Give up? No way!

I almost gave up on this article I've been trying to write.  I've rehashed it from a couple of different angles, none of which seemed to work.  There was a soft deadline last Monday for submission and I sent in one "reflective" article, but I wanted my first publication to be a bit more meaty.  It's a student edition of the journal, so I'm hoping they're easy on us.  Anyway, even though it's passed the deadline, I tried one more time to hash this thing out.  I think it worked.  I'm going to email it in and see.  Crossing fingers...

After a crappy day on Friday (so bad I couldn't even blog about it then), I did have some good news.  I got an email asking for me to do a repeat presentation I did last year for some county people.  Yeah! Oh, it's the little things we ABD's get excited about.  

So why was my Friday so bad?  Well, several of our students have left the program, yet are still on our program roster.  I send an email before every semester to tell advisor and B who is not registered.  Apparently this goes partially ignored.  As she said "we got caught with our pants down".  Let me clarify... "SHE" got caught w/ her pants down.  They are either to be officially on a LOA or kicked out of the program.  Some she couldn't get a hold of and left them dangling on the roster.  Hmm...not kosher.  We had a lot of graduates last semester and our numbers have DROPPED.  So she went on and on about how she won't have a job, budget cuts, another collateral faculty is rumored to get the boot, etc.  I feel her pain, but don't blame me for you trying to pad the enrollment.  Geez!  

So I was getting sort of the short end of the stick, sitting on the floor, yes floor, of her office filling out paperwork to drop students from the program (had to be done NOW).  I looked at my watch and....4:05.  It was my turn to get my kids off the bus (at 3:30).  I RAN to my office to call my friend.  Kind of puts the rest of the bs in perspective.  

Post script:  kids were fine; bus driver took them back up to the school and my friend was able to pick them up from the office.  Advisor must have felt mildly bad; posted a nice comment to my edublog (barf).  I'm becoming a cynic.