BIG NEWS!

Big news.   For those of you who haven’t already heard from me or my family: Tomorrow is my last day at my job and I will be going back to school at the University of Illinois in August.  I will be working on earning my Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture, something that I have to have if I want to follow in the CFO’s footsteps and teach.

This definitely wasn't in our initial plans when we moved up here, but sometimes you have to improvise. The next question that people are asking is “what are you going to do after you get your degree?”  At this point, I don’t have a good answer for that yet...  Maybe I will find a teaching position somewhere or maybe I will be able to build some connections with U of I alumni who work at firms in Chicago that might consider hiring me to work remotely and ride the train into the city once or twice per week.  Who knows.

I’ll freely admit that I’m nervous as hell about going back school… it has been 15 years since I graduated and times have changed.  Back when I was in school (you can read this imagining an old man’s voice) no one had cell phones or laptop computers.  We had to go to one of the computer labs on campus if we wanted to check our UGA email account (which was a new, cool thing).  All of my design projects in school were drawn by hand and I spent a bunch of late nights in the studio on campus drawing them.  Now I'll be able to work on my laptop where ever I have a power plug to plug into.  

I’m also a little worried about being an “older” student.  I’ll turn 40 before I graduate!  I never would have guessed that my 40^th birthday would be celebrated on a college campus.  

The CFO is not looking forward to her new role as Sugar Mama… she said that she preferred to be the supplemental income generator, not the primary one.  But, as many people have reminded her, I did it for her while she earned her PhD, so fair is fair.

Hopefully this will give me a lot of stuff to write about over the next two years!