Full Swing

Obviously, I've fallen behind my goal of weekly posts. All I can say is that I've been busy. School work is steaming ahead at full speed, and work has just been crazy.

In the past weeks, I've taken and passed my differential equations midterm, and had numerous homework assignments in all of my classes. I just finished a project for differential equations, and wrote it within Google Docs. I've been using Docs for a while to take notes and write small spreadsheets, but recent feature additions allowed me to write a report worthy of printing and turning in. You can check it out here. Since this was for a math class, being able to insert an equation with LaTeX syntax and having it print nicely was invaluable. And I really love that I can access these documents from any computer, and don't have to carry it around on a USB drive or manually synchronize with an internet file system every time I make a change. I still hesitate to put everything in the clouds, but it worked well for this assignment.

Driving the bus for the past couple of weeks has just been a bear. They were already just getting by with getting enough people to fill all of the runs (without violating DOT regs or putting people in overtime, etc). Then, the wife of one of the staff drivers had a baby, and he's taking paternity leave. (Congratulations, by the way!) I fully support him in taking leave, because it's an important time for him to be at home. But it also leaves the managers scrambling to get enough hours out of the rest of the drivers to cover runs.

Long story short, I've been working a lot more than I like. Last week I worked every day with starting runs at 7am, got off just in time to get to class, studied for an hour or two, then hopped back on the bus and took it back to base at 9pm. Those kind of hours make for very long days. With commute time, I was home often enough to sleep. I was getting pretty burnt out, and Ashley was concerned. This week has been a bit better, mostly because I'm getting better at saying "no" to the dispatcher.

This past weekend was also my first drill since the deployment, back with my original unit. It was great to see many faces I recognized, both from other people who went to Iraq with me, and also people who stayed at the unit that I hadn't seen in over a year. This drill reminded me that I need to get my PT back in order. I've been working on it a bit, but not nearly enough.

How am I supposed to fit all of this in? I'd have plenty of time if I left the buses, but then there's the problem of having enough money to eat...