Countdown to fall semester: six days
Two days before orientation
This is actually my 200th post here over the span of the little over a year since I completely revamped the blog last summer. Go me, right?
Ahem, anyway.
I mentioned earlier, over the weekend, that more shitty things had transpired over the past few days, and I wasn't kidding. Now that those things have been mostly rectified, I can write and talk about them here.
I can't remember when, but one day last week -- either Thursday or Friday, probably -- I noticed that my school folder had gone missing from my computer.
As in, completely gone.
This is, folks, a very bad bad thing.
My school folder contains everything I've done in graduate school -- papers, assignments, projects, templates and important documents (such as my student loan disclosure statements and the like) -- but more than anything else, it also contains all of my teaching materials and lesson plans, and most importantly, it contains my thesis. You know, my thesis, the thing that is basically the culmination of my entire graduate school career? The thing that's going to be half of what earns me my degree, and will probably end up as my first published book of poetry? Yeah, that.
Gone. all gone. Completely gone.
I cannot properly express the gravity of this situation fully. A week and a half before classes start, and I no longer have any of my lesson plans or the thesis that I've spent most of the summer meticulously constructing off-and-on to get it sounding just right, to include in it only the works which I felt deserved to be in there, and having them follow some sort of sequence in which I felt they best made sense and flowed together.
I did searches. I scoured my computer, I scoured everything and every possible place it could have been shuffled off to on my machine. It had simply disappeared. Somehow the folder itself had gotten completely deleted and wiped clean from my computer's hard drive. I'm guessing I did it at some point by accident, and just didn't notice it for a day or two, but I have no clue how that could have happened.
Luckily (well, depending on how you look at it) I made a backup of my hard drive's contents about a month ago on my biggest (read: 16GB) flash drive, and I was able to restore the folder from that. However, I was basically back to where I'd started a month ago. Up until this past weekend, I was pretty much 95% or so done on the thesis, and I had daily lesson plans scheduled and typed up -- as well as an updated syllabus/office hours sheet -- for the entire first month-long unit of my classes this fall. Having to restore everything from my backup shot me backwards to having none of those lesson plans done, and having my thesis only about 40% or so complete. With little more than a week before classes start, this was a huge problem.
So, because I didn't have much of a choice, I sat down here at my desk, turned off all internet-related applications, and began writing. With about fifteen or sixteen hours' worth of work, a pot and a half of Tim Horton's coffee, and a pack of Liggett cigarettes, I completely reconstructed my thesis and finished it. It now sits at fifty pages, total, and its "first draft" of sorts is complete. I immediately made a new backup on my flash drive -- I am not doing that again. I also thanked Tim Horton's coffee and Liggett cigarettes on my "Special Thanks" page at the back.
The next day I did the same thing with my lesson plans, reconstructing them from what I remembered and basing them on what I have done in my previous semesters of teaching my Engineering English class -- streamlining them by the day and weeding out the more "needless" lessons and discussions, beefing up some of the others, etc. I was able to shave a full week off of the first unit, and made some needed changes to the syllabus. I was also able to construct my schedule and office hours around the times I need to be working and when, so when I was finished redoing everything, it was all better than before. This took me about eight hours' worth of work, and when I was done, I again made another backup.
So, with 24 hours' (or more) worth of solid work under my belt, things are back to normal and I am relatively ready to start the semester...at least when it comes to lesson plans and the like, anyhow. Everything else remains to be seen.
My student loans have come in, have been processed by the university, have cleared my student account there, and have been sent to my bank, yet they have not yet shown up in my bank account in any form, pending or otherwise. According to student accounts (and it says this every semester) it may take up to five business days for them to clear and be deposited into my account as an ACH (as per the usual, just like my direct deposit paychecks for being a GTA). It never takes that long, obviously, but it looks like it's taking a little while longer than usual this time. Either that or my bank is being slow -- I had to go to Walmart yesterday morning, for example, and that purchase ($30 for cat food, litter, and some small foodstuffs to tide me over) is still pending right now, when normally it would have gone through by now. I've been checking my account a few times per day just to see if it's shown up yet. So eh. It takes a while, I suppose. Let it take an extra day or two to clear, no worries; I've already gotten confirmation from the school that it's on its way, so now I just have to wait. Even if it does take the full "five business days to process," I will survive just fine and it will completely clear by the weekend. I can't remember how long it took in the spring, or even last year at this time, and I survived then with just as little money to spare as I have now. I'll "make do," as they say.
Still, with any waiting involving money (especially financial aid) there is always that paranoia that something will go wrong or get fucked up along the way, because I'm neurotic like that. Poor + neurotic = no fun in Brandon-land. Oh, how many days have I spent this summer being poor and neurotic? Lots of them. Most of them, actually. I'm pretty sure if there was a gland that produced stress and neuroses, I've burned it out over the course of this summer with all of the shit I've been through -- most of it, of course, that I've not written about here for many, many different reasons.
[UPDATE] Said money is now pending in my account and should clear in a matter of hours.
In other news? Last night, my webcam/microphone crapped out on me. As in, completely. I got a strange message saying the driver for it was corrupted, and that Linux was searching for a suitable driver for it -- which, of course, makes no sense because it is a USB, plug-and-play device. I've gone to the Logitech (the manufacturer) website and attempted to find a replacement which will be compatible with Linux, and I thought I did. However, it still screwed up and wouldn't work, so now I have to dive through the bowels of Linux support messageboards and the like to see if there's a way to get it working again. It just sucks because I bought the camera for $30 about two months ago (read: back when I had money) and it's really nice, 780p HD output, etc. Having a camera and microphone is sort of essential for programs such as Skype...which ends up crashing on me almost every time I use it anyhow, so that doesn't help much either.
[UPDATE] I downloaded updates to Linux last night which ended up somehow disabling the software that said camera works with. I found a command-line workaround and it is now up and running again. After about two hours of searching for info, of course. Ugh. Regardless, at least it works now. For the moment.
I've probably mentioned our orientation schedule for fall before, but I'm not sure. All of us GTAs (both old and new) have been given tentative schedules for our classes we'll teach. I say tentative because our office administrator said she'd have to go back in and switch a few things around. My classes, however, didn't change days/times/places, though, simply because those things are "set" for my classes long before anyone else's schedules are set because I teach the only sections of the Science/Engineering English 102. Usually, I know when and where my classes are going to be far in advance of anyone else in the department save for a few of the full professors and other faculty members, and those of us who teach online courses. Anyway, because I'm one of the returning GTAs, we have a simple three-hour orientation sort of meeting on Thursday morning, in the Writing Center, from 9AM to noon.
As an aside, this will be the first day I have to get up reeeeeeally early again, and will start a chain of such mornings, interrupted only by weekends, from then until mid-December. In preparation, I have tried as much as possible to force my body into a "sleep at night, be awake during the day like a normal person" sleeping pattern again, and for the most part it's worked. I've been going to bed between 11:30 and 1 on most nights, and have been getting up between 9 and 11 most mornings. While this is about double the amount of sleep I'll be getting every night throughout most of the semester, it is at least workable and a step in the right direction, I think. However, I sense much coffee in my future over the course of the next three and a half months. Much coffee. Oh yes.
The purpose of the three-hour morning orientation for those of us who are returning isn't exactly clear, to be honest with you. Especially for those of us who are third-year GTAs -- we know the ropes already, we know what to do and what not to do, and we're good. More than anything else, I'm guessing it will be a meet-and-greet sort of scenario, something that (as most of you know) I'm rather bad at. As I recall from my previous orientations, it involves a short address/speech from the chair of the department and the directors of the various programs (the MA and the creative writing programs, really), and a let's-go-around-the-room-and-introduce-ourselves session, and then we're paired up with the new recruits and told to show them around campus -- something I've never participated in, mainly because A) I don't know where anything on campus is aside from the student union and, like, the buildings I've taught in, and B) because the new grad students aren't toddlers; they can read a map and wander the campus by themselves without supervision. No offense to any of those "new recruits" who may eventually read this, but I have no desire to pal around with people I don't even know, putting myself in awkward social situations that I can't stand and don't function well in. Let those in my class and the second-year class who are more social (and who actually live in Wichita) do that; let those people show the newbies around and have fun with them. I'll be going back home to my cats and my man cave for three more days before I'm forced to be on campus for long hours every day until mid-December.
Tomorrow will be spent taking care of the stuff that I can now actually take care of since my money will be in my possession, including paying the bills I haven't dealt with yet and making my big grocery shopping trip, and then tomorrow night I must go to bed really early (read: like, 10PM or so) in order to be able to get up early for Thursday morning's orientation meeting. Thursday and Friday nights will both be spent watching football, as there's games on that I can actually watch on the networks (Fox and CBS, respectively), and the weekend -- my last weekend of true freedom -- will be spent taking care of everything else I need to do around the house or in regards to expenses and the like before school starts on Monday. Again, I now have less than a week of relative freedom remaining before the grand, long slog of fall semester rears its ugly head and dominates my life and all of my free time for the foreseeable future. I'm not necessarily looking forward to that, but I'm also not not looking forward to it either. It will be, on some level, good to have a sort of routine again. And, after spending the past three months listless, mostly unhappy, and dreadfully poor, maybe it'll improve my mood somewhat.
