Today I had to bust out my new mittens and hat.

Yes, it's finally getting wintery here. Fortunately the cold held off just long enough to celebrate my thirtieth birthday in style*. The dropping temperatures are harbingers of mid-terms, impending Norwegian exams, and frantic exam preparation. They also promise November, when I will decide which supervisor I would like to write my bachelor's thesis for in the coming spring.

I have no clue what I am going to do for my thesis. The current fad among my fellow schoolmates is to attach themselves to resilience thinking, which I admit is totally cool, but I don't know if I want to elbow my way through a bunch of over-eager undergrads and get lost in the mix. At this point in time, there seems to be only one professor supervising work with resilience in my department, and the competition amongst his adoring followers is quite high. I was, however, very much impressed with my agriculture and development class last semester, and if I have an opportunity to work with the people associated with that course I will jump on it. (Although what a plant biologist would want to do with a social sciences student remains to be seen. Ah, the beauty of an interdisciplinary degree!)

It is a riddle, one I am quite content to lay aside until the very last minute whilst I concentrate on other things. Mostly, this has been my Norwegian course and learning how to do statistics in Excel (hate, hate, hate!). I take my Norwegian exam in a little under two weeks. I feel confident, but mostly I am grateful I will be finished with the exam before the heat turns on to finish my university school work and prepare for exams. This has been a bit chaotic, as one of my instructors has had to go on sick leave for the rest of the semester, leaving the fate of the class and 10 critical units (one third of the semester load) up in the air. The scramble to find a solution has resulted in the course's term paper deadline pushed up, and the exam changed from an oral exam to a take-home exam.

I should probably start working on that instead of mindlessly blogging....

Anyhow, it's been an interesting semester. The struggle goes on with the US Veterans Affairs office in the attempt to get my university approved for the Montgomery G.I. Bill. We had turned in the application in August of last year, and the lack of reply never worried me until the following summer. You see, anything that requires VA work takes a long time. An excruciatingly long time, in fact. If you ever need anything from the VA, consider starting the paperwork before any evidence of need appears. Then you may get what you want sometime before the window of opportunity closes.

No, that's not a snarky aside, that's the plain-speaking truth.

Turns out the application sent by my university never made it to Buffalo, NY. I spent about an hour on the phone with the VA representatives figuring this out, and then many more hours at the student services center helping my representative write a new application. A lot of this time was spent explaining, "No, you need to write exactly what they wrote in the instructions. This is a government bureaucracy, you need to do the thinking for them. No, they won't understand that, you have to spell it out for them." This all makes the VA sound like a gaggle of idiots, which I don't think they really are, they're just...hidebound. And once you get that, a whole new world of understanding opens up.

So, the application has been sent in digitally and by post. By sometime next semester we'll have answer as to whether or not I can get my grubby little hands on my money. Hopefully, the answer is yes.

Until then it's back to the books and waiting for the first snow to fall.



*Style: (n.) 1. The state of being too drunk to remember exactly how a bowl full of puke-bathed brownies appears on the kitchen counter the next morning, just basic memories of free shots, good friends, beer, chili, Red Velvet cupcakes, and more free shots. 2. The way in which something is done, expressed, or performed.