This past week was another busy and somewhat stressful week for me. Since my mom got out of the hospital, I'd been concerned with my mother's condition. I had been wanting to visit, but there was trouble with timing between school, my parent's schedule, and necessary travel times. As if that weren't enough medical issues for my mind, my wife started feeling stomach pains. We ended up spending most of my birthday visiting doctors and ended up sending us to the emergency room on Friday. For my birthday on Wednesday I had purposefully made minimal plans. I didn't want to build up any grand plans in my mind, only to have them shot down due to lack of funds, or because of the inconvenient time (since other people might not want to come out for a party during the week) and hadn't imagined that Beth would have critical medical problems on my birthday two years in a row. However, despite them being purposefully minimal, they had mostly been botched, so I'm thinking that Chris might be onto something with that 10-year-increment birthday thing. Fortunately, I had a great time with Chris and Charles on Wednesday evening, so it wasn't all bad. (Thanks again for coming over guys!)
Now, outside of those issues, the week went primarily like the previous one had, with me studying nearly non-stop every day. On Saturday I got back to my parent's to visit, and I'm very happy that I did. My mom is very upbeat, seemingly back to her normal self, other than needing to rest more and needing a walker to get around after her hip surgery. It was very good for me to see her again and to talk with her.
Unfortunately, while I was studying today, wrapping up everything that was due today, the power went out at our house. We spent a while here before heading out to walk around the park and then off to the store since the power was still out. When we returned, I had 3 hours to finish my assignments... or so I thought.
Prior to getting home my wife commented on how it would be unfair for me not to be able to turn in my assignments due to the power outage and that the instructor should accept a power outage as a legitimate excuse. I would have thought the same thing too, if it hadn't been for the "terms of agreement" that we had at the beginning of class. I think there were a couple classes that posted them very prominently at the beginning. To sum it up, assignments are due when they are due and there are no excuses. When we arrived home our power was on and I happily thought that I had plenty of time to submit my assignments. I had a quiz to complete in one class, along with required discussions in two classes, that were due by midnight. I got my Stats quiz done and my World Literature discussions finished and I was going back to submit my discussion for Stats when I realized that it was no longer available online. I checked the syllabus again and discovered that the deadline for that class is not midnight, but 11PM. Even though I'll probably remember now that this is the class that cuts off early, I should probably just plan on 11PM for any class from now on. It's probably a safer bet than trying to remember when the different deadlines are.
