- @tutumagu Warrant? Nelson? Quiet Riot? ow, memories of 80s metal hurts the brains… #
- @redeyechicago That was AWESOME! #
- Just got back from a DePaul SNL recruitment seminar thingie — they /really/ want my $14k/yr. #
- Today is taking yesterday’s yarn-tangle irritation and totally dwarfing it with I HATE COMPUTORZ OMG WTF irritation. Not an improvement. #
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so i’ve been figuring on this for my school plan: continue taking classes at City Colleges until i earn an associate’s degree, then transfer to a 4-year school. i’ve been loosely planning on DePaul (as i mentioned previously), chiefly due to the online course availability and the experiential learning credit… meaning that i can do some sort of work based on my life experiences (cough teh computxors cough), and they give me college credit for it (yay!). depaul is not cheap; it’s a private school. so finishing out the associate’s seemed to make financial sense; at $800/semester for part-time coursework, that beats the pants off of $3500 for part-time at depaul (especially since depaul is on the quarter system, while HWC is on semesters; so depaul would cost $14k/yr while HWC only costs $2400). big difference. but there’s another big difference, and it addresses what’s been bugging me lately — the time. it absolutely chafes at me that i’ve wasted so much time, and that it’s going to take me years hence to finish this, this major obstacle to a major life goal. it especially chafes because this semester is … not nearly so difficult as i had feared. sure, that’s partly because i’m taking math for weenies and intro bio at a community college, but …
but i was concerned for making sure that my academic plans were on an efficient track, so i won’t have to repeat work (read: waste time), so i went to a depaul school for new learning informational seminar at lunch today. it was useful — they cleared up some questions i had that i couldn’t find easy answers to on the web site. like, the rate of completion. the program is comprised of what they term “competencies,” which are used as a unit measure of completion. so, rather than having to earn 120 semester hours to graduate, you have to earn 50 competencies. since this is foreign to my college experience thus far (which has all been measured in semester hours), i had no real idea how to calculate an approximation of what my transfer credit would be worth in competencies, and therefore no way to guess how long it would take to complete the course. the answer is simple… courses worth more than 2 semester hours (and scored above a C-) are worth 1 competency apiece. so as it stands now, i’ve got something like 16 or 17 competencies’ worth of coursework done.
unfortunately there’s no easy way to guesstimate what my experiential knowledge would be worth — that’s gauged based on a thesis sort of system; work with an advisor, pick a topic or topics, write a paper, get feedback, refine, feedback, present, and then get judged for credit. since that’s highly individualized the advisor/salesperson wouldn’t give any estimates — it’s basically sign up, do the work, and see what you wind up with. so that’s sort of a pain. but, at $150 per competency earned that way, it’s still cheaper than class.
then there is plain tuition cost. the depaul tuition is $440 per credit hour — HWC is $72. yikes. but the credit earned per class is different. so a SNL class is 4 credit hours for $1760, but it’s worth two competencies. a HWC course priced at $290 is also worth 4 credit hours, but is worth only one competency, and takes much longer to get (16 weeks versus 10). continuing at HWC earns 6 competencies per year versus 16.
so: fine. do the straight numbers. continuing at HWC to earn the AA, then transferring, means a total cost of about $27000, and time commitment of three years. if, OTOH, i were to transfer to depaul at the beginning of this summer quarter, rather than taking a course at HWC, it would cost me about $32000, and take only two years (or possibly less, depending on the experiential credit earned). so is an entire year worth $5k?
at the moment, i actually am starting to lean toward transferring to depaul immediately after this semester. it seems silly to take classes that are extra long and worth less for the time investment. and let’s face it, if i’m going to have to take out student loans anyways (anyone else got thirty grand they can spot me for a while? i seem to be a little short), i might as well get the entire thing out of the way sooner rather than later, right?
i don’t have to decide right now. if i were to go that way, i’d have to take the first course (which is a short, two meeting class) at the end of april/early may — that’s the first one at the loop campus that works with my schedule. then the semester doesn’t start until june. the current HWC semester ends in early may. so i’ve got a little time to figure out what i would do for money, and weigh options. just … thinky tonight.
- @hubbit The wooly sort, of course! #
- @hubbit RT away! #
- Argh. Just spent 90 mins untangling wet, just washed-to-set-the-twist, just-spun 217 yards of wool. Smell like wet sheep now. Pleh. #
- In revenge, think I’ll knit this mess up and felt it. Ha! #
- @tutumagu Any. Any Poison song is too many. #
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Well, I built a contraption a couple of Sundays ago: I took a $5 Ikea tv tray table that I got about 7 years ago, which had lost a couple of screws and was unsteady on its pins, disassembled it slightly, and turned it into a knitting caddy (with a tabletop!), to keep all my chairside knitting stuff sorted and away from cat-related damage.
So that’s kind of cool. I can keep a couple of projects in the caddy, it has pockets on the side for accessories, and the tabletop is removable so I can still use it as a table. The caddy bit is removable and washable, and it still mostly folds up, if I don’t mind moving the tabletop separately, and all it cost me to make was a $5 hacksaw and a $2 dowel. Rock!
I also did some spinning. I can’t spin in the wintertime (which is deeply annoying) because the skin on my hands gets too dry to handle fiber (and there is no lotion that helps this, I’ve tried — climate changes help, actually, so travelling in January actually healed my hands up a bit), but I have gotten a bit done in the past couple weeks. I finished up spinning the last of an 8oz. hank of Frabjous Fibers Blue-Faced Leicester in the “Deep Space” colorway. I drafted the full width of the roving out to pencil roving (so I had nice long chunks of colors) and navajo-plied it to preserve the color changes and shade neatly from color to color — came away with 540 yds of slightly-more-than-worsted,-not-quite-chunky weight yarn. Here’s a hank. I have four hanks now and I just want to sit and pet them. My pretties!
This roving was, to be perfectly honest, TEH BEST EVAH. If it weren’t like $30 a hank or something, I’d run right out down the street to Loopy and get like a dozen more and spend the rest of my life in fuzzy, soft, blue-purple bliss. (P.S. It is extremely dangerous to a budget having Loopy Yarns a block away from your house. Especially on rainy days when someone emails you a new project idea and you raid the stash and come up empty handed, and you whisper those fateful words: “I’ll just be like ten minutes.” I am just saying. Danger!)
I’ve also been working on Johnny’s Guitar Hero scarf. I changed it from crochet (in the pattern) to a broken-rib stitch, and am about halfway done — no pix, though, it’s not very interesting yet. But Johnny’s in a Guitar Hero tourney in a month so I have to get it one before then!
I also bought — drum roll, please — a shiny new lovely — OH YES I DID — Strauch Petite drum carder. I’ve been messing around with it and carded up a few batts of some Brown Sheep mill end rovings I got a couple years ago from The Sheep Shed Studio, which I spun up yesterday into some neat zebra-y singles I hope to turn into a two-ply worsted-weight yarn. This was a huge purchase and I dithered over it quite a bit, but I’ve been wanting one for ages so I can try making more interesting yarns, and I had the money… since, to my MASSIVE irritation, my annual spring trip to Ohio for the Ohio-Kentuckiana Soapmakers Gathering got cancelled this year due to it being scheduled on the same day as an exam in my bio class that I cannot miss — and as this year’s Gathering is in Greenville, OH, home of the Kitchenaid Experience outlet store, I’d been saving up my money for ages to buy a Kitchenaid there, which I was no longer going to be able to do what with the not going and all. (Note to self: NO MORE Saturday classes!) Sure, I could have just gone to Macy’s and bought a Kitchenaid there but, srsly, it’s not the same. And I decided I would probably use the drum carder more than the Kitchenaid this year (since I really wanted it so I wouldn’t have to knead bread dough anymore and I discovered no-knead bread last year), so I used that money for a drum carder instead. Despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I soundly confused a couple of coworkers by going on and on about “I WANT MY DRUM CARDER!!!” for like two weeks while waiting for it to ship… Nonetheless, it is awesome. And now I am going through life wanting multicolored loose silk fiber to drop from the sky…
And, since I’ve been wearing the hell out of the last one I made, I went stash-diving for some soysilk laceweight I knew I had in there somewhere and cast on for a third Clapotis. It’s nice to have a little mindless-yet-interesting knitting in there you can default to. Even if the laceweight does move annoyingly slowly, on #4 needles. It’s turning out pretty nice, I think I’ll be pleased with it when it’s done.
Of course there’s also been all the usual stuff — work, school. School is going well enough that really, I’m just mad at myself for putting it off so long. If I stick to my schedule, I should hopefully be getting an AA from HWC after summer 2010, and then that just leaves finishing up — the current contender for that is DePaul. I’m sort of miffed at the U of I system for being completely useless — UIC’s evening program is, as always, deplorable. UIS offers an online program for a couple of courses of study, but the enrollment is extremely limited (20 students? Really?). UPenn have an online program, but, meh. The nice thing about DePaul is that their School for New Learning (cough: School for Adults who Took a While to Get Their Shit Together) offers (a) classroom- or online-based classes, (b) earned credit for experiential learning (present a portfolio of work and get school credit for it — wonder what they will give me for my massive background in Internet memes?), and (c) build-your-own programs so you can study what you are actually interested in, and/or a Bachelor of Arts in Computing, meaning I could get a degree in my field without having to take Remedial Discrete Math eighty times to pass. They’re not really cheap, but I think it’ll be doable. I’ve figured out about how much money it’s going to take me to do this, and I’ve decided I have to handle it basically like my credit card debt… I just have to treat it as immutable: I must pay this amount into savings, which is playing the role of Discover Card in this little show. That amount also includes a targeted amount for my “escape fund,” which is for covering visa application costs, cat importation costs, first+last+deposit on an apartment, expenses, etc. for relocating. It’s sort of an ugly amount to stare at; even more so when you do the calculations for how much you need to save to have $XX in Y years at a 1.76% interest rate and the interest is just laughable. On the bright side, that formula was taught to me by the math class I’m in this semester, so I suppose it is making itself useful already. On the extra bright side, I won’t be getting done with this degree and thinking I’m all ready to do this thing and then suddenly realize I am thousands of dollars short. So that’s something, I guess. (Even if it does severely impair my plot-since-I-was-21 to get a fancy-pants sports car for my 40th birthday: The plan was always to pay cash, so there’s no way I’m going to pay cash for a bachelor’s degree out of pocket, plus save thousands of dollars for a move overseas, plus save like a hundred grand for a shiny new 911, in … 9 years. Ain’t gonna happen. I loved you, though, Dreams of Potential Car. Always remember!)
So that’s the news from the south loop. But now: big bio test to study for, and batts to spin! Quick! To the bat-comfy chair!
