The trash and the easy

I got through my work day OK yesterday. It took me 11 and a half hours, but I got everything done that I needed to, billed enough, fulfilled all my requirements and still managed to get home while it was light. I was quite proud of myself. It's only one day down, but it was a big one.

Then last night, I got out my lunch container, got my snack ready, got my school bag, had things organized just so, and went to bed.  And as I was lying there, for some reason I started thinking about my parking decal.  Y'see, I'd picked up the parking decal on Friday, but hadn't put it on the car immediately. And I lay there, and thought I'd have to remember to stick in on the back window in the morning before setting off, and then it slowly dawned on me that I didn't know where the parking decal was.  I'd done some cleaning up on Sunday night and figured I must have moved it somewhere.  I got out of bed, I checked around everywhere I might have put it, and nothing.  I even snuck out to the car in my nightie to see if I'd left it in the passenger seat footwell.  Nowhere.  And then I looked across to the curb where the trash was sitting ready for pickup, and I knew.  Somehow I'd thrown the darn thing away. Thank the lord trash pickup is on Tuesday morning and not Monday as it'd have been gone if that was the case.

Yes, people, I went and got the trash out of the trash can, took it back into the kitchen and mooched around in the smelly leavings for my parking decal. Lovely. I found it, wrapped up in its receipt, no worse for wear, but ewww.

But you don't want to hear that - you want to hear how my day was.  I have successfully completed my first day at community college, and boy, is it ever going to be a walk in the park. They give you points towards your grade just for showing up! He, he, if only we'd had that in my day, I might have got better grades. 

Anyhoo, for four of my classes there is nobody else above the age of 20, apart from the professor.  The other one has a woman who may or may not be somewhere near my age, it's hard to tell. I have nothing in common with these kids but at least everyone was well behaved and seemed to want to be there, so that's good.  I didn't even speak to anyone all morning, but then shared a couple of words with my neighbors in my afternoon classes.  Along the lines of "I have those shoes, they're really cute".  But it was communication, so it was a start. I liked two of the professors, two were OK, and one is an irascible old hippie that annoyed me but I'm sure we'll get along just fine if I play along with him. At least none of them mumbled or bored me to tears straight out of the starting gate.

I now have some reading to do, and an assignment to post on the web-component part of one of my classes.  It's 150 words or thereabouts introducing myself.  And I get points for it.  It kind of makes me want to insist that everybody who never finished their degree or wants a new career get along to their local community college right now, this minute, and sign up (provided you can find the time for a class, that is), because, really, if you've been out in the real world for a while this stuff should be easy peasy. Now, OK, I'm not doing college-level algebra, which I would struggle at, but you can get a LOT of credits out of easy classes.