I’m a little past half-way through this course. My team and I (the entire curriculum save the exams is group work, and I have a good team; a really good team) have mutually agreed that we’ve hit the wall. We’re getting pretty good at working the system now; we’re routinely finishing our relatively complex group exercises hours before they’re due, and we’ve actually broken past the 82.5% barrier that’s been mentioned on the last two (we hit an 85% and a 90%!) and we’ve definitely come to realize that grades and points on these exercises are almost completely arbitrary. The instructor’s grading narratives bear little resemblance to the documents they’re allegedly grading, and the last one didn’t even feature complete sentences by the end.

We’re all tired of it, it’s starting to cause me to backslide into sickness after a couple of days of getting better (you see that hike/bike counter to the left going up, right?), and we have no compunctions about bailing 90 minutes early if we’ve finished things, even this ridiculous one today that was basically just putting together a schedule logic puzzle in Microsoft Project (hwaaak-ptooey!) and answering a bunch of of rote repetition questions in yet another PowerPoint (double hwaak-ptooey!) masquerading as a professional brief.

I grow weary of the academic environment. And of course, I’m still not off the hook for my “personal” briefing grade (we all get one for our turn at leading a presentation), since I got bumped to the last graded one. This bit doesn’t bother me (I taught high school – public speaking does not phase me in the least after that), but I like to get it out of the way early.

Still, my team leads the way in terms of grades and competition among the four, to the extent that there is such a thing. We legit rock.

There is, however, no reason this class needs to be an entire month long. It’s very tedious, is what I’m saying.

Today, as I alluded to a few paragraphs back, we bailed early after handing in our latest work product. As it was actually nice outside today, I decided to forgo the hotel gym recumbent stationary bike and return to The Anita C. Leight Estuary Center, a neat park down the road where I wandered around last Sunday afternoon, where I hiked a couple of miles along the trails through the woods and knocked out the first set of tasks for the new Pokemon Go special research thing along the way (I also got bit up by mosquitoes). Being out in the sun was nice, though – it felt pretty good, even with my horked up lungs and sinuses.

I am now sitting in my home away from home again, having consumed my dinner sandwich and worked an hour or so of review for this week’s “Celebration of Knowledge” (hwaak-ptooey! once again) on Friday morning. What’s left for me tonight is to pack my lunch for tomorrow (saving up that per diem!), one last spin on social media, then probably just settle in with a drink and my quite lovely anniversary gift Kindle and knock out a few more chapters of my current book.

…and hopefully not wake up two minutes before my alarm goes off tomorrow like I did this morning. Damn, that sucks.