Well, firstly, thanks for all the encouragement, suggestions, and nice thoughts.  It helps, it really does.

Secondly, do I need to even mention that I couldn’t sleep last night? MIND. RACING.

Thirdly, as the planet is wont to do to me, a bunch of shit sort of fell into place today.

I went to campus for my last class (yay!) and thought I’d see if Marilyn was around.  Marilyn was my student teaching advisor, and has really become a mentor for me, and every day she’d been at school this semester, I’d been on campus.  We kept missing each other, and even today, she was at school and I wasn’t there because I had taken the kids to the Challenger Learning Center for their mission (One word: AWESOME.)  I was a bit early, and lo and behold, Marilyn was there.  She was busy, but took the time to to talk to me, and was so, so reassuring. 

I filled her in on the goings on at my school, and all of that, and told her about the squidlet, and how it was making me crazy trying to figure out what to do, and she made the point that I kept forgetting, or never considered.  "Being here full time (as a GA) isn’t the best money, but you can’t put a price on the connections you make up here,  you really need to consider the networking possibilities for when you finish your degree."  Whoa. Yeah.

And, GAing will be up to 9 credits (FREE!, which is cool, because each class –3 credits — is around 1k tuition) and a stipend of around 10k for 20 hours of work per week. AND, I can always loan more, AND I still don’t know about the scholarship yet, which, who knows how much it is? Every bit helps.  AAAANNNND, by being all po’ for a year, it sets me up for better aid NEXT year to finish.

It really gave me something to think about, and I headed downstairs to class, where the first thing from my prof’s mouth was "Gretchen, have you talked to [my advisor]?"  My advisor had e’d me over the weekend saying that it looked like the lab assistant that they’d hired wasn’t going to be around after all, and that I should talk to my prof.  I sort of, kind of, blew it off in a "I’ll wait til Tuesday" kind of deal, and I did.  I said "yeah, I need to update my resume, and get a form from someone, right?"  The prof then said "Yeah, and talk to [outgoing GA, who was standing right there] about my filing system… we’ll have to set up a time for that."

So, um, yeah.  It kind of looks like I’ll be doing the grad school bit. I totally need to call the uni day care.

Beyond THAT, my plans are now looking to take 9 credits in the fall, and then 6 in the spring, with my 20 hrs of GA work built around it…. and since the lab assistant spends a lot of time monitoring, I could totally work on my own projects while on the clock.  (That’s what the current one does, anyway, anytime I’ve been in the lab.)  Looks like I’ll have to get used to Christian rock, but on the other hand, Christians are generally big into babies, and I might be able to get a good schedule in the spring.  It will all work out. It will all work out.