So what's new with you?

Right now Beatrice, little Bea, is sleeping by my feet. She's almost awake--almost. I sneezed a minute ago, and it startled her, but she seems to be heading back to Slumberland. She's the cutest thing ever. She's black, and fluffy, and looks like a little teddy bear. She's just 3 months old.

Bea came home with me on Monday evening, which means that I've had my puppy for less than 48 hours. She's been really good, surprisingly mellow for a puppy, and has only had a couple of accidents. (One in the bathroom and one in the kitchen. All things considered, these are smart locations for her to choose. Much better than the rug or the hardwood floor!) The people she came from had dirt, not grass, outside, so Bea hasn't learned yet what grass if for. She likes to eat it, though, and it can be hard to tell when she's eating and when she's sniffing.

Bea is Change Number One. Change Number Two is graduate school--I have officially been accepted into the GEM program, and sent my deposit check. I start in the middle of July. I am a little nervous--it's a new program after all, and the "hybrid" online delivery format might be a bust--but I tell myself that I can always change my mind again. It's not like everything is set in stone!

Anyway: New Puppy. New School. Big changes! (Though it doesn't feel that way really.)

When things start happening

So yeah. I'm two quarters into an expensive grad school program and thinking about dropping out and entering an entirely new program (and no: nothing would transfer). There's good news and bad news.

The good news: I finally know what I want to be when I grow up! I've been struggling ever since I started school, in part because I'm much more practical than most of the people at DU. I've been working for 10 years. I make a good salary. I'm respected. I have a career, one I trained for and earned, and it's been hard to stomach the idea that I would be not just taking several steps back, but taking a 50% pay cut (if I was lucky) at the same time. I mean, why am I spending $60K for a MA if I'm going to graduate and make $40K a year? Not that it's all about money to me, but it's a little about money.

So anyway, I kind of came to the conclusion that I want to stay in the corporate world. Not just because it pays more, but also because I have so much experience here, and I'm good at it. I thought about doing more "corporate social responsibility" work, and that's when I decided that a business degree would be a good idea and applied for that program. That upped my degree cost to closer to $90K, tacked on about another year of classes, and didn’t promise any immediate increase in my income (it’s very hard to get into corporate responsibility work, because most companies hire from within).

Then, last quarter I took a career development class (it's a free class they offer students), and they talk a lot in that class about values and skills and interests, helping to focus you. At the same time, I started reading that new Thomas Friedman book (Hot, Flat and Crowded--great read) and it got me to thinking about how I've always been interested in the issues of renewable energy, and how that also falls into the important "sustainability" category that is what attracts me to international development work in the first place. So I started looking at job descriptions in the energy sector. I found my dream job, found the GEM program, and then things really started happening.

You know the idea that, once you start looking in the right direction, things will just start happening for you? Well, things are certainly happening. I talked to my aunt, who worked in power when I was a kid and is now working for another power company, and she's been connecting me to some of her old colleagues, who have largely attained pretty high and mighty positions by now. One of them offered me a free pass to a conference on renewable energy this week, and a plane ticket so I could get there. And so I went, talked to a lot of people, and became even more interested in renewable energy. I think this is really a good fit for me.

The bad news is that the GEM program is probably a better entry into the field, and of course nothing that I've taken at DU transfers. I would have to start all over, although the program is actually cheaper, and I'd end up owing less at the end of it than I will if I continue at DU. I would also finish my degree at the same time (or earlier) than I would finish the DU program.

So here I am, considering starting over—again. I may be crazy, but it feels right.

1.5 Highlighters a Week

I like Foray highlighters, the kind with the liquid ink that you can see in the barrel. The Foray highlighter has a bright, even line that doesn't bleed through the paper too much. It can smear a bit if I'm not careful, but at least it doesn't bleed through. Since I print everything double-sided, that's important.

So the second week of school, as I was merrily reading about Democracy in Latin America and highlighting away (but not too much, of course--it's not like I'm coloring the pages yellow) I noticed that my lines were getting paler. Is it the light? I wondered... But no. After several pages I finally realized that the pen's reservoir was empty. I've run out of ink.

How odd, I thought to myself. I thought that pen was new. I scrounged up an old highlighter (and I mean old--probably five or six years old) and used that for the rest of the evening, although it was nearly dry.

The next day I borrowed a highlighter from work. The ones we have at work are not Foray--they're Hi-Liter brand, and are "SmearSafe". Well, they may not smear, but they definitely bleed. They're also not very bright--sometimes I had trouble telling which lines I had highlighted on a page, and which lines were highlighted on the other side of the sheet and had bled through. How ridiculous is that? The pen was also not very ergonomic, and for some reason I had a hard time telling which way the point of the pen was facing--to make a thin or thick line--unless I looked at it carefully (very annoying when you're reading and highlighting frequently).

So I went and bought a box of 10 Foray highlighters. I've already run another pen dry, and I figure I'm going at a rate of about one pen every week or 10 days. Talk about a lot of ink!

My first test is Saturday. I'll be referencing all those highlighted pages then--wish me luck!