Two inconvenient things have come about recently:

1: M (we) can only afford a very limited amount of time off, both because I’m making no money right now, and because her job is very busy and not really letting anyone take time off. 

2: My portfolio is not going well*, and the presentation and final approval is almost certain to be pushed back well past the original date (March 24). 

The most immediate impacts of this are stress on both of us, and a steadily increasing likelihood that I will not go to Utah in two weeks.  Which is a bummer.  But, I don’t want to go without M, and driving 1600+ miles round trip for a 4 day trip is kinda silly.  It is also looking increasingly likely that we’ll move back south this summer, we both miss it, and my increasing discontent with the department here only adds to the dismal Missoula winters.  Missing out of seeing everyone, not eating Susan’s pizza, and not starting a ___ for the first time seems a tragedy.  At the same time, we’ve still yet to visit Canada, and ought to do so while it’s still so easy.

If there is anything I’ve learned in grad school, it is how important grad school is.  That is to say, not very when compared with a thing like taking fun trips with my wife.  This is a conclusion that one would think a social work department that trumpets self-care would endorse, but one that I think I’ll leave out of the portfolio (see below).

I did get some good skiing in yesterday morning.  One last hit of winter powder in the face of what are rapidly becoming spring conditions.  I’m ready for the big mountains to come into condition.

Thanks for reading everyone.  I’m rather looking forward now to returning to a normal life as a non-student, and hopefully seeing many of you more often than once or twice a year.

* This has occured as two seperate but heavily related things.  One, I tend to be obscure and convoluted in my writing and thinking.   Little surprise that I need lots of time and rewrites to make thing sufficiently clear.  I gave myself plenty of time, but ended up needing more.  Two, in the face of their lip service to the contrary, the department has a pretty rigid idea of what they want in their graduates.  My portfolio is the proof that I pass muster in this regard, thus my original conception and construction of the thing didn’t fly well.  I have this last on rather good authority.  So I have to do what I am historically very bad at, which is suck it up and do things not as I would have them, and as a result produce what (for me) will be an inferior product.