Other than having trouble falling asleep May 13 after work (cause: momentary obsession with comparing Missouri in the After the End mod for Crusader Kings 2 to Missouri as it actually exists resulting in staying up until 4:40 AM, then not falling asleep until like 7:30 AM) I’ve had a decent few days. My mom came down to help my brother move out of his dorm room, and since she didn’t want to make the approximately 5 hour drive twice in one day she came down the 14th (the day after her birthday). My brother was an RA for the last month or so of the semester, so he was busy with checking people out of the dorms. The night of the 14th we all went out for dinner. The next morning she and I went on a walk, got coffee and gas at the gas station near my apartment, and went to campus to fill up her car with my brother’s stuff. After a couple hours of helping him move furniture and carrying stuff out to her car, Mom and I went out for lunch, she did some shopping, and she bought me a few groceries before she left about 4 PM. The morning of the 16th, my brother dropped by before he left about 10 AM, and I spent most of the day not doing anything significant. After my roommate got back from work shortly after 3, we headed across town to a small local convention. We got there about 4 PM, and had been there only a few minutes when I felt my phone vibrate. I looked and saw I had a new voice mail and a missed call from work, so I checked my voice mail and learned that I was apparently scheduled to work 4-9 PM on the 16th. The last time I checked my schedule (May 11), I wasn’t scheduled to work again before 4 PM on May 17.

Long story short, I wound up being an hour late, and we weren’t very busy for the 4 hours I was there. I’m hoping it doesn’t have any dire effects, but it’s weird that my schedule changed, probably on one of the days I had off, and my manager didn’t call me to ask if I could work on a day I was scheduled to have off, like she usually does. Yes, perhaps I should have checked my schedule more recently than Monday, but why would I do that if I have no reason to be there, considering I usually avoid my place of employment unless I have to be there (for example, to work a scheduled shift)? I can handle changes to my work schedule, particularly after a few days off, but I usually prefer to have more than -5 minutes warning, and it would have been nice before I was on the opposite side of town.

Anyway, in happier news I checked my grades and the Business Applications professor commented that I had “great answers” on my final, so that’s good (even if I felt like I wasn’t writing anything particularly original), and I had 100% on that. As of today, I have about 3 weeks until my summer class starts, and final grades for the semester will be available Tuesday. With an A, my GPA should improve (and continue to do so once I retake the Writing class this summer).

(Below the cut: early morning storms, and some pertinent thoughts on college and graduation)

(At this point, I had to take a break because I was hearing unfamiliar sirens, which didn’t sound like the emergency vehicle sirens I can usually hear. After checking the weather, I noticed a tornado warning was in effect, and some minutes later, after I started actually hearing rain and thunder, I spent five to ten minutes in my bathroom, per tornado safety recommendations about avoiding windows and being in an interior windowless room of a sturdy building)

Lately, since it’s the season, I’ve been seeing lots of pictures on Facebook of people wearing caps and gowns and graduating. Since I’m 24, and most of my Facebook friends are somewhere between 28 and 20 (give or take a few years), most of these are either people my age (which is to say, people who started college in the autumn of 2009) graduating from graduate school (or, in the case of my high school class’s valedictorian, law school) or slightly younger people graduating from college with their bachelor’s degree.

In the past, not graduating yet has bothered me more. It was particularly bad in 2013, when most of my friends from my freshman year of college all graduated. This year, whether it’s because I know I’m only halfway to a degree or because I couldn’t think of anyone I knew particularly well that was graduating, it hasn’t really bothered me at all. Somehow the idea of graduating seems weird, but that may be because, at my current pace, I’m still a few years away from graduating (hooray for being a half-time student!), and while I’ve selected a path, I’m still taking, for all intents and purposes, gen eds. I think there are a few more classes I have to take before I can apply to the college of business and actually become a proper IT services major, but if I remember correctly that’s a second economics class, 2 accounting classes, this summer’s writing class, and a business law class. Then there will be however many hours of upper level courses that actually apply to my major, and if I’m lucky I might graduate from college before my younger sister graduates from high school, which gives me until December 2017 (or, if I wanted to graduate around the same time she does, May 2018). At this point, my main goal is to graduate from college before she does – my brother seems to have an idea of what he wants to do, and he should be graduating in about 3 years. If she’s particularly hard-working/lucky, she might graduate by 2022, but I’m not sure I anticipate that, since my brother seems to be the diligent student of the family.

Anyway, I suppose I should be winding down. I had intended to do laundry before I had to work again, but since that didn’t happen I decided to wash my work clothes tonight, before I work for three days straight. Something about doing laundry early in the morning almost reminds me of my freshman year of college, though I’m not sure I ever did laundry at 3 AM, I’m not sitting on an uncomfortable floor in a dorm, and when I’m done I don’t have to walk across the building to get to my room (among other differences, haha). I suppose I could have broken this into multiple entries, but where’s the fun in that? It’s not as if I have anything to do today anyway – one of my D&D games starts at 1 PM, and then I work 4 PM to midnight.