Home Stretch

It's almost the end of the school year. It can't come soon enough for me this year.  It's been a long, long, long, long year. Did I mention it's been a long year?

Oh, and I have this to look forward to......

Enough said.  4 1/2 more days with kids and 6 more days total and I'm a free girl! Bring it on!

Pinch Me

With Distinction. Not only did I pass my exams, but I passed them with distinction.  There are no words. I can exhale now. I am speechless. I am thankful, I am exhausted.

I am done. Tracie has a Master's Degree. I wish my Grandmother's were still alive for this. They would be so proud. 

Afraid to breathe

Tomorrow is the big day. Somehow between 1 and 5 I'm supposed to muster enough courage to call the graduate office and listen to them tell me whether or not I passed my comp exams. I can hardly breathe just thinking about it.

Pass. Four little letters that will change my world. Oh please, please let me hear those four little letters.

I have no interest in hearing the other four letters. Fail.

Breathe, breathe, breathe. 

Pushing the Limit

Today was a really bad day. The kids are done and I'm exhausted. It's a recipe for disaster in a classroom. To make it through it's going to take all my clown college skills. It's going to be the longest 16.5 days of my life.

All day long I was planning my run. I was going to go at it alone. I thought I had a charged Ipod and was ready to go. Not so much.  I'm the only person on the planet that has 3 dead Ipods. In my attempt to salvage it I was headed out the door when Sean came home.  He offered to run with me and I figured sure, why not. 

I planned on doing my normal 3 mile route and if I felt good enough I was going to tag on the hill at the end. However, Sean had a different idea. He made me do speed work. Initially I was really pissed, this was my run. What you don't know about me is that I'm exceptionally motivated by being annoyed. So, I did the speed work. Then I did the hill too. After we turned around from the hill Sean announced we were going to finish with speed work. Oh hell, why not.

It turned out great and I really pushed myself out of my comfort zone. Turns out I did ok. Sometimes you have to be willing to go with the flow and step out of your own way.

I hope it works with my mad skills from clown college routine tomorrow.

12 Days....

Did you know that 7 hours can pass by in an instant? Who knew?

It's done. I took the 2 days of exams. I wrote pages and pages and pages. I fought through brain freeze, printer freeze and the panic. Here is the recap.

I over looked a few things in my panic of the high stakes testing at its best. First, I forgot a theory. I forgot a date or two and I think I screwed up a name. I wrote longer on one question than intended and short changed the last one on the second day. I worked hard on my APA citing but totally spaced my APA line spacing and wrote my entire 19 pages single space. Shit, I hope that's not an automatic fail.

Now I wait. I have 12 days until I make the phone call that determines whether I'm really and truly done with this or if I have more hoops to complete. 12 days. That's 2 days short of 2 weeks. My strategy?

Let it go. No more worries. There is nothing I can do about what has been done. I'm hoping for the best but for the next 12 days I'm letting it go.

Exams? What exams?

See, it's working already.

4 days

That is the amount of time I have left until I will drive myself, a large coffee, a water bottle, seven packs of sugarless gum and perhaps one small snack size bag of gummy bears to the library at WOU where I will be locked away in a tiny room to begin the first of 8.5 long and painful hours of comprehensive exams.

It's been four years in process to get to this stage and while I've theoretically completed all the coursework necessary to pass these things, with each passing day and ticking down of the minutes I feel less and less prepared for this. I've had the questions for a couple months and have been studying for weeks now, but I don't know where it has all gone. I dream of it every night. Perhaps it flitters out of my mind somewhere in the great abyss.

I hope once they shut the door, confiscate all my electronics and leave me with nothing but my brain food of coffee and sugar, that it all becomes a Zen like moment of clarity and the words just flow from my fingers complete with properly cited theorists, and specific examples.

Until then, I'll keep cramming, hoping and learning.  After all, when all is completed, I can finally fulfill my life long dream of being a teacher.......hey wait a minute.....

I am a Runner.

Last Sunday was the Corvallis Half Marathon. I ran it for the second time and beat my previous time by nearly 13 minutes. It was an amazing day. I have never felt so proud of myself. I had every intention of writing about it on Monday after work.

However, rather than writing about my running story, I spent the evening glued to the TV as the Boston story unraveled. Boston. The town is already my second favorite city in America. I fell in love with it on a trip 18 years ago and would have gladly moved there had I ever been asked to. The Boston Marathon is the holy grail of all Marathons. Even those of us who never have a chance of ever running in it know the BQ for our age group. Just qualifying is amazing. Melinda and I refer to any hill in our runs as "heartbreak hill." It is legendary for good reason.  Every year I look forward to watching the amazing athletes. This year was no different.

Running is such a pure sport. It is one runner against another, but ultimately it is a race against oneself. Friends, family and the community came out for the Corvallis half. My favorite part of the day was watching Stafford and the kids show up on bikes at undisclosed locations to cheer us along the way. Madeleine with her big smile and two thumbs up every time I saw her gave me inspiration to push through when I didn't think I could. She was no different than those spectators at the finish line in Boston cheering their runners along too. The idea that she could have been in harms way cheering us on rocks me to my core.

As the news coverage came in, what struck me more than anything was the selfless acts of the community, the families, the runners who thought not of themselves but rather of each other as they rushed towards danger to help their fellow man. In the days following the attack, stories of heroes continue to dominate as the information available is sifted through and the pieces of the puzzle are put back together. Our nation mourns for those lost, injured and forever changed. The running community is a strong bunch by nature. We endure and we will continue to endure, standing together united in a love of a sport and the power of good to triumph over evil.

It is with this in mind that I honor Boston by proudly declaring, I am a runner. I celebrate what that means and believing that like a long and difficult run, we will all get through this together too.