit of knowledge that I’ve gained so far from the class and it’s a real high in an odd sort of way to accomplish something.  Not to say that this will actually make me PASS the stupid midterm.  But for a moment, no matter how short, I feel  pretty OK about it. 

So I’m studying, off and on, for my midterm. I have now gone through all the weeks of lecture notes, matching up what is in my notes to the slides from the lectures to the slides of the midterm review. I think I get most of it, at least on paper. Actually doing it will be something else, but that’s not until two weeks from today, so for now I’m just trying to get the written test material down. For the most recent topics I recognize I need to do the homework assignment to better understand what’s going on. But, of course, I can’t even figure out how to START the homework assignment. I emailed the professor yesterday with my beginning questions, but so far no response. I hope he’s not tanning down in Florida.

In between study periods I worked on a knitting project. I’m knitting a sweater for my sister. She saw it in the window of a Traverse City yarn shop when we were traveling last summer. She bought the pattern, I went to my local library and retaught myself how to do some fancy stitches, and away we go! It’s a nice relaxing thing to do that doesn’t allow you to eat while you’re doing it, two benefits in one project!

I’m also beginning to do homework for my other two classes. I realize I can’t focus my entire week on the web class, as frightening as it has become. So I worked on my collection management group project, doing some research for our group paper. And tonight, even though it is after 8 p.m. I’m starting on my individual paper that is due a week from Monday. Once I’m back in school and at work next week I will have less time to get this done, so I’d like to get it done or at least roughed in this week. Next week I will be stressing over the practical web design exam and a presentation as well as this individual paper, all due within three days of each other. Better to get as much done as I can. Studying for the web test just isn’t productive after awhile.

So…knit, knit, yarn over, slip stitch, knit two together…write a paragraph or two…sit and contemplate….write another paragraph, knit some more…it will all work out. But I wish it was the end of March instead of the end of February! Then I’d be ALMOST DONE!