I can’t believe it. Tomorrow my site goes live! I’m just a little bit behind schedule, so it won’t work until a little later in the day, and a couple of things aren’t quite complete, but the important stuff is. Of course, no tutors will actually be tutoring tomorrow because no students have been able to sign up yet, and being Labor Day, the likelihood is slim that any one will for a few days yet. But still! It’s here!!!
My last day today. They gave me a nice party yesterday. I felt very loved and appreciated. I have a poster that they made for me and everyone who came signed it. I’m going to put it up in my home office, and one day it will be in my office at my tutoring cafe.
It still hasn’t sunk in yet that I no longer work there. I wonder when it will. I didn’t have to cart too much home because I’ve been bringing things home little by little over the last few weeks. I left everything so organized it makes me wish I could at least spend some more time working just to know what it feels like to have nothing to do at work. All projects completed, everything updated.
One of my original tutors, who has become a very dear friend, stopped in to see me and we had a very good chat. He graduated with a finance degree. He travels all over the country (and sometimes out of it), spending weekends here at home, though his company is based in New York, and he’s doing quite well. He is beginning to collect “toys”. His latest? A red Porsche. And his latest assignment? Las Vegas. Remember when I took my entire staff to Las Vegas for a tutoring convention in 2002? He was there, the youngest one, 19 years old. It’s so amazing to consider that he’ll soon be 26. He’s only a few months older than my oldest son.
Monday my younger son comes home from the army for a visit. I can’t wait. I’ll spend the weekend getting the house all in order and then just enjoy the time I can spend with him. I’m glad I won’t be away at work. I will be working, though. I have a lot to do to be ready for my virtual grand opening in September.
The kittens are growing, spending more time playing and less time sleeping, although, being cats, they still sleep a lot, of course. They’re very good natured. We were very lucky when we found these two. Tiger, my daughter’s cat, is finally beginning to play with them. He’ll even go so far as to wrestle a little with Numa. Numa is determined to turn Tiger into another playmate and is always attempting to get him to participate in his games with Maddy. Maddy is a little more temperamental. Sometimes she’ll want to include Tiger, sometimes not. Now that I’ll be home more, I’ll get some pictures of the three of them to post.
It’s amazing how the whole world shifts when you finally bring yourself to say them. I haven’t been this happy, this optimistic, in
years. It’s scary, and our lives could come crashing down on us if this goes awry, and yet,
I just have one more month of work. I’ve been very busy because I’m on a committee to celebrate the school’s 40th anniversary and it’s been interfering with getting some loose ends tied up in the TC, but slowly, bit by bit, I’m accomplishing what I need to accomplish.
There are some major changes happening because of my decision. I was asked if I had any ideas about how they ought to proceed when I left, especially since there are some major budget cuts going on. I said, “Yeah, do away with my position and put the TC under the supervision of the Writing Center supervisor-give her a higher position of course.” So she gets a raise, but they save money. And as it turns out, that’s exactly what they’re going to do, and they’re moving the TC over to the library where the WC is along with the open lab which is currently in my area, too. They are then going to call the whole shebang The Learning Commons. I think it’s cool, and if I weren’t already excited about my own plans, I’d be jealous of the WC supervisor. This marks a new era in the assistance services to students. What’s funny is that I like the fact that no one will ever take my place in my area. It will never be what I made it-that will be mine forever. So it’ll be easy for me to come back in the fall and teach. I won’t be passing my space knowing that someone else is in charge. It’ll be something so totally different, and it’ll be under the care of someone that for which I have great respect and affection, so it’s like this was meant to be in the whole cosmic scheme of things, you know?
Okay, so maybe you don’t believe in stuff like that, but I do. And because this is such a good move for the TC, I can only believe that it’s a good move for me, too.
I’ve negotiated a deal with the developers of an online app specifically made for online tutoring. I’m sending in the paperwork for creating a Limited Liability Company this next week. I’m working on a Joomla template for my website and getting the promotional materials printed up.
Spring break ended yesterday. I went back to work today. I came home. I sat down to work on yet another project in an endless sea of projects, and I finally said, “Enough. This is not how I want to spend my life.”
My list of to do things keeps growing. The bad thing is that the really important things that I MUST do, keep getting shoved back because of immediate troubleshooting things that come up and eat away my time. In the past I’ve been busy because of projects I created for myself to do here to keep myself busy. Now, it’s just a matter of the maintenance of all of those things, and suddenly, I have no free time. But then, I’m on two committees now. It’s amazing how the unimportant can so completely set the important on the shelf. The things I have to do must be done right away. Dropping the ball is not an option. But it’s for things that really don’t have meaning in what I do. They’re fluff things, extra things, promotional make the college look good things.
Sigh.
I can’t even read my blogs in peace any more. And to top it off, I’m taking another class again, and this one is going to be really intense and will give me A LOT more work to do at work, because as usual I will be using my job as my project for the course. That’s good for my employers-they’re getting 200% out of me because of all these classes I’ve been taking and using to make things work better in the center.
But I’m up for it. Those four months without classes after 2 years straight made a new woman of me. And this time it’s only for two months, and then I am well and truly done, at least for a couple of years.
Yes, I know it’s 3 months past the time I intended for it to be finished, and one month past when I told my editor it would be finished, but, IT’S FINISHED!
It was actually finished, the writing of it, anyway, two weeks ago. But I gave myself a week away from it before going back and doing my own editing and tweaking. Then I had to write up questions for each chapter and include a few last minute resources and appendix pages.
But…
IT’S FINALLY FINISHED! I HAVE FINISHED MY TUTOR TRAINING BOOK!
There should be an ad for it in the upcoming NTA newsletter, and hopefully all will go smoothly with the printing of it that it will start selling at the upcoming NTA conference. Hopefully.
Oh, and I’m designing the cover and layout, too, once I get it back from my editor with corrections. Yay! I think that’s my favorite part of the whole thing. I wanted to write it, but sometimes it was tedious. Desktop publishing is never tedious to me, so there’ll be no dragging out of that part of the assignment.
Hip posted about his new workspace. I’ve posted pics of mine before, but last semester I changed things. I moved two huge filing cabinets so that they block the forward facing view of my desk and form a wall of sorts to my corner. This is how I livened it up.
Your year was horrible. There’s no other way to say it.
A lot went wrong for you, and you’re still recovering from it.
The good news is that things probably won’t get worse for you.
So look forward to the new year, where things will hopefully be much better!
