Seriously, is anyone still reading this thing? Email me and let me know--it'd be nice to know if I have any kind of audience.

As of this Saturday, I'll officially have been out of my old job and in school for a full year. It's been a weird time. The poverty and workload have been really stressful, but overall I feel like I've been accomplishing something, unlike when I was working for the government. (Which, technically, I guess I have--I've been accumulating credit hours towards my degree and learning stuff.)

I got my student loan check a couple of days ago, and I've been going through a frenzy of school-related money-spending, the most notable of which is the two CLEP tests from yesterday and today. I passed yesterday's, and if I pass today's, I'll be done with my core general degree requirements after a whopping fourteen years. Shudder. God, I'm old.

I don't mean to brag--actually, that's not true at all--but yesterday's test was the Natural Sciences general subject exam. The top score is 80, the passing score is 50, and the time limit is 90 minutes. Going in cold, with no preparation and slightly hung over, I got a score of 71...in 30 minutes.

For $80 and a half-hour of my time, I got six hours of college credit that would otherwise take sixteen weeks (if I took two classes at once) and upwards of $700. Not a bad deal at all. I'll be doing the same this afternoon with the Social Sciences and History test. It'll be kind of overkill if I pass it--I only need two hours, and this test is worth six like the other--but it's the easiest of the social science tests. (It seems a little odd that the easiest test is worth more than the harder ones, but who am I to argue?)

I've got my spring schedule nailed down finally. I've got my last two classes in my minor, a major core requirement, and a major elective. The last one is a little scary--it's a playwriting class that has you turn out a full play by the end of it. It's intimidating as hell, but I love the instructor, so I figured I'd give it a shot. The major core class is Introduction to Stagecraft. Ugh. I wanted to take Stage Directing, but apparently stagecraft is a prerequisite. Go figure. At least it's a 2000-level course, so it should be a little easier than the four 3000-level courses I took last semester. That was kind of a workout.

After this semester, I'll have somewhere between 16 and 18 credit hours in my major to complete (five or six classes, that is), and then I'm done. I'll have a bachelor's degree for the first time in my life. Odd, scary, and yet cool.