The end of the beginning

My first semester of my first year of graduate school is done. I feel so much relief. It was a lot of work. I think that I'm pretty acclimated to graduate school now. This is a good and bad thing, as I know what to expect and am not necessarily jumping for joy at all the hard work coming next semester :) On a positive note, stats 2 is not supposed to be anything as hard or time consuming as stats 1. Though I did fine in this class, it was the greatest source of anxiety and stress for me, as math has always been!

I'm pretty much waiting around in Oxford right now until I head to the gulf (6 hours away) for a project Tuesday-Thursday. I really enjoyed my down time Saturday & Sunday, cleaning my apartment, going grocery shopping, watching endless episodes of Gilmore Girls, starting a new Francine Rivers novel which is actually turning out to be quite depressing (first pleasure read, if it could be called that, since July), and catching up with friends. Now, I'm kind of restless and ready to go home. Friday I'll be there!

We got some snow flurries on Sunday, and they started coming down harder after I got out of church. It took me down memory lane and made me think of where I was the last time I was driving in snow....

College Station had a freak winter last year, in fact, I think everywhere in the country did. It was the end of February, and I was on the verge of burnout (actually, I was just burnt out) with everything going on. I was working at my incredibly stressful/demanding/disorganized job and we were undergoing an audit. As usual, there was immense pressure (as in, you better get it done or we might fire you) to chase down the kids and their parents at the end of the month to get all the face to face hours in (despite the fact they moved/changed numbers/schools every week). I had to get it done early because I was driving 11 hours to Mississippi at the end of the week to go to a weekend long interview for a spot in a PhD Clinical Psychology program, what I had been working towards/waiting for the last year and a half. I had also had an interview the weekend before at a program in Texas, and I was going to have a phone interview in the middle of my 11 hour drive to Mississippi. The day before my last day of work, the freak winter weather started. It was snowing and ice was starting to cover everything (again, not the norm for Texas). Our center closed, and everyone in the entire building happily left, except for our department, because my boss said that despite the weather, we had better get our hours. I drove to schools, but they were all closed. I did what I could, and geared up for a night of packing so I could get ready to leave for my trip after work the next day. Of course, as soon as I decided to leave work, I got a call to come do a crisis screening (I was a contracted screener) in another town. If I cursed, I would have cursed then. I was so stressed that I just cried as I drove through the snow all the way to the neighboring town. Around 3am, I got another crisis call for another town. Numb and not even having enough energy left to be stressed, I headed out on what at this point, were icy, impassable roads. Since I was a crisis responder, weather wasn't an excuse for me. I saw about four wrecks during my hour drive to the hospital, and I prayed the whole way. I arrived, the screening was a big headache, and I didn't leave until the sun had come up and work was ready to start again. I came to work, delirious, unshowered, without makeup, and without sleep. I was supposed to start my trip to Mississippi that night, and I hadn't even packed a thing! I called my mom at work that morning (she hadn't even known I had been called out in the middle of the night), and I started crying and then just couldn't stop (I'm not much of a crier, so I knew that I was in a bad place, lol). I had appointments to go to, but I couldn't pull it together, so my wonderful co-worker, Jessica, stepped in for me and did them. She said something along the lines of how important this opportunity was for me (getting into a PhD program) and how that is what I needed to concentrate on. Bless her! My worried mother called my grandparents, who quickly called me, and decided that they would drive me 11 hours to Mississippi! They always wanted to visit anyways, they said. Bless them! I felt like a little kid again, and I insisted that I didn't need them to help me. Truth is, I did. I really, really needed help at this point, and I needed a break from helping everyone else for a while. The rest is history, as I did in fact make it to Mississippi, had a good interview weekend, and eventually got into the program! I am so incredibly thankful that I'm here and not there again this year, and I'm so thankful for all of the people who helped me get here!

So, yes, long story, but as I was driving through the snow yesterday, I was thankful that this time, I got to enjoy it :)