We're not meant to be alone.

We survived Monday! Whoohoo, go us!

Work was purely chaotic. We had an immense call volume, and I was getting emails every few minutes asking me to do something else. I don't know if they have forgotten that I haven't gotten the new job and new pay yet, but goddamn, I felt like I was going in 10 directions at once. I got it all done, but it was a lot. I need someone to tell me which I should prioritize, because I feel like I'm letting my team down by not helping on the phones as much (Though I took 33 calls), but I've got to get these patients in, too. I just need a little clarification.

Today will probably be psycho too, but we'll see. Usually Monday and Tuesday are the worst, and then it dwindles a little through the week, though it's never light. I may clarify with Amanda what my primary focus should be.

Tomorrow is payday and that'll be nice. I have bills to pay this week. There's rent and phone and various little things that come at the beginning of the month. So I'll take care of that on Wednesday, when I get paid.

I purchased Office 365 in preparation for college yesterday and downloaded it. I like googledocs, and I'll still probably use it for most of my stuff, but I learned on Word, so I have a fondness. My term starts on 4/9, so I've got a little time to prepare. Between now and then, I'm going to start working on my math skills. Youtube is a helpful resource that I didn't have in high school as is Khan University. I think I'll be okay? I don't ever expect to be a math savant. I don't expect to be able to figure out the secret language of numbers, but if I can manipulate them and solve for X that's all that matters. I just need a C in the class.

I'm having a little pie in the sky about finishing my bachelors and maybe considering a master's degree. Not saying I can't. Hopkins would pay for it, and I feel like I'm smart enough to do it. I just don't know that I need it. I guess we'll see how much I like academia.

I need to curate a playlist of instrumental music that I can have on while studying. I've already found a bunch of orchestral covers of Ghost songs, which sound like a strong start. After all, I can trace a line from their concerts to my current list of upcoming things. Getting to go to the concert (Ritual) was really empowering.

It's funny, for a band who's music is supposedly Satanic, their music is very hopeful. There's a song of theirs called The Future is a Foreign Land that is about the future being better. And even songs like He Is which is a song about Satan, is at it's core about community and belonging. And Peacefield is possibly one of the most hopeful songs I know. It's a "yes, right now things suck, but hold out, it'll get better." And right now, we all need that.

When I'm stressed out, I put on my earphones and have some emotional support Ghost and Hazbin Hotel and it relaxes me and makes me feel better, and I can't really ask for more than that.

Tomorrow, it's supposed to be 50 degrees, so I'm hoping that I won't have to clean off my car when I go out again. I'm going to have to request a refill on my clindamycin. It's working, but slowly. Each day, it's a bit better, and the swelling goes down a bit, but it's not quite there yet. The yeast infection is going to be epic (It already is.)

Next week, my sister is going up to NYC for work for the whole week. This means that I'll be sleeping with the dog for the week, which is sad. I love my puppers, but I miss snuggling Jess. On the other hand, that's a bunch of nights where we can watch TV in the evenings and have quality time during the day. It also probably means we're not going to be able to get away on the weekend of the 7th, but we'll figure out another time. Maybe the weekend of the 28th. We don't seem to have any games planned then.

This is apparently going to be a thing that happens now and then, so I might as well get used to it. It's really not a big deal, just means that I'm going to be sleep deprived for a couple of days until I get used to her bed and a dog kicking me.

So I might as well enjoy this week in my own bed. I don't spend enough time there. Maybe we can watch some more of The Pitt in it. I want to watch more of that.

I might as well work on The Pitt and Heated Rivalry, since there's not a whole lot of movies coming out in the near future that I'm wildly interested in. I might do Project Hail Mary and the rerelease of the Mummy, but the first one I'm really excited for is Mortal Kombat on May 8th.

Of course, we'll be in Vancouver when that releases. I'm seriously considering going to an evening showing the night before we board the ship. We'll see how tired I am from the day of sightseeing. Knowing us, we'll do that til about 3, and then go back to the hotel to rest. So we might be good for a movie. Stupid action movies are better with a first weekend crowd.

I had an Advocate magazine add pop up about the least expensive cities with good gay enclaves. One of them was Old Chinatown in Portland, which seemed really cool. Maybe in a few years, when the BIL's mother has passed, we'd consider moving. And the Pacific Northwest has always seemed like a good place to go. They have strong protections for LGBTQ+ people and the weather is nice. I also thought about Seattle, but good lord, it's so expensive.

Okay, time for me to go forth and get myself together. Everyone have a stupendous Tuesday!

And we're back to Monday. It's snowy out, but thankfully we seemed to miss most of the snowpocalypse. It looks like maybe 3" if I'm being generous. It'll keep the kids out of school, but not much else. I'm really happy that it's not going to fuck up our routine for days, but that tiny part of me that's still a 5 year old is like "That's not real snow." Mostly, I'm happy that the dog won't be upset by it. He won't like the bit that there is, but he'll probably still do his business.

I forgot to mention that on Saturday night, we watched the first episode of The Pitt. I keep getting clips from it on TikTok, so I finally decided to take the plunge. One show, and I'm already hooked. Really excellent. I think that'll be a new thing for us, settling in and watching an episode now and then. I know season 2 just came out, so that'll give us plenty of episodes to watch.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I got up relatively late and then relaxed until gametime. We did get breakfast/brunch sushi, which was very good, or so I'm told. The antibiotics are messing with my tastes, so sometimes things just don't taste right. So really, anything I say about food can be taken with a grain of salt for the moment. It tasted okay, just not quite what I was expecting. We found a place that does not fuck around with the tobiko. When you ask for fish eggs on your California roll they put great heaping spoonfuls. It was glorious. Despite not being quite right, I'll probably have some of the leftover rolls for breakfast.

Then, it was onto game, which was super fun. My character got to showcase her temper a bit, punching a classmate for being a racist twat. It didn't matter that said character had also tried to trip my character. They're long standing rivals, and that's a matter of course. But get racist with her tiefling and firbolg friends, and she's going to forget that she has magic and throw hands.

It lost our team 10 class points, but fortunately, the racist's friend came up and shoved my character, who oversold that shit like Shawn Michaels against Hulk Hogan, so they lost points too.

It probably escalated things with our rivals, but sometimes, you just gotta punch someone.

After that, I piddled around for a while before I realized that the beef I took out for dinner was not anywhere near defrosted, so I ordered pasta. It was very good, and the stuffed shells tasted perfectly correct.

After dinner, as I was perusing the internet, I found an add for an online college. I've been thinking lately that this promotion I'm about to get will probably be my last, because I don't have a college degree, and considering going back to school. The thing that made me hesitate is the money. But we have some money now, and I have tuition reimbursement, so I could 100% do it.

I just don't know if I can. I'm not strong in math--I may need remedial classes to get me ready for algebra, but we'll see.

Anyway, I looked at this college, wondered if it was too good to be true and dug further. Turns out they're fully accredited, and legit. Probably not the most prestigious, but I don't have the time for prestigious, I just need a degree. So, I signed up.

It's called University of the People, and it's a tuitionless college. You pay an application fee, and you pay for your assessments at the end of the classes. The complete BA will cost me $6600. The degree transfers, and should I want to, my last semester, I could go to Edinburgh or Canada to study. (I won't, but it's cool.) So, come Summer, I'll be a part time student. I'm nervous, but excited. It's kinda weird to think that in a few short months, I'll be writing papers and doing tests. I'm probably going to start with one class, just to get my feet wet. and then from there if I feel like I can take more, I will. It might take me til 60 to get my degree, but I was planning to work til I'm at least 65, maybe later. We'll see.

There's one dude online who has a serious hate boner for the college, but PBS and other outlets have covered it and acknowleged that it's a real college with real degrees. I'll be sharing classrooms with people from around the world, including a 10% refugee enrollment, and some women studying at home secretly under the Taliban's restrictions about higher education for women. Most people seem very happy about their schooling, though they agree that it's what you make of it. Online can be tough, so I'm' going to need to be at the top of my game.

Who knows, maybe I'll like it so much that I'll go for my masters. We'll see. I'd probably switch my masters to Health Administration. I don't really want to be in charge of anything clinical, I want to be in charge of people. But the nice thing is that I do have tuition reimbursement if I'm doing something that will benefit my career with Hopkins, so in the end, the only thing that I'll pay is the application fee (and of course if I fail a course, I'm going to be paying for the test I failed.).

I'm a little confused, since my materials say the semester starts in April, but my orientation is in May/June. So we'll see how that works. If classes start in April, I'll be doing some work on the cruise, but that's okay. We have a good internet package, and I get up early anyway. I'll sit with my computer on the balcony and do my reading and writing.

Today, work will be bugfuck, as people will be calling to reschedule appts, even though there's very little snow. We're opening at 8am for the sites, so that's a handful of people we're reschedule (since we start some tests at 6am.) And of course, a ton of "are you open" calls. People, we're Johns Hopkins. We don't close shy of blizzards.

Hopefully, there's some movement on the job application this week. Good lord, they're slow.

Okay, on that note, time for me to go forth and get myself ready for the day. Everyone have a wonderful Monday!