Mastering - update

Phew! Right, here's where I've gotten:

1) Taking the GRE ... DONE! Last Saturday.

2) apply for a masters program ... DONE! Sorta. I'm off-cycle with admissions so I'm going non-degree this Spring and being all official in Fall

I've also

3) Registered for Spring classes and gotten everything I wanted to get

4) Met with the faculty member I'd like to chair my committee and gotten enthusiastic approval AND learned my area of focus is what 1/2 his sabbatical proposal was about which is just all kinds of cool.

5) Met with the associate chair of graduate studies and generally been welcomed and patted on the head and told I'm a bit mad with my timeline but best of luck and all that

AND

6) Met with my boss and broken the news that I'll have to drop some of my hours what with my rather insane plan for the Spring. Fortunately my boss is either a saint or a close approximation thereof and said any number of marvelous supportive things and also pointed out that my lead-in explanation had given her the momentary fear that I was going to out-and-out quit (we lost one full-time person last week and will likely not be allowed to hire a replacement until... well... ever possibly) so just dropping a few hours each week was comparatively easy.

All of which means I'm just a little bit committed to this now! Now, to make things just a leetle more interesting, in the past few weeks I have also:

1) slogged through my more than pathetic effort for NaNoWriMo which was originally going to be a genuine novel and then had to turn into a rambling, sort of stream-of-thought memoir sort of thing that is completely self-indulgent and honestly not terribly interesting or well written. I just didn't have time to do the novel and ended up, two days before the deadline to begin, deciding to have another stab at the memoir, knowing it wasn't going to be organized or focused or even planned in any way. However, I had promised myself I would do it and I'm doing it and I have 51,268 words dumped in there. Some of it is reworked blog posts, most of it is just rambling memoir stuff. I'm not sure how they'll count it (what with the blog posts) and I still have a bit in process for this last week but it's at least there. Kind of. A little.

And

2) been finalizing the major project I've been working on forever which is, ready or not, to be launched with fanfare in three weeks.

So actually starting grad school should be nice and relaxing really, in comparison... won't it?