Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Ever so tired, brain too fried to put together coherent paragraphs, so instead you get bulleted lists. Because really, who doesn’t love a good bulleted list? Also, incoherence.

My Dad

• My dad’s operation, which will be at least 10 hours long (!), is scheduled for Feb 8. I will be flying out to Ontario to be with my family at that time.
• I’m so thankful that I have a very understanding boss and that my school is understanding as well.
• My friends and colleagues have also been so supportive and it’s meant the world to me. Kind words, offers of drives to and from airports, stories of similar surgeries that have been wonderfully successful and all the other support offered are all helping me and my family a lot.

School

• When I said that I’d likely be posting a lot fewer blog postings once school started, I wasn’t kidding – it feels like forever since I last blogged! In preparation for the first weekend of real classes¹, I’ve spent the last three nights reading pretty much from the time I’ve gotten home from work until the time I’ve fallen into bed exhausted. This is in addition to the fact that I’d started reading prior to this week AND I had to do a bunch of administrative-y things – like buying textbooks, downloading a course binder of materials, signing up for various websites, etc. etc., that I’ve been chipping away at over this month.
• One of our profs told us we aren’t allowed to whine about our workloads because if we have time and energy to whine, we should use that time and energy to get our work done instead of whining. So, for the record, I am not whining – I am merely stating facts
• Because I am a nerd, I’m tracking the hours I’m spending on homework using a program called Time Edition ((For the record, I have no affiliation with the Time Edition people. It just seemed like a handy time tracking program and I’m going to test it out. I’ll probably blog a review, should I ever have time to blog ever again)). I’m not sure if seeing this  will make me feel validated that I’m working hard enough or make me want to throw up when I see how much time I’ve spent on homework. Either way, I’m sure there will be graphs of this data in future blog postings.
• Tomorrow night is the welcome dinner for the program and we have to wear business attire. I’m very excited to have an excuse to wear my designer suit!

Work

• I really freaking love my work. I do such cool things and work with such great people. Things are ramping up for the AWESOME Project and I am SO EXCITED about that. Also, another work trip to Ottawa is coming up, which makes me squeee!
• In less awesome news, I got my first ever rejection from an academic journal for a paper that I submitted. Boo-urns! We are going to adapt it to submit to a different journal, so fingers crossed!

Health

• Given my January schedule of 8 hours of work or school 6 days a week, with the 7th day of the week being a 14.5 hour day of work plus driving plus school, I’ve done virtually no physical activity this month, save for a couple of hockey games that mercifully fell on Sunday nights after I finished school. I think I need to force myself to make some time for at least some short distance jogs and the occasional yoga class because I feel like crap when I don’t get exercise.
• These long hours are really not doing well for me nutrition-wise. I haven’t had time to go to a grocery store in ages and my game plan for this week turned out to be to order lots of pizza last night, so I’d have enough for not only last night’s dinner, but today’s lunch, today’s dinner, tomorrow’s lunch and probably Saturday’s lunch as well². Clearly, I need a better system!

I really thought I had something else to say, but now I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. Anyhoo, headed to bed now. So. Freaking. Tired!

Update: OK, I remembered what I wanted to say, which was: If this week is any indication, I think I need to buy stocks in Pepsi. Because at the rate I’ve be downing diet Pepsis, they are going to be one hellava profitable company in the next 28 months of my schooling!

1. As opposed to the pre-core classes I’ve had the past three weekends [↩]
2. School is providing tomorrow’s dinner & Friday’s lunch [↩]

So apparently the world continues on no matter how big the tumor in my dad’s brain is, and so this weekend I was back at school for the third of three pre-core courses. This time, it was economics. Economics, according to our good friends at Wikipedia, is “the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” I had to look that up, which shows you how much I knew about economics before this weekend. But now I’ve done the 20.5 hours of pre-core, so I know all there is to know!

Some random stuff I learned this weekend:

• Opportunity cost represents the value of what you gave up to do something – specifically, the “what you gave up” is the next best alternative (as you could probably identify many possible alternatives). For example, if you buy a coffee for $4, the opportunity cost of buying that coffee is whatever the next best alternative use of that $4 would be – like, buying half a beer (assuming that beer costs $8). If you pay $40,000 for tuition for an MBA program, the opportunity cost would be whatever the next best alternative use of that $40K is – namely, buying 5,000 beers¹.
• The Law of Demand says that, all other things being equal, when price of a good/service goes up, demand goes down.
• I’m sure I learned a bunch of other stuff, but my brain is too tired to remember any of it!

In related news, here’s a photo of my “to do” list of all the things I need to do before school officially starts on Thursday:

1. Of course, in my particular case, the opportunity costs of paying $40K for tuition is actually nothing – since I got a scholarship that pays for my MBA, but which I can’t get for any other purpose. Thus, if I didn’t do the MBA, I would, sadly, not have the $40K to buy 5,000 beers. [↩]

This past weekend’s pre-core course was about accounting, which means I spent Friday night and all day Saturday and all day Sunday journalizing, posting to ledgers, and making statements of income/owner’s equity and so forth. I can feel your jealousy. I’ve never done *any* accounting before, so this was a pretty steep learning curve. When I went to bed on Friday after class, my head was spinning with thoughts of “An increase to an asset account is a debit” and such stuff¹. Also, I’m not a very detail-oriented person – I much prefer big picture thinking – so I kept making little errors, like putting things in the wrong column (by accident, as opposed to thinking they actually belonged there) or putting too few zeros. Happily, the prof wanted us to understand the concepts, rather than just being good at the mechanics with no understanding. In the end we had a quiz to test ourselves to see how well we’d learned and I got 85% (even though I didn’t get to the last 3 questions), so that made me feel like I’m doing OK.

Here’s some random things I learned this weekend:

• Debits  go on the left side, and credits go on the right side, of a ledger. Whether an increase (or a decrease) is a debit or credit depends on what kind of account you are talking about.
• The double-entry bookkeeping system, which we still use today, was first described in 1494.
• Expense ≠ Cash Out. Expenses don’t happen when you give someone money – they happen when you benefit from the asset (e.g., product or service) associated with that expense.
• Revenue ≠ Cash In. Similarly, you don’t make revenue when the money comes in – you make the revenue when you deliver your product/perform your service.

Also, I got this swanky backpack as part of being in the program. Not bad for $41,000, eh?

1. I also spent the first half of the first period of Sunday night’s hockey game with my brain racing with thoughts of accounting. I couldn’t seem to get my head in the game for that first 10 minutes, but I could easily have told you that accrual-basis accounting follows the revenue recognition principle. [↩]

So, I was in class for 20.5 hours on the weekend¹:

• Friday – 5:30 to 9 p.m.
• Saturday – 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Sunday – 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

It was a lot of hours and it was all math and – I’m sure this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me – I quite enjoyed it. I mean, it was rather exhausting, of course, and I really didn’t like having to get up at 6 a.m. on the weekend, but the content was interesting and the professor was excellent. And it was really nice to meet some of my classmates for the first time! Since the program I’m in uses a cohort model and involves predominantly group work, I’m going to be spending *a lot* of time with these people over the next 28 months, so it was great to meet so many friendly and interesting people!

One thing I found myself telling a lot of people is something that I learned when I played hockey for 10 days straight – don’t think too far into the future! Take things one shift class at a time. Anytime someone mentioned that we were going to be spending four weekends in a row in classes – 20.5 hrs for each of the first three weekends, followed by 32 hours on the last weekend of January (Friday to Monday) – I saw this look in their eye that I recognized as showing what I felt whenever I started to think too far ahead during that game. It’s a look of overwhelm, a look that says, “I can’t do this.” And so I would say, “Don’t think of it like that. Just think of this weekend. One day at a time! We can totally do this!” And it was a really good reminder for me too! And I just typed this out, I’ve realized something else – it’s hardest at the start. The first 3 of the 10 days of hockey were the worst, and I bet the first weekends of classes are the worst too. Just like in the game, it will get better once we get used to the new routine.

Anyway, I learned a whole bunch of stuff – and get a refresher on a bunch of stuff that I knew before but didn’t remember all that much – I’m looking at you, calculus! Here’s some random things I learned this weekend²:

• The symbol used for “profit” in business math equations is π . Dr. Dan‘s theory on why this is so is because π goes on forever, which is what you would want your profits to do. Also, π  is delicious!
• Bill Gates and Warren Buffet started a movement to get the mega rich to give away a lot of their money. And by “a lot,” I mean at least 50% of their wealth, within their lifetime or upon their death (in case they haven’t given out the 50% before they die). In the case of Buffet, he’s giving away 99% of his wealth. To give you a sense of how much money he has, he says that even after giving away 99% of his wealth, he won’t notice any change to his lifestyle or that of his family! You can check out a list of the mega rich people who have taken this pledge at givingpledge.org.
• Calculus is all about slope and reaching limits.

Also, as part of our course package, which costs one zillion dollars, we got a swanky business math calculator. It’s the calculator that we have to use on all of our exams so that no one has any unfair advantage of having a more advanced calculator than anyone else. The problem, of course, is that everyone in the class has the exact same calculator, so it will be quite easy to accidentally pick up someone else’s and if you lose yours, how would you ever be able to figure out which one of the 50 in the room was yours³? This is my solution to that problem:

1. Hence the blog radio silence for the past few days. [↩]
2. This isn’t *all* that I learned, but I figured that most of it would bore the hell out of you. [↩]
3. This reminds me of my undergrad, where all of the thousands of students had to use the Casio fx991 calculator, and one day the Calculus prof made an announcement at the start of class in front of the 200 or so students: “Someone left a calculator in the lecture hall after class last week. It’s a Casio fx991. You can come and claim it at the end of class.” [↩]

Tonight, I hop on a 737 at 11 pm and will be whisked 4,000 km to the east, arriving in Ottawa at 8 am tomorrow. I originally planned to take this trip almost a year ago when my Granny’s side of the family announced plans to have a family reunion in Eastern Ontario. A few months later, my sister announced she would have a new baby by that time, so the trip became a family reunion/meet my new nephew trip. And, since I’m all about efficiency, why not throw a side-trip to Ottawa to visit Sarah & Dave, and a guest lecture in Dr. Dan’s course at U of Guelph in for good measure?

Thus, my schedule looks something like this:

• June 14 – red-eye flight to Ottawa¹.
• June 15-17 - gallivanting in Ottawa
• June 17 -19 – meeting up with the fam in Gananoque for the family reunion
• June 20 – Toronto
• June 21 – giving a guest lecture in Dr. Dan’s class at U of G²
• June 22-24 – more Toronto³
• June 24 – fly home.

Then, of course, since I’m insane, I’m running a half marathon on June 26 at 7 am.  Just writing this all out makes me so tired that I want to cry.

Other random thoughts:

• I started packing on Saturday, a full three days before I would usually start packing⁴. I had to do this because I was out all day on Sunday, worked and then went out to watch the Canucks game last night, and am working⁵ today and then off for a massage and chiro appointment and then its pretty much off to the airport. The reason I don’t usually pack in advance is because once I have that suitcase open, I keep throwing more and more things in it – so this has given me 3 extra days to think “Oh yeah, but what if I want to wear *this* shirt? Oh, and I totally need *this* pair of shoes!” and now my suitcase weighs one billion pounds.
• I realized last night that I had packed neither my bathing suit nor my PJs. Glad I realized this last night and not once I’d left!
• My vacation officially starts at 4:15 pm, the end of my workday. By 4:45 pm, I’ll be on the massage table. I think this is a highly civilized way to start one’s vacation.
• Also, can someone please remind me to use my vacation time next year to travel to somewhere awesome? I mean, I’m using my vacation this year for some awesome things – I do like seeing my Ontario peeps, my 10-day long hockey game is going to be epic!, and a road trip down the coast with my sister and her munchkins⁶ will rock – but I still haven’t been anywhere terribly exciting since my trip to the Dominican a year and a half ago! Eek! Can I declare now that 2012 will be the year of international travel?
• How the hell is it June already? Where did the first half of the year go?
• Here’s hoping I do a better job of blogging this trip to Ontario than I did my last trip to Ontario!

1. I *so* love taking red-eye flights out east. I totally begrudge losing a day (with the combination of the flight time and the time zone difference) to travel and since I’m tiny enough and sleep-deprived enough, I can usually sleep through the whole flight, meaning that my time is no more lost than it is if I am asleep in my bed. Less comfortable, to be sure – but not wasted. [↩]
2. And, since I haven’t been back to U of G – my alma mater #2 of 3 – since I finished my M.Sc. in 2000, there will definitely be gallivanting, cavorting, and, undoubtedly, shenanigans around campus. [↩]
3. Including seeing Kalev on June 22 and celebrating my dad’s belated birthday on June 23 [↩]
4. Yes, I usually pack the day of, unless it’s a morning flight – then I pack the night before [↩]
5. Note: I’m actually writing this on Monday night after getting back from the game. I’m just scheduling it to post Tuesday afternoon. But I’m writing it in present tense so it *looks* like I’m writing it today. Because I’m cool like that. [↩]
6. Which is what I’m planning to use some of my vacay time in early August for [↩]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there are just not nearly enough hours in the day to get done all the things I want to get done. Let alone to get in anything even resembling relaxation! It seems like every weekend I tell myself that I’m going to just spend a chill weekend at home, doing some vegging out and some organizing¹ and every weekend I get invited to do something awesome and, combined with a hockey game or two, suddenly it’s Monday morning again and I’m exhausted but facing a full week of busy, busy work. Not to mention all the things I try to do after work – CIHR applications, writing reference letters, teaching, blogging, running², sometimes Wednesday hockey games, actually hanging out with friends – which means I never seem to get to bed before midnight, and then I’m back up at 6:30 a.m., progressively more and more exhausted each day.

This weekend is no exception – I’m still exhausted from being away last weekend plus a busy week (tonight is the first night I’ve actually spent entirely at home since Feb 9), yet I had several awesome invites for stuff to do on Friday and Saturday and then I have two hockey games on Sunday. And then it’s Monday again.

Can someone please remind me to just stay in next weekend?

1. you know, like doing laundry, tidying, getting groceries, cooking food for the upcoming week, etc. [↩]
2. though I have to admit that my running has been non-existant the last couple of weeks [↩]

So many things I want to blog about, but I’m so freaking tired that I think I’m going to phone this one in and go to bed. Hopefully I will be able to catch up on some much needed sleep this weekend (since last weekend was full of way too much fun to be worried about such things as sleeping!). And this week I’ve been super busy at work trying to get a bunch of writing done as next week I have 24.5 hrs of meetings (eep!), so won’t have much time to get actual work done. And I do have *a lot* of work I need to get done this weekend – including getting going on a rather important funding application and writing seven reference letters for students¹! But I expect that despite the work, my weekly Seawall walk with Jen on Saturday and my hockey game on Sunday, I will still find some time for some sleeping. At least I hope I will!

1. though it’s seven letters, thankfully they are for just three students – each student is applying to more than one program – so I’ll be able to do repeat the same stuff when I’m writing the second (and third) reference letter for a given student [↩]

Too tired to write in actual sentences. Finally submitted project I was working on during my full workday-length evenings after working full workdays this week. Waiting for sushi which I’m hoping will give me enough brain energy to teach for three hours tonight. Thank the FSM i made awesome slides last year and know this material inside out and backwards, so little prep required. Have a full day session with big wigs tomorrow, and after that I shall take the world’s longest nap. Dr. Beth out.

Tonight is my work Christmas party, which doesn’t start until 8 p.m.  But it’s down in White Rock and I didn’t see the point of driving all the way back to Vancouver, only to have to turn around and drive right back to the ‘burbs.  So I’ve been sitting in my office long after everyone else has gone home, marking papers¹.  And it’s probably a really good thing I stayed, ‘cuz I’m pretty tired and I’m sure that if I’d gone home, I wouldn’t have come back!

1. the neverending pile o’papers [↩]