the dark days

I'm less than a week away from having my sweet husband back from the deserts of Iraq. This is fantastic and thankfully has helped me to not slip into a very deep depression over some recent developments in my academic life.

It went like this. I wrote up an IRB (application for UT's internal review board-the body that must approve all studies conducted by faculty and students) over winter break. I gave it to my boss, Maria, to take a look at. She promptly corrected it and sent it back with loads of helpful comments and advice. I meet with her on Tuesday (she was 1 h 5m late, but that is no problem, I'm a student I live to wait around for the people in charge of my entired future to show up and share their pearls of wisdome with me :) and we discussed my study, my participant and the timeline. I was very encouraged and excited. Toward the end of our meeting I asked where qualifying exams would fit into my timeline. She says in no uncertain terms that it will not. Possibly, not likely, I could attempt to take them in the summer, but really it would be best to wait until next Fall. I had hoped to take the exams last semester so that I could graduate in May 2010. If all goes well now I won't graudate until May 2011.

Any of you who know me understand that I am a total nerd so staying in school one more year for me would be a bit annoying, but would grant me one more year to read books and do nerdy stuff before I am forced to rejoin the real world. The problem is that sweet Raymond is scheduled to get out of the Army in June of 2010. This little development throws off our carefully crafted life plan. Ray hates the Army way more than I hate UT at the moment so this is going to present our family with some very touch choices in the next few months. I forgot to mention that I'm about to turn 33 and have been happily postponing reproducing for a while up until my older sister mentioned that she is going through early menopaus at age 36. AWESOME! We are not sure how this will fit into our new life plan.

Ray and I are busily working on whipping up brand new life plan we can both live with. This is the official end to my "poor me" week because this is the last opportunity I am giving myself to lament this situation.