Exhaustion!

To immediately cut to the chase, I pulled my first all-nighter in college last night. This is of course excluding nights that I stayed out until the wee hours of the morning doing something fun....but as far as having to be responsible and get something done...yeah. I had absolutely no idea this would occur either! Here's how my day began to play out:

Yesterday I knew that today I had orientation for substitute teaching, but I didn't realize how behind on getting things around for that I was. I literally thought I had everything accomplished, except for getting finger printed. This is what you get for not reading (and I love to read)! My main goal was to go to the police station and get finger printed, but then I discovered that I wouldn't be able to just waltz in and have all business stop for me. Apparently people are quite busy, and my plans/desires aren't their top priority. Sigh. I resigned myself t putting this on the back burner when I discovered I needed to get a copy of my original transcripts as well. This entails waiting in line at the Office of Registrar on campus, and chatting with the ALWAYS overly-friendly office staff. Complete sarcasm. *As a side note: why is it that people go into customer service related fields, who clearly have no skills with customer service! In a setting where people typically have to wait in a long line, it should be a requirement to plaster a smile on your face and at least pretend to be friendly!* When this task was completed I needed to go right home and get around to have dinner with my friend Nicole!!

This by the way was amazing. I had not seen her in a million years, and it was so great to be able to catch up and pick right back up. We have shared many a meal at Olive Garden, and sometimes it's nice to see that no matter how crazy things get, somethings will never change.

My plan was to get everything organized as soon as I got home, and to immediately go through the rest of my paperwork. I knew there were probably still some forms I hadn't signed, and that I had yet to make copies of my personal identification. What a process this has turned out to be! I understand that anytime you're working with children you must taker the utmost precaution....but wow. After this is all said and done I may also be certified to work for some top-secret government office for all I know! Regardless, I'm out of work, and $75 a day is too nice of a deal to pass up...so I shall prevail!

Of course my plans were waylaid when I returned home, and was over-powered by the need to play with things online. Sigh. I don't think I'll ever change. At any rate, somehow it wound up being 10, and when my sweet boyfriend called and declared he wished to see me, I absolutely couldn't refuse. I thought I'd go over to his place for a little while, and then be back here early enough to get a reasonable amount of sleep. Oh how plans change. I have a very dear friend who is going through an incredibly messy break-up. They lived together, and had a dog together...so they may as well have been married with a child. She's got a key to my place, and has been coming over quite a bit since he still has not moved out of her house. Heather is such a good person, and does not deserve the pain she's going through right now, so I try to help whenever possible. Last night she needed my help. At first it began with several long phone calls, which I'm absolutely ok with. They continued even when I got to Will's house, and I have to point out here that he is so amazing, because he completely understands how important my friends are to me. He has no problem (at least he doesn't show it if he does) sliding into the background while I do my thing and try to get everything straightened out. Around 1:15 it became apparent she needed out of her house again, so I told her to come over. I then headed home to be with her. We chatted for a long time, and while we were talking and venting I sort of started absent-mindedly going through my paperwork to make sure everything was a go. You can imagine my surprise when I found some directions at the very bottom of a page, in very vague writing, that said I needed to complete 6 training modules PRIOR to the orientation. It was not spelled out so clearly, and if I hadn't stumbled on that page when I did, my training would have been incomplete, and all this bother for naught. So yes. I was not upset at first...I thought, ok...I'll just do these very quickly, print off the certificate, and be in bed by 3:30. Oh no. It turned out that each module was roughly 25 minutes long...some longer. When everything was said and done it was close to 5...I made an immediate decision that it would be better to just stay awake then try to survive on 2 hours of sleep. Whatever. I stand by that, because I can't imagine feeling any worse.

So I was there about 20 minutes early, and it was incredibly boring. Incredibly. About 10 minutes into the presentation my contacts gave out, and all I could see was a blurry haze. I might add at this point that this is probably in part to all the crying I did from 5:30-6:45, as I went through and read from start to finish a blog Nicole suggested to me. I'm definitely going to be keeping up-to-date on that families struggles, and keep them in my daily thoughts. Sometimes it's good to be reminded how precious and brief life really is.

Anyway, I got home around 11:45, and decided it would be cruel to Grady to feed him and throw him back in the crate just so that I could sleep. It's girls night tonight, but we've decided to shake things up and go to the Comedy Club with Will and some of his friends. I've only been once with him, so I'm excited to go. I am, however, exhausted. I managed to snooze from 12:30-4:30 on a very uncomfortable chair, while sharing my limited space with both Grady and Kitty. Now I'm prepping myself to be up for quite a while again. I'm about to take another shower, but all the thoughts I'm consumed with are centering around how messy our apartment has become in the last 48 hours. It's making me sick...but I don't have the time to do anything about it just yet. Sigh.

At any rate...I felt the need to whine for a bit. It's almost the weekend, and I have some fun things going on...so everything should be alright.

Before I go, I must thank Nicole for the beautiful job on my page! I love it. I'm really bad at stuff like that, but she has all the patience in the world. <3

More to come!