snoozy learnin'

modern conveniences update: yesterday, 9:50 am. hour 8 of a predicted 35 solid hours of online continuing education courses for the license renewal. a knock on the back door. "just wanted to let you know we're going to cut off your power. cool?" sigh. er, how soon? "um, now? if that's ok?" i mean, seriously. is it so hard for my landlady to at least give a call the night before? she knows i work from home. and i doubt these guys woke up and randomly decided to come work for free. this is PAST ridiculous. funny thing is, i just got my electric bill, and it's oddly almost 20% higher than the month before. if only i had the time to look up previous bills and compare usage, i could call and vent on some unsuspecting power company employee. oh well. these online courses, by the way... i knew they'd be tedious. i was warned: "f'ing miserable." still, i figured it wouldn't be TOO bad. boy, was i wrong. i truly think they're worse than the on-site courses i took for the pre-licensing reqs. sure, it sucked to wake up early and trek down to school, especially on those lovely summer new york days, but at least then i could read a magazine, doze off, and then go buy shoes or wander through macy's between classes. these online courses are essentially made up of a series of interminable power point presentations, with the fun twist that each page has a timer, and cannot be clicked through until the timer runs down. the average is about 45 seconds, which sounds pretty quick, but that's for one paragraph. maybe i read too fast, but one paragraph takes me about 8 seconds to read... so then i sit here and stare at the timer and wait. if it were minutes instead of seconds, i could easily get other things done, but there's a limited pool of things in life that can be done in intermittent 37 second increments. the good news, i suppose, is that they're not difficult, skill level wise (though the pile of finance questions in the commercial real estate section threw me off a bit). the relative ease hardly makes up for the boredom factor. how many hours should a person really be forced to read about title insurance?? in other education news, i changed my mind about waiting around for two more months for car to be ready. that money is currently en route to me, to be spent instead on paying off my outstanding debts with the dept of ed and the community college, and then taking summer classes. i fear i may regret this decision (passing up the car deal, that is, not the school return), but it's made. C told me tonight that there are 'help wanted' signs all over town up there... plus, he says he could offer me work a couple days a week at his office in the city, doing random scanning and paperwork... sounds good, though if i went for both those ideas, i'd be working even more than if i stayed here, which sort of defeats the purpose of repairing to a country house for the summer, no? not sure why i'm having such a hard time deciding what to do about this. part of it is, if i get a job up there, i won't (theoretically) have the flexibility i have here, to take a weekend off every few weeks without losing my job. not the end of the world by a long shot, but it would require a change of lifestyle. current plan: i'll go up mid may, when the new cafe schedule comes out, and i'll see if there are any jobs left. if i find one, perhaps i'll stay. if not, i'll stay a week, then come back here and work. today roomie said she might be leaving june 1, which will complicate things financially. but as long as i'm working, it doesn't seem to matter what city i'm in. (and that's what makes the decision harder. given little difference between two options, inertia is generally more appealing to us lazy folks. someday perhaps my laziness and my urge to travel will meet on middle ground.)