Thursday Randoms

I want to share some random things today, jumping from topic to topic, sharing little bits and pieces that I keep meaning to share, but that never seem to qualify for a whole post to be devoted to them.

It's amazing to me how challenging it has been to go back to school after reading break.  I had felt like I was settling in to the rhythms of school prior to reading break, but a week where I slept in and didn't spend hours and hours every day with people seems to have set the settling in process back further than I anticipated.  It hasn't been this hard to get out of bed, and I haven't been this tired since the first week or two of the semester.  Here's hoping that my level of adjustment jumps back up quickly!

This morning I'm off to a junior high school, to do school immunizations.  If all goes well, by the end of the day I'll have given at least a couple of kids their immunizations.  It still seems a little bit crazy at times that this nursing thing is actually happening, and perhaps even more crazy that the first real patients we'll ever have, we're inflicting pain on, but I'm pumped for this!  (Well, not for the inflicting pain part, but definitely for the first client encounter part!)  I wasn't feeling nervous until yesterday when our instructor gathered the group of us going with him and told us that a few people had sort of freaked out a bit, and we needed to have a "safe word" that we could say to let him know we needed him to step in, or for him to let us know if there was trouble and he needed to take over.  Those comments made me just a little bit nervous, but I'm still feeling like I'm more than capable of this, and I'm excited for it.

This has been another tough week in the finances department.  I'm not sure if I mentioned it here, but the accountant who did my taxes last year made a major error that ended up sticking me with a very large bill.  I got another bill in the mail yesterday, informing me that I owe a different government agency still more money, since I received cheques that I shouldn't have (a subsidy cheque) based on the correct income that the account failed to report.  I also found out yesterday that there continue to be snags with my student loan funding, and that I may not receive any more funding, much less the nearly ten thousand dollars I thought were coming.  Not the best news ever to get on the day that a brand new laptop I ordered arrived in the mail.

And, speaking of the laptop, while my finances are a bit of a mess, I think I would have had to order it anyway.  Turns out that the trusty MacBook that I've had for seven or eight years, the one that has been slowly inching towards death for a couple years now, was picking up its pace on the trip to death's door. I couldn't take the risk that the MacBook would freeze (its new favorite activity) in the middle of writing an in class paper, or any sort of school project, really.  So, I ordered a new 13" MacBook Pro, and it arrived yesterday.  It's shiny and beautiful, and I can't wait to make the full transition to using it.

Also in random news, I'm growing out my bangs.  I hate growing out my bangs, and clearly forgot how frustrating the process is when I decided back in August that I needed to have bangs for the first time in a decade.  Being back in school, and broke, bangs and the constant styling and trimming were too high maintenance for me, and so I'm growing them out.  They're in the horribly awkward stage - the too long to style as bangs, but too short to effectively put back without a bunch of work stage.  Let's just say that my collection of barrettes, headbands, bobby pins and sundry hair accessories has grown in size over the last few months.

And that, I believe concludes this set of Thursday randoms.  Do you have any random questions for me? Leave them in the comments, and I'll answer them either there or in a post if there are enough of them.

Happy Thursday, y'all!