Trying to slow down

Hello blog world. It has been a long time since I have posted and I am sure that you all greatly missed reading about what is going on in my life. I have been extremely busy the past few weeks, so I am going to try to catch you up on what has been going on in my world. Also, I am going to "try" to talk a little more about my family and what is going on with them moving forward. I can't make any promises, but I am going to try. My wife recently learned that I have a blog and was a little hurt to find out that I wasn't talking about her all the time. I guess I can see her point. I talk about work and school most of the time, so it might be nice for you to hear about other parts of my life.

So, to start us off, lets talk about school. I know what I just said in the paragraph above, but I am still going to write about what I started this blog to be about. I am rapidly closing in on the end of the class I am in currently. When I say rapidly closing in, I have sixteen days left in this class. I have a lot of work to do to make it and get a decent grade in the class. I am currently caught up with all of my assignments, but the two biggest assignments are still coming up and are due in 10 days. I guess the last six days are more of a vacation for me as all of my assignments will be finished by then.

When I finish this class, I will be 9 hours away from my comprehensive exam and dissertation. That is 3 classes. It looks like it will turn into 2 defined classes and an independent study, which will be great for me. It is kind of scary to think about the end coming so soon.

On top of being busy with school, I have been very busy with work the past couple of weeks. I lead the quality assurance team on my contract, which comes with a lot of work on its own. I am responsible for creating any and all of the templates used by our analyst and programmer team, and also used by the team for our other MIC contract. I also am responsible for driving the quality process to ensure that our clients only get the highest quality deliverables from us. This is a time consuming process, especially at the end of the month. To compound this, in September we scheduled a new staff training in our Baltimore office for the last week of the month. So, as the lead for the QA team, I got to travel to Baltimore and present several training sessions.

After we planned our training, I found out that I would also be giving a presentation to our client. So, I had to travel down a day earlier to give that presentation and spend all day in meetings there. I think the hardest part of all of that, was flying on Sunday afternoon and then getting up earlier than I ever do for three days. Monday morning I had to get up at 6:30. That doesn't sound like that early, but my body thought it was 5:30. To make matters worse, I never get up before 7:30 on a regular day. And to put the icing on the cake, since I normally stay up until 1:00 every night, I could go to sleep that Sunday night. In the end, the presentation and training all went well and I was very happy about that. I ended up getting home around 10:00 Wednesday night. Thursday rolled around and I was in the office from 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 p.m. It was the last day of the month and we had to get work done. Friday I got a little of a break and left early, at 3:00, but that was to plan for working from home Friday night. From the Saturday to Friday, I worked right around 60 hours. Then Friday night, I started working on updating on of our web-based tools. I happen to be the administrator for this tool on both of our contracts and our company decided we needed to make some changes. I went to bed at 4:30 Saturday morning. I really wanted to sleep all day on Saturday, but no such luck. I had important football to watch. Can we say Boomer Sooner?

This week has been a lot less stressful. I have still been very busy but at least things are trying to slow down.