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I feel like I’ve had a fairly productive week so far, life-wise. To celebrate, I made you this list.

One: I started a new diet this week in an attempt to lose a bit of nonessential body fat. To make the diet more fun and exciting, I created a spreadsheet. Perhaps I’m the only one (on earth) that thinks spreadsheets are cool, but whatever. I could use the additional motivation. My spreadsheet automatically estimates my resting metabolic rate (RMR) based on my age (to the day), height, and weight (to the day), and then estimates my caloric deficits or surpluses (jebus forbid!) based on what I eat and how I exercise. In short, it rocks. I’m shooting for a 1000 - 1200 calorie deficit per day, which would mean I’d lose 2 - 2 ½ pounds a week. It’s only day four, but so far I’m doing pretty good, and I’m feeling optimistic.

B: I’ve booked my flight to Seattle. :) I’ll fly out of Des Moines around noon on Wednesday, June 20 and land in Seattle around 7pm (following a 4-hour layover in Minneapolis). I’ll spend Thursday and Friday attending the ever-so-awesome An Event Apart conference, and Saturday seeing the sights and hanging out with Justin. I fly out of Seattle at 7-o-freaking-clock the morning of Sunday (June 24), change plans in Memphis for reasons beyond my understanding, and land in Des Moines around 3:30pm. Sucky flights aside, the trip itself should be a blast.

Tres: I’ve signed up for an 8-week Spanish class starting next Wednesday evening through the Des Moines Public Schools Community Education program. I’ll be taking the class with friend AnneJanotta, so it should be fun. This class will be useful for many reasons, including 1) Friend Hannah and Girlfriend Zinger already speak Spanish, 2) Amanda and I said we’d join a club each this summer and I’m counting this as mine, and 3) Hannah is importing her boyfriend from Costa Rica some time yet this summer, and since I hear his English is pretty bad, I figure to be fair my Spanish should be equally bad.

4: I planted four pepper plants of various toxicity today. This probably isn’t as big a deal as the other three, but it still made me happy. :) They’re a little droopy, so I’m hoping they’ll rejuvenate in the next few days. Even if they don’t, our tomatoes are looking great, the green peppers are doing well, and all of the herbs have pulled through a shaky start. Go team Robanda!

Infinity plus one: Oh, and Miles had his first obedience class Tuesday. They loaned us a gentle leader collar to try out, and let me tell you, it makes a ~huge~ difference. My initial reservations have faded.

Adios!

I heard back from one of my top-choice companies on Thursday and had a half-hour phone interview that went really well. And then they called back on Friday to schedule an in-person interview down in Des Moines for next Friday (the 31st). I’m really super excited. :) However, now that I’ve scheduled my first in-person interview, I have come to the realization that I don’t have what I’m going to consider appropriate interview attire (at least for the types of jobs I’m applying for). Dana and I are going to have to go shopping sometime this week. I’m going to need an entirely new outfit, right down to the shoes. My brown Birkenstocks are showing their age on top and literally falling to pieces on the bottom. My black dress shoes are also falling apart on the bottom (there’s a huge water-attracting hole in the right one), plus they’ve become nastily salt-bleached during our last bout with Mother Nature. I consider it an investment, though. If an outfit can help me get a decent paying job doing what I want to do, it will be entirely worth it. Plus, it’ll eventually work its way into work attire.

My schedule this week is going to be frustratingly busy. I’m going to want to spend at least one or two evenings worrying about the interview (shopping, figuring out how to make an impromptu paper portfolio out of websites, etc). Unfortunately, I need to get a nearly-final draft of my creative component to my major professor by Monday, and then a really-nearly-final draft to the rest of my committee on Friday. Plus I have a big project (design a multiple-week class unit for a technical communication course and defend your decisions in a too-long report) due on Thursday that I haven’t really even begun. I have a good idea as to what I want to do the project on, but I’ve no idea how quickly that will translate into a finished product.

So how am I starting off this week of business? Drunk, probably. Dana and I went out last night and had a few too many whilst playing pool at the place down the street, and Kara is coming up to go out with us tonight. I’m going to try to get a couple of hours of stuff done before she gets here, and then all day tomorrow is going to have to be creative component time. And the second I finish, it becomes homework time. And the second I finish that, it becomes creative component/interview preparation time.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention the real reason I decided to update. It’s pretty much official that I’ll be moving across the hall in early- to mid-May. Dana and I took a look at the apartment Friday morning and decided it met my needs, and then my landlord approved of the proposal via email Friday afternoon. Dana says I’m not allowed to move the bar. Or the shopping cart. Or the giant red flag I found in the street. The giant orange and green fish hanging on my wall will probably take additional negotiation. Obviously, the woman has no design taste. ;)

I’m happy to announce that my creative component work is coming along well. Aside from the buttload of editing work that undoubtedly still needs to get done (but somehow doesn’t count as “work” in my head), I only have to make a few substantial edits to the website and write the conclusion to my creative component. I should be on track to get my final draft to my major professor by Sunday or Monday. It’s turning out to be a big bugger, too: I’m guessing it’ll be over 80 pages long, not counting appendixes, and a bit shy of 100 pages counting ‘em.

That probably sounds horribly long to some people out in AudienceLand not Grad School Inclined, and maybe even a little short to you Audibles out there writing theses right now. To the former, I would say this: Most of my life for the last five or six weeks has revolved around writing this thing. Not researching… that was done earlier. Just writing. It almost feels like it should be twice that length by now. To the latter: hey now, I’m having to build a website to go with this thing, too. Plus it’s a touch frustrating to know I’m writing this much and it’s not even going to be archived by the library. At least yours has a ~chance~ (however small) of being read someday.

I have decided I don’t really like the dead period between sending out a resume and waiting for a response. There’s nothing I can do to accelerate the process. I can’t even really check on the progress of the process for the most part. Sigh. At this moment, I have my resume out to four companies I’d like to work for, and I’ve only heard back from two of them regarding positions I’m not ideally interested in. I figure I’ll be picky for a few more weeks, until I decide to panic and take the first job willing to pay me enough to survive on ramen and day-old bread.

Speaking of living economically (it’s a stretch, I know), I’m considering moving. Now, before you lovely relatives of mine hyperventilate at the thought, I’m only considering moving about ten feet south. Literally. There’s a one bedroom apartment available across the hall, and I’m toying with the idea of taking it. The rent would be less, the location would be the same, and I could quit feeling guilty about having eight rooms to my lonesome.

Anyways, Dana should be here in a few for a goodnight kiss (the extent of our time together on average these days), so I’m going to go make it look like I’ve been sitting on the couch watching TV for the last six hours.

I’m really starting to look forward to when I graduate and get a full-time job. You know, so I can relax.

There was a time when getting a 9-5 sounded scary. Eight hours a day, five days a week? The repetition alone was enough to make me cringe. However, once I stop and actually take my current schedule into consideration, 40 hours a week is starting to sound like a fantastic way to wind down for the next 40 years.

For the last month, according to my very rough calculations on a sleep-deprived mind, I’ve been averaging something more like fourteen hour days, six days a week, or right around 80 hours every week. The last two weeks have been even worse than the average. I get up between 7am and 8am, do homework until it’s time for work or meetings, spend the next six or seven hours on campus working, and then come home and work until between 2am and 3am. Sure, I take breaks in there. I eat one to four times a day. I go to the bathroom to expel the exhausted caffeine. I pull the cat out of the sink or off of my laptop. I think I might even have a girlfriend around here somewhere. But I figure I’d probably take breaks working a 9-5, too. What a sweet deal.

And the weekends aren’t any better, either. Last Sunday, for example, I decided I was going to sleep in. I stayed up extra late, until 3am or so, just to make sure I was good and exhausted, and then headed to bed. My mind had me back awake by 8:30am. So, I got up and started working. There’s just no winning sometimes.

The good and bad news, of course, is that I’m almost done. I’ve something like eight weeks to go until I’m graduated. Some weeks will be worse than this one. I don’t plan to sleep between March 18 and March 22, for instance, as I’ll be planning a major conference presentation while simultaneously working on my creative component, developing a technical communication teaching unit, and working for the grad college. I might have a freelance gig in there too. However, sometime in mid-April, I fully intend to exhale. My creative component will be done, and I’ll still have a 30ish page annotated bibliography to turn in for my class, but that doesn’t sound as scary as the rest.

Of course, that’s when Dana will be getting ~really~ stressed. So maybe I’ll wait to celebrate until May. Graduation is May 6, I think, by the by.