Oops, my bad

So I realize I promised more blogs back in, oh I don't know, September-ish, but the reality is that life is choking me with a braided rope made of lesson plans, pointless projects, and senior seminar English papers. (Well, the truth is that there is only one major seminar paper, but to make it fit in the series it had to be plural.)

I have no time and therefore no life. It is an unfortunate situation. And parts of it are unpleasant as well.

I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the public school system in all its forms, including the way future teachers have to jump through 18 flaming hula hoops to become certified--and we get to pay money for that sort of fun! For example, I will soon have to have an FBI background check and official fingerprinting, which does NOT fit into my schedule at all (I will have to skip my EES lab to go to it), and I will be paying a total of $85 for this, $10 of which goes directly to Furman, as though I haven't handed them enough money over the past 3.5 years. And in a few more months, I will be taking the Praxis battery of standardized tests, which will run me about $350 or so, and to pass these tests, I have have to have satisfactory knowledge of only EVERY MAJOR WORK IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (plus a few originally in other languages). Of course, that wouldn't be so bad if I had time to study for said exams, but I'll be doing my Winter Term Practicum (read: student teaching) around the same time, so I'm pretty much screwed all around. Right now I'm just counting down til Spring Break, after which point I may be able to breathe again.

In somewhat more pleasant news, I am hoping to buy a house next year. Of course, there is the logistic problem of my not getting a paycheck until September (thanks again SC Dept. of Education), which means I can't get a mortgage until September, but I remain optimistic. It is an older home that has real fixer-upper potential, and I'm surprisingly excited about working on it. I think this is partially because if I didn't actually have to work on it, I'm not sure I would, and then I would essentially be living in someone else's house, which I think might be a bit creepy.

One final note: only one more week til my 21st birthday, huzzah!