Thirty-six Hours a Day

That's how many hours a day I figure I need in order to deal with everything on my plate at the moment. I suspect the problem is exacerbated when you work a graveyard shift. It seems like I'm forever working, sleeping, working, sleeping, working, sleepy, or just allowing myself a couple hours in the evening to veg in front of the TV with an easy dinner. Come the weekend, I still need to get groceries into the house and pick away at household projects. I tend to hang out with one or both kids most of Saturday. I live in a perpetual handyman special, which seems to have something falling apart regularly - new garage door, new floor in the laundry room, refinishing the bathtub, or agonizing over how I'm going to replace the siding. I also have bird cages to clean, dog to groom, cat box to empty, and for some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to start making my own dog food (a twice-monthly ritual). This doesn't even factor in the regular household routine, which already involves dressing straight out of the dryer too often so I can bypass the intermediate step of actually putting the clothes where they belong. . . To make things worse, I get to deal with all of this on my own.

So when do I fit in time to go back to school? What was I thinking? I'm hoping this is a matter of time expanding to meet my needs. After all, working moms burn the candle at both ends all the time, right? Fortunately, my kids were in high school when I started working, so I was spared the most difficult choices to balance work and family (to say nothing of watching half my paycheck go toward child care). Before the divorce, I had the luxury of taking a course and doing nothing but for at least 12 hours a day - and I did. I finished my MT course ridiculously fast, and with near-perfect grades. I grasped the material well enough that I was able to toss the marriage on the funeral pyre and support myself almost immediately. Now that I'm working toward transitioning to cancer registry, and having the benefit of the intervening immersion in the medical field, it should be almost as easy, right?

Ugh. I'm not finding it to be so, unfortunately. Besides burnout from working through every holiday in the last year, I figured it was time to take some of my stockpiled vacation days and play catch-up on my coursework. True to form, I then discovered a critical disaster in the making and have spent the last week ripping apart my Florida room and putting it back together. This has meant single-handedly ripping out cabinets and flooring and about 26 hours of sanding and painting. If I can figure out this “easy” laminate flooring, I may actually finish with some vacation remaining. *moan*

I think it hasn't helped that my first course is a bit hard to get excited about. At first, I thought Anatomy & Physiology would be a snap. I know this stuff already, right? Yep. . . except the first few chapters are about the least compelling part of it - chemistry. Do I really need to know how to figure the atomic weight of something? Do covalent bonds actually figure into the job of a CTR? I want bones, dangit! I want muscles! I want to be quizzed on where organs are and what they do. I want to know how a diseased one affects the next one down the line. I want to make use of this stack of anatomy coloring books I've amassed. To make things worse, AHIMA's course includes countless links to relevant websites, which I find myself poring over. (I am a serious web junkie.)

So yeah, I'm sputtering around the starting line, frustrated and impatient with myself. I think once I'm done with the first three chapters, it will be much smoother sailing. In the last six months or so, I've started a self-improvement kick and have been faithfully journaling my food intake and sticking with an exercise routine, so I've proven I can accommodate a new routine and stick with it. One less hour a day in bed and I should be able to fit in the necessary time with the books to get this done. It's not like I have to do it for the rest of my life, after all. . . and in the end, I'm looking at not just a new career, but on the opposite side of the clock! I have a sneaking suspicion that's where they're keeping all those extra hours my days seem short on.