As you may or may not know...

I didn't die from the illness mentioned in the previous post. I did get over it and don't even remember it now.

In other news, the end of the last semester went relatively well. I did a lot better in most of my classes, however, i didn't do quite well enough. All of my classes ended up well aside from genetics, which I somehow managed to fail after getting A's and B's on nearly all of my quizzes. I apparently managed to miserably fail all of my tests, and after something like that, it takes a lot of quizzes to bring it back up enough. Whatever. But moving on...

Christmas was good. No, make that great. Per usual, we (being me and my family) went up to North Carolina, only this time we had the wonderful addition of Patricia, and that always makes things better. The break from everything was wonderful, the rest of the family loved Patricia, and the presents were awesome. New Year's was pretty cool too. Fast forward through drive back and... home again.

This current semester didn't start out so hot. I had a really hard time concentrating and focusing in class, not to mention trouble sleeping at night. There were a few nights where I didn't sleep at all and even more nights where I was awake until about 5 in the morning. I finally resigned to getting some sleep drugs and that helped the sleeping issue, but the focusing is still a work in progress.

I also decided to switch over to dispatching full time (instead of labor pool), so my days are completely full. Class all morning, work all afternoon/evening, sleep all night. I know it's a bit crazy, but I'm loving the paychecks.

And finally, after much deliberation, I'm back to Plan A. For those of you out of the loop, Plan A, back at the beginning of my college career was: finish school, get married, go to medical school (preferably at Duke), live in the Carolinas. After my grades took a turn or two (or ten) down the crapper, that plan was thrown out the window. Plan B (which was devised before college, not after Plan A failed) was: finish school, get married, work for the police as a forensic investigator, maybe work for the FBI? But now, thanks to some help/ideas from coworkers/professors, Plan A is back in motion. With some modification of course. Now Plan A version 2.0 goes as such: finish school, get married, go to medical school in the Caribbean (preferably, for now, at Saba), move back to the US to practice. For those of you with your doubts about how reasonable and practical this plan is, just keep your pants on for a minute. There are several schools out there that are fully accredited and licensed to function as medical schools. For a school to be accepted as a legitimate medical school by US standards, they must meet certain requirements and be on the official International Medical Education Directory list (which can be found at https://imed.faimer.org). In the Caribbean, there are several real medical schools, however, many of them are still not so great. Out of all of those schools, there are four that are commonly known as the Big 4. They are (in my order of preference): Saba (www.saba.edu), St. George (www.sgu.edu), Ross (www.rossu.edu), and American University of the Caribbean (http://aucmed.edu). As of now, this is just a tentative order, and the order may be changing before I actually do anything (specifically for Ross, I'm staring to like it a little more). Some nice things about this new and improved plan are that the admission requirements are significantly lower than US med schools (some accept as low as a 2.3 GPA!), they cost a LOT less (St. George is the most expensive at 32,000 a year, Saba cheapest at 18,700 a year), not all require the MCAT to get in (although it is strongly recommended and I'll still be taking it), I can actually get into and afford these schools (unlike US schools), and finally, it's in the freaking Caribbean, that's cool no matter who you are!

So there you have it. The update on my life. I hope you enjoy it blogging world.