a hectic but happy week

this past week was so hectic!  we've officially moved into the second half of the semester.  i know this because my fels course has been broken up into two halves: the accounting half, which we just completed and the budgeting half, which we've just begun.  i'm looking forward to the budgeting portion of class, but my one disappointment so far about this unit is that it seems too heavily focused on government budgeting with no real eye toward non-profit budgeting.  i hope we at least get some taste of the latter in the next six weeks.

having the beginning of the second part run into the end of the first was more stressful than i expected: we had our first day of our new budgeting class this past saturday and the final for our accounting class due this past sunday.  it was hard to think about our new unit and assignments this saturday when we were still working on our final accounting projects, which were group projects.  i have a lot to say about group projects, but i think i've said much of this stuff previously -- it gets challenging when only half of a group is committed to responding, communicating, and just plain timeliness, but we worked through it and handed our project in on time.  because there were many leader-y personalities in the group, i expected to take a backseat on the group management end, but i ended up becoming the de facto leader at some point, much to my own surprise.  anyway, it all worked out and hopefully, we'll have a grade we're happy about.

this week, i also had a team presentation in my discourse analysis class -- my classmate T and i presented on "repertoire and recontextualization" on thursday.  the presentation went pretty well and we got a perfect score, so that was good.  even though there are six or so weeks left in the semester, i find myself thinking about my final paper and looking forward to at least developing a good outline and beginning my work on it soon.  the thing i've missed most this past few months is doing research and writing a good academic paper.  i'm really looking forward to it.  i emailed my professor with some clarifying questions about the final assignment and once i get a response, i'll get started.

the one really exciting thing about this past week was that i got to spend time with a couple of people from my cohort.  last friday, i had coffee with one cohort-mate and we shared tons of news and insights.  it's so nice to reconnect.  and then just yesterday, another cohort-mate visited me at work for a few minutes.  our cohort has so much love for each other, but we don't see each other too much, so it was really lovely getting to hug these folks and listen to their news and chat about school and life things.

anyway, more later... for now, i'm off to work on my first budgeting homework assignment!