… About Catching Up — Part One: Work and School (That’s Right, School!)

As you may (or may not) have noticed, there weren’t any posts in September. With everything that’s been going on the blog just didn’t fit on our “to do” list! I’ll try to catch you up on everything that’s been happening with our work lives, and then get into who’s back in school.

Let’s get Rob’s work out of the way first. As most of you know he’s been working six days a week since last fall, so that’s been the norm for about a year now. But lately he’s had to pull a couple of seven-day-a-week weeks — which works out to be way too many days of working in a row! That doesn’t leave him with much free time (obviously), and that pretty much makes it impossible for us to hang out with anyone. So we haven’t been avoiding any of you!

And then there’s my work, which has been pretty crazy lately. For several months I had been working a few different freelance jobs, with my hours ranging from 15 to 30 hours (or so) per week. In mid-August, just as some of those jobs were slowing down, my favorite former boss (the lovely Laurel) told me about a part-time, temporary job helping a UofL researcher with some office/filing work. He’s nearing the end of an FDA study involving using nasal stem cells to treat spinal cord injuries and he needed someone to work 10-20 hours a week to make sure all the files and things were in order, as well as help do some other office work. He was willing to let me set my own schedule, and I thought his work sounded interesting — plus I knew it would be good to get out of the house a little. I wasn’t sure about working for UofL again, but I’d be paid by his grant money, not UofL money — so that made a difference to me. (Also, it’s at the School of Medicine so it’s downtown, not at Belknap Campus.)

I accepted the job but couldn’t start for two weeks until my background check came back. Right before all that happened, my most recent former boss — the one I had been working 6 hrs. a week for, on the reality TV site — asked me to put in an extra 30 hrs. on a different project. I thought that was just going to be for a week or two and would be a good fill-in until the UofL job started. Little did I know it would turn into almost two months of work — and then the UofL job started. So over the course of a couple of weeks I went from working about 20 hours a week to about 60 hours a week! (You’ll have to trust me on those numbers — I know the math doesn’t make sense.)

Hopefully that explains why there’s been no blogging! But that only catches you up to mid-September.

As some of you know I had applied for the “Code Louisville” project, which I guess would be considered a “job training” program. It’s a city program that’s partially federally funded, and the goal is to quickly train computer programmers/coders because there aren’t enough in Louisville. I won’t go into why the program appealed to me (too long of a story), but I had been filling out paperwork and going through testing for a couple of months. Finally in mid- to late Sept. I found out I was chosen for the first-ever Code Louisville class! More than 100 people applied but only 14 of us qualified/were chosen.

It’s a 30-week program broken into three 10-week “terms.” The first term started Sept. 24, so I have been back in school for two weeks now! The schedule and amount of materials is pretty crazy. I’m in class on Mon., Tues. and Wed. at JCTC from 3:30-8:30 p.m. (15 hrs./week) and we’re already halfway through the first class, so we have a mid-term on Monday! Actually I should be studying right now, not blogging…

Obviously I was worried about being able to keep doing everything I was doing, but I didn’t want to cut back on any of my freelance jobs — it’s hard to turn down money when you don’t have a “real” job! But in a bizarre “perfect timing” situation, the day I started classes I found out my 36-hour/wk. freelance job was ending a week later. Not being cut back to the original 6 hrs./wk., but ending completely. So in a way that was a big bummer, since it was good money, but I knew it was temporary and I’m lucky it lasted as long as it did. I still have the UofL job and a few small freelance jobs, so add school on top of that and I’m definitely keeping busy.

And with that, consider yourself updated! I’m going to try to do at least one more post in the next day or two — but first it’s back to studying for me…

I didn’t have a photo to use, so I picked one of Rob’s drawings that I thought was appropriate. I’ve been spending a lot of time in front of my laptop lately!