I'm Really Going to Miss You All

After my first weekend of "real" class, I've made a discovery. My life has just completely changed. I have just finished blocking out on my calendar 5 hours per day, 7 days per week, for the next year, to work on my classwork. I have also blocked out 12 hours per day, 2 days per week, for the next year, to provide enough income to feed us and pay our bills (as you can guess, we have very few bills, and are learning to eat on a more frugal budget!) With a nutty schedule like this, yes, I'm really going to miss you all this year. But for today, I'm feeling "free" for a few minutes, although my mind is REELING as it tries to process all the new data it has been presented with. We got a new team member this weekend who seems to be a really nice addition to our group. He lives, works, and attends class with us (via electronic classroom technology) in Portugal. The way it works is this...while we are in class, there are two video cameras recording everything going on in the room. One camera is located at the back of the room and is focused on the instructor--quite cool as it tracks his or her movements around the room via a device worn around their necks. The other camera is located at the front of the room and kicks into play whenever one of us presses a button located in front of us. The button actuates our local microphones so that our questions or comments are broadcast for the remote students to hear, but they also cause the camera at the front of the room to lock in on the person speaking, so that students located wherever they are in the world can see us as well. Because the remote students do not have access to this kind of room, their comments are submitted via a "chat" feature that is running at the same time the classroom activities are running. This is also quite cool in that I can watch, and participate in, this running conversation on my computer screen while I am sitting in class and listening to the instructor. The entire setup is fabulous and appeals to my crazy sense of participation to be technically allowed to, as well as personally inclined to, participate in several concurrent conversations/activities. Yup, it's a crazy setup but instead of causing my attention to be diverted, it actually seems to enhance the entire learning experience because everything going on is so detailed, related, and engaging. It's like I'm learning at an incredibly high rate of speed. The problem is all in the aftermath. Because things come our way at such a velocity and level of intensity, after it is over (like today), my brain goes into a kind of neutral gear. I read somewhere once a theory that when we remember things that happened long ago, we are not actually remembering the event, but rather remembering the memories of it. In other words, the event is long wiped from our memories, but the fact that we've thought about it again, retold the story of it to others, looked at photos and videos of it, etc. make us think we remember the actual event. (This goes a long way in explaining why two people in attendance at the same event can remember it in extremely different ways.) Anyway, this is the way that learning works for me. If I walk away from the weekend and only think of it occasionally, it becomes less and less vivid for me. But if I review my notes, review the videos (oh yeah, another cool thing is that the entire class sessions are recorded and placed online for us to review over and over at our leisure!), and work at keeping the information in my brain, I have a much better chance of retaining more and more of it. Whew! What a crazy "brain fart" this posting has been! Sorry...I guess my brain is in really high gear still, although my body is just about dead to the world today. I might surprise us all and still find time to do a brain dump here on occasion and share what's going on in my life, but I also might ignore this blog when my lifestyle forces it. But I want you all to know that I think of you often--my friends, family, coworkers, and even a handful of interested acquaintances. Leo teases me sometimes and asks if I'm going to forget him, you guys, and this quiet place in the country when my head gets all full of ideas and I'm out there trying to do something about them. My answer is, absolutely not. This is my life, my home, my base, my foundation, and my grounding. While the other activities satisfy my needs for intellectual stimulation and to engage myself in something exciting and demanding, my life here with him (which includes my interactions with all of you) satisfy the more basic needs to be safe, to be comfortable, and to be loved.

Time to Go Home

Our team has been finalized, and our two projects [for the semester] selected, and now it's time for me to go home and for the real work to begin. I'm pooped! Over the next two weeks my main goal is to keep my head above the water, and my a__ away from the alligators. A quick review of my next few weeks includes a TON of work, for work, which I can't list here (proprietary concerns, you understand). For the University of Houston (UH) I have two graphics projects, a quiz, and an exam; twelve current technologies to read up on and be prepared to be tested on (four are randomly chosen, and our test consists of four blank pages which we fill with as much information as we can about them); and a 60-page research project, and verbal presentation, on "The Use of Configuration Management Theories to Improve a Document Management Program". And for the University of Texas (UT) I have to read 6 chapters, research two technologies, and complete a stack of homework items. You know, I think I'm ready for a break. Too bad my next break appears to be in May of 2008!

Another Long Day

Today was active, entertaining, and educational, but coming at the end of a week of dawn-to-dark activity, it also made for a long day. Our topic today was the rather "soft" subject of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). In case you are wondering, I happen to be an INTJ (Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judging). While a good part of the day was spent learning to understand our own indicators and how those reveal themselves in our day-to-day decision-making activities, a good portion was also spent trying to understand those not like ourselves, and what motivates them. The final point of the day was that there are no "right" or "wrong" types, just different ones; if we make ourselves aware of that fact and attempt to empathize with others, we can learn to value our differences and make good use of them while striving for excellence in our teamwork. It was all interesting and our instructor was excellent, but I'm REALLY worn out, and our team still has not settled on a first choice technology. So, I hope you'll excuse me as I get back to my research. I have had the most incredibly interesting week, but I am really ready to go home tomorrow.

My Reading List

I didn't get much sleep last night as I was researching a list of about 40 technologies that our team is to pick from when determining which one we want to follow through on. We are given a very short synopsis of what the invention is, what it is supposed to do, who it's target audiences might be, and must pick our semester-long project based on that information. So, we all hit the computers late last night to try and gather more information, as well as work through some justifications and challenges for selecting our technology. What a night...my mind is reeling. I have 12 minutes left in a download I'm doing, so I thought I would post my summer reading list for your enjoyment (and my reference, when I'm out of town.)

• Adams, A Good Hard Kick in the Ass
• Agtmael, The Emerging Markets Century
• Aubuchon, The Anatomy of Persuasion
• Bok, Universities in the Marketplace
• Chesbrough Open Business Models
• Christensen, The Innovator's Solution
• Friedman, The World is Flat
• Jacobs, Systems of Survival
• Jolly, Commercializing New Technologies
• Mackie, Marketing Technological Innovations
• Marshall et al., Accounting: What the Numbers Mean
• Moore, Crossing the Chasm
• Ross et. al., Fundamentals of Corporate Finance
• Wilson & Gibson, Technology Transfer

Well, my download should be done any minute now, so I guess it's time to pack up and head to class. It's definitely going to be a long day.

What a Great Team

What I feared would happen, did happen, but it turned out to be a really good thing. Go figure. When I got back after lunch, the groups that has established themselves began to assemble at different tables. There were several other people that were not already grouped up, but the funny thing is, NONE of them are the ones that I "feared" getting grouped with, but instead, are several of the ones I had on my "wish list". I'm not going to put names here, but rather a bit of a description. There are three women and two men on our team. One woman is our "remote" user and will be working online, but she is extremely interesting, accomplished, and has great ideas. She has a strong knowledge base about India, including the language, as this is her home country although she now lives and works here in the U.S. She also has ideas that run all the way out to the edge of the box and tries to go even further. She is a great asset on the team. [P.S. If you look back a couple of messages ago, you'll find mention of a woman I met when I first arrived. Well...this is her!] The other woman is young, and the quietest of the Taiwanese group that I've been "hanging out" with. However, she has a very strong incentive for being here, and has moved here just to attend the program this year. Although she doesn't speak up as much as we think she will later, when she does, she is very intelligent and has interesting ideas to share. One of the men is very young, out of undergraduate school only a couple of years. He is quite lively, and has a very strong computer skill set. It's funny that we have teamed up on conversation before, and have ended up together on this team, as we are at extremes in a lot of ways (old/young, female/male, tame/wild) but still find a huge amount of common ground. The other man is quite interesting, and is from Houston (lives, works, runs a business there). He was one that I selected on day one as someone I didn't think I could work well with, but I swung to the other extreme after we worked on a small activity together. He is extremely intelligent, well read, has a wide range of interests, and is very plain-spoken (forthright!), but has some incredible insights and is willing to share them, open-mindedly, with the group. So...that's us...we have a TEAM and I like it! We have tons of homework to accomplish, so I'll be up half the night, but I am so looking forward to this semester and finding out what kinds of things we are able to accomplish together. Whoo Hoo...I have a TEAM, and it's a GOOD one!

My First Bad Day

Well, I knew it would come...my first bad day...I just didn't know it would be this early in the semester. We've had time now to get to know each other a little bit, on a surface level anyway. So it's the time for doing all of that "sizing up" that I talked about earlier--it's time to get ready for the event we'll call "The Picking of the Teams". We all wrote down a bit about ourselves on the boards around the room, and then began the process of trying to "group up" based on our likes/dislikes, skills/weaknesses, and more. Although no one in the entire class has been rude to me, actually, no one as been anything other than nice to me, absolutely no one approached me to suggest forming any kind of teaming alliance. In other words, when all the kids were picked for teams, here I stand on the sidelines, and the teams are all full. So, I'm back in my hotel room, crying a bit over my lunch break, and wondering how much I would miss the $1,000 deposit if I go home right now. Anyway, no official teams have been established, but the process is scheduled to begin right after lunch. I don't know what the real deterrents are, and I still have another half hour to be depressed about what they could be (my bluecollar career, my old age, my smart mouth, my size and appearance, my country girl accent, who knows?) Hopefully you'll hear from me again this afternoon and all will be well. Again, I have a tremendous group of friends, family, and even a handful of what amounts to "interested" parties pulling for me, and I want you all to know I appreciate it so much! So, it's for all of you that I'm going to put on my gameface and jump right back in the mix!

Good Morning, Crazy World

I know I promised an update when I got back yesterday, but after reading my email and doing a little work, I just collapsed. And it wasn't from exhaustion, as we had been sitting in classroom settings all day, but from mental exhaustion. [I'm about to wear myself out trying to strategize on teams and projects, on working solutions for surviving the next month of being a full-time student in two different programs AND trying to earn a living, and more.] I've done TONS of prep work now, and have so much more to go. I have my collection of textbooks (14 of them for just this semester!) to begin on, and a HUGE list of things to do before I come back in two weeks. So, I'm feeling unusually frazzled at the moment, am in a high state of anxiety, and am off-the-chart on the excitement scale. I have to make a run to the truck now for some paper (I've got an office set up in my hotel room and my printer is hungry) and a hole punch, then have to be in class and ready to go at 8:30, so I'm going to sign-off now. Today is a big day, and I hope I'll have more to report when I get out. Thanks for thinking of me! P.S. In case you don't know it, you guys can send messages to my blog almost as easily as I can. Just click on the link at the end of whichever message you want to comment on that says "Comments". (Trust me...it's safe.) You can type in a quick comment to me there. It may ask you to do something small in order to verify that you are not a spammer, but again, I promise that it is a safe thing to do. The only other thing to be aware of is that everyone who sees the blog will see the comment as well. But it is this business of allowing other people to post messages here that makes it a blog and not just a website, so feel free to say hey!

Crazy Morning

This morning was a bit of a surprise to me as all we focued on was getting to know one another. It was a bit like attending a 4-hour ice breaker session at the beginning of an interactive conference. Still, there's no way I can downplay the usefulness of this activity as we are expected to arrange ourselves into teams by Sunday, so we really need to find the points of commonality, complement, and even contention before Sunday arrives. I've stopped off at my room for a moment before heading down to lunch. After that, we board a bus to go to campus and begin the process of getting id's, picking up our books, and getting all of the technical details worked out so we can get started working. (We've been assured that we will have homework to work on tomorrow night!) After that, we will be leaving campus to go a nice dinner together. So...although you won't hear from me for the rest of the day, I'm expecting to have another report ready for evening. I wish you were all here with me (especially you, Leo) enjoying the fun!

Checked In...Settled In

The drive was no problem at all, but I'm glad I didn't wait any later as I can see traffic building up outside. Although I'm staying downtown, 6th street at IH35, it was a straight shot from where I came into town. Not a bad drive at all.

The digs are really nice, though! In all my travels, I've stayed in my share of hotels. But I am generally just looking for a bed and shower, and a couple of hours of rest between two long days. So, I typically stay on the low end of the hotel chain luxury scale, and avoid anything that would cost more than a Grant (dead president) per night. With that nice, fat tuition deposit, I'm happy to see they've put us up in style for the week. My 14th floor room is fabulous.

I've already met one of the other students as well. She is an international student and was standing near the valet booth when I came in. I saw she was holding the same kind of "welcome" letter as I was, so we introduced ourselves to each other. I'm terrible with names, so I'll have to get it again later, and I was even so impolite as not to inquire about her country of origin [she did inquire about mine]. But she seemed genuinely nice, and I am looking forward to seeing her again.

Oh well. I have a couple of "emergencies" to take care of for some clients, so I'll take an hour or so to make some progress there before heading down to the meet-and-greet. But, I thought I would check in and let everyone know that things are starting off well, and I'm thrilled to be here.

Don't worry...you'll hear from me often this week as I encounter things that I want to share with you all!

Today I Become a Longhorn!

Yes, that's right. Today is the day I begin grad school at the Univeristy of Texas in Austin and officially become a longhorn!

Um...am I nervous, you wonder? Yikes! You bet! I am not at all concerned about whether or not I can "do this", as knowing what I am capable of is something I've grown into over the years. Yes, I can do this.

But as to the questions of "is it worth it", "will we ever recover from paying for it", "am I going to enjoy it", "is it going to meet our needs", and thousands of others just like it, well, I'm going to be optimistic and plan on all of those being true as well.

I'm currently in the process of packing all of my goodies (including tons of unfinished client work) into the truck so I can head to Austin in a few hours. I will be pretty much unavailable, by phone anyway, for the entire week as my days will involve classroom work from 8:30am to 5:30pm, with the promise of tons of homework and follow-up activities each night. Add to that the fact that several clients are waiting on packages from me, and you can see how I'm a bit "booked" for the week.

But...I am way off the top of the excitement scale, and unbelievably wired for the week. My only real disappointment with the whole thing is that Leo won't be there with me. However, with my new addiction to the high quality, and FREE, skype video calls, you can bet I'll be phoning home regularly. Wish me luck!

Bad News! BPPV is Back!

A few years ago I found that I have this odd medical condition called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). In many cases, the onset of symptoms only occurs once, and never again. I was really hoping this was the case for me, but it turns out not to be. I've been feeling a little "off" for the last couple of weeks, and today I had another nasty episode. BPPV is actually a mild condition with only occasional violent episodes. But boy are they violent! Leo tells me I look really "spooky" when my nystagmus (uncontrollable eye flickering) begins. If you want to learn more about it, you can visit this article. Basically, BPPV is a condition where there are some calcium crystals in one of my ears that move around at often inopportune times and wreak havoc on my system. It is not painful, but causes [at least for me] very violent episodes of vertigo (the falling-down-drunk kind of episodes, with the eye flickering added on for amusement) and generally a strong feeling of nausea. Until the room settles down again for me, generally within a minute or so, things are really quite horrible. So now you know why I am posting this message at 3am. The episodes often kick in when I am asleep, and this violent interruption to my sleep is not at all helpful to my need for rest. Tonight, I slept a couple of hours before the episode hit, and I've been up, here on campus, ever since. I can now look forward to a week or so of poor sleep as I try to figure out ways to get past the problem. The last time this occurred, I spent a fortune on a physical therapist who helped me understand the problem and clear up the symptoms. Now that I have no medical insurance to help out with expenses, I am planning on trying to work the same exercises--a series of movements designed to bring on the episodes!--on my own. Anyway, in spite of this minor setback in my gameplan, I am still progressing on all fronts...senior project, undergraduate graduation, and graduate school attendance. I hope you'll all wish me luck on all fronts!

Honor Cords!

Last night, Leo and I got all dressed up and headed to the on-campus Hilton Hotel to attend an induction event. I was being added to the roles of the University of Houston chapter of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi.

We arrived at 6PM, and were there for nearly an hour before I finally spotted someone I knew. A nice young man named Ian Bailey, who is in the College of Technology as well and has been in several of my classes over the past year-and-a-half, was also being inducted. I introduced him to Leo, then we headed into the Conference Room for dinner.

The meal, and the service, were both surprisingly good. After a nice salad, we enjoyed a chicken breast topped with avacado and cheese, green beans, and carrots. For dessert, we were treated to a delicious cheesecake. We sat at a round table with two other students (from other colleges) and their families.

After dinner, the keynote speaker was introduced. She was a young, African-American partner in a Houston law firm, and spoke to us about pushing outside of our comfort zones in order to achieve greater things. She shared lots of stories about her transformation from a shy UH freshman to the law firm partner and about the people that influenced her along the way.

Once that was over, several special awards were handed out. Then it was time for the rest of us. We got up in groups and stood on one side of the room until our names were called. Since this was done alphabetically, I was very close to the front. When my name was called, I walked across the room, shook hands with the chapter president, and received my Honor Cords, certificate, and chapter pin.

Honor Cords! I was never really upset about not being able to attend graduation before (I will be in class in Austin) since my academic achievements will not be recognized. Even though my GPA is between 3.75 and 3.80, I will not be allowed to graduate Summa Cum Laude because I am a transfer student with less than 66 hours at UH. But now...Honor Cords! Wow, I didn't know about the honor cords!

The food was delicious, the presentation was good, and the rest of the night was not bad at all. But my absolute favorite part of the night was walking back to my chair wearing my cords and holding my certificate, and looking up and seeing the grin on my husband's face. Although there were a lot of people there being recognized for their academic achievements, this man didn't care about all of that. He was there to see just me. As always, my number one fan was there to cheer me on and share the moment with me. Now, how cool is that!