Monday, September 10, 2012

Daily 5 - Year 4, Day 20

Today's Daily 5:

  1. flocks of starlings overhead, readying for migration
  2. My TOMS for comfort
  3. a pretty scarf
  4. that it was at least daylight when I left for school
  5. settling back into my commuting routine with one of Christianne's Sunday Cup of Quiet lectios
  6. being greeted with a hug by a school friend
  7. a welcome back pancake breakfast put on for free by the nursing faculty
  8. surviving the first day of classes
  9. the chance to attend a worship gathering hosted by a friend of mine on campus at lunch on Mondays
  10. heading out for Ethiopian food for dinner with a friend and catching up on the month since our classes ended and we saw each other last.

Semester Re-entry

It's been lovely to take some time away from this space.  To focus simply on resting, and accomplishing the myriad of things that don't get tackled when school is in session.

To be honest, though, I'm not sure what coming back to this space is going to look like.  I'm still thinking and praying about what structure will work best for this space in the coming months, and about what sort of structure will work with my school schedule.

You see, this semester is the one in this program that has the reputation of being the most intensely challenging.  This is the moment where, after eight months of telling us we essentially aren't allowed to get near patients, they suddenly throw us in head first, and expect us to, well, know things!

My placement this semester is in the hospital that is the furthest away from where I live in the city, and I'll be rotating, two days a week, every other week, between day and evening shifts.

In the meantime, I also have two full days (8am-5pm) of on campus class time, and several hundred pages of assigned reading per week.  Plus assignments.  I piled my textbooks up the other day and took the picture that you can see here.  That is 9 inches of dense reading. (Actually, there are two other books, not shown, for a total of an extra couple inches).  Topics like pharmacology, physical assessment, and pathophysiology don't make for light reading.  It's going to be a school heavy kind of semester.

In the midst of that, I'll be continuing my part time job as a care aide, continuing to lead a small house church, and juggling all the stuff of day to day life.

And somewhere in there, this space, still so important to me, fits in.  I just haven't quite figured out how yet.  Other than the Daily 5, which will continue, I hope to be here between 2 and 3 times a week.  I know that I want to continue with Whimsical Wednesday, and that I'd like to continue writing posts 1 or 2 times a week, and that I want it to have some sort of regular schedule and rhythm to it, but I haven't figured out what that will look like yet.

A lot is riding on how this first week of school goes.  On how the kinks of placements and transportation and reading and life pan out.  On answers that will be gained in the coming days.

So, in the meantime, just know that I'm planning to be back here more often, and that if you're reading this on Monday, when it goes live, and it's between the hours of 8 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon (mountain time), I'm probably in class, getting some of the answers that will let me establish a rhythm to my life, and that once I have those answers, and have sorted out that rhythm, I'll let you know, and be back here on some sort of more consistent basis.