Balance

“No… sleep… ‘TIL BROOKLYN!!!” -The Beastie Boys

Any room on that scale for Elliptical Bike work?

I’ve heard somewhere before that “life is a balancing act.” Well, the Fall semester of 2016 has been a balancing act for the ages.

I’m now getting hours at Kinetic again, working at TRIMARC (a traffic monitoring place, under the Northop Grumman umbrella), and taking 12 hours online.  I have worked 2 jobs while at school before – heck, I did  it in 2015  and the start of 2016 – but those were only for a few weeks. This is a more ‘stable’ work situation (at least with TRIMARC; the jury’s still out on Kinetic’s workload)… and a much more exhausting one.

I started TRIMARC on August 22nd, the same day as Western Kentucky’s classes started. My schedule will eventually be weekends, 6:30 PM-6:30 AM; however, for that first week, I worked 4 hours a day (weekdays), in a window of 6:30 AM-2:30 PM. The next 3 weeks were 6:30AM-10:30AM, as I got to know the ins and outs of monitoring and reporting on the Morning Rush traffic on the Louisville interstates. This week, I’m working 2:30PM-6:30PM (for the Afternoon Rush); the next 2 weeks, it will be 6:30PM-10:30PM (Night Shift/Weekend Shift training), on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays; and after that, it will be the weekend overnight shift.

Meanwhile, Kinetic finally got in a significant amount of work 2 weeks ago. The advantage of Kinetic is that I can schedule it around everything else.

WKU Online classes don’t have set schedules. What my classes do have – “CIT Fundamentals”, “Web Page Development”, “Cultural Diversity in the U.S.”, and “Systems Thinking” – are work deadlines: any Discussion board posts are due on Wednesday night (Systems Thinking) and Thursday night (the rest); Papers (all but Cultural Diversity) Assignments, Quizzes, and Exams are by Sunday night; Cult. Div. papers are Monday night. This makes it somewhat easier to block out what to do and when, but that’s also assuming that the weekly workload in the classes stays the same.

You know what happens when one assumes:

Classes as a whole are going ok. I took some early zeros in Cultural Diversity (no book) and I had a few late assignments (Web Development) but I think I’ve got things back on track. I’m actually ahead on work in CIT Fundamentals and am on track with Web Development and Systems Thinking this week. I’m behind with Cultural Diversity but not horribly. The trick this week is to finish as much as possible by Friday night: 2 of my very best friends are getting married on Saturday afternoon; it is also my older brother’s birthday. Homework is a distant 3rd on the list that day.

So, I need to make sure to get school work done in a timely fashion these final 2 weeks before Fall Break (… FALL BREAK ALREADY?!?), keep training at TRIMARC, squeeze in some hours at Kinetic, and REALLY hope that I have chances to do some fun stuff away from work and home. The balancing act continues….