Author: Mackenzie Paradeis

We’re heading in to the home stretch now. I was a week or so late updating my office calendar in November, so instead of writing a month at the top I titled it “Home Stretch” and included everything from November 10th through mid-December. Having the last five weeks of this fall term all together where I can see them has been nice. I’m a big fan of efficient presentations, and that what this feels like. Not that it doesn’t have personality; my partner filled it with drawings of our cat Pepper at the start of the term, which still makes me smile even though the pictures are a little worse for wear now.

I’m at that point in this term now where I am operating like a well oiled machine. I’ve recovered from all of my earlier issues and setbacks and have turned my weekly time management schedule into both a science and an art. That ease and simplicity and peace is how I know it’s time to start a new term.

In all seriousness, I’m excited to be progressing through my senior year. Every day I’m inching closer to the goal of completing this program. There’s only a week left of this fall term and then I get to turn my attention to my winter break projects. This year, that means learning how to utilize the Godot game engine and hopefully finding a job for my post-graduation world. Life stays busy, but I don’t mind. I’m just glad to be here.

I’m going to be honest here, it’s been a rough ride for the last month or so.

I feel like I’ve been in one of those lovely life stages where everything is finding uniquely challenging ways to go wrong. It starts with a nasty bout of Covid that ran its course through my family in October. I had a lot of issues with fatigue and brain fog, in addition to a fever that didn’t want to let me out of its clutches. Unfortunately, this coincided with a stretch of time where I needed to be at my most focused in class. I distinctly remember telling my capstone project mates that my brain felt like soup during one of our planning meetings.

Fortunately, sickness doesn’t last forever, so after a couple of weeks I crawled out of my blanket nest and got back to business. I managed to keep up and meet the bare minimum while I was sick, but it left me a whole pile of advanced tasks to do once I felt better. I hit the ground running, only to be derailed by life at the worst time.

My extended family does a yearly women’s retreat around the beginning of November. I haven’t missed a single one since I was eligible to attend the adults-only Freedom Weekend, so I knew that I would have to get ahead in order to take the time off for relaxation. The final week of October was a mad rush to get all of my work done, and I was making reasonable progress. Unfortunately for me, my partner had a very scary medical emergency in the middle of the night on the 31st. Everything turned out okay, but I could have lived without the 4 AM ER visit. When everything settled back down, I threw myself back into work.

It was a frenzy of activity, and I think my desk was as full of post-it notes and research papers and assignment specifications as it’s ever been. I think I looked a little wide-eyed and wild whenever anyone happened to glance through the doorway of my office. But I got there, and I finished what I needed to get done.

I’d love to say that my early November has been less chaotic, but I’m not sure that’s true. So far this month has included an extended family gathering (wonderful and stressful), a presidential election (extremely stressful, not so wonderful), and my anniversary (purely delightful).

Life has been a lot recently, but I’m optimistic that things might calm down soon. And if nothing else, there’s only four weeks left of the fall term.