mood:
listening: blackbraid - sacandaga
weather: rainy, humid
time: 13:09

well last weekend i left you all saying that i would probably have some big updates to talk about and i was Right.. unfortunately it's not really the news i wanted to hear but it's not exactly bad news lol i did have quite a difficult time the last 2 days calming tf down. i'm not really sure how to explain everything that went wrong without explaining to you how everything works but basically i got fucked over Very badly by some administrative stuff that happened at work. thankfully my official "out" date is january 4th but i can be cleared to move before then as long as i get my clearing papers fast enough. as soon as i get them you bet im gonna SLAM that shit hard as i possibly can so hopefully i can be on terminal leave before christmas and not have any loose ends to tie off.

that same night i found out all that stuff i had come home and i was finally settled down (i was very mad lol) i got an email from my school with my tuition bill and i was confused because i couldnt figure out what was going on with my fafsa. it turns out i filled out the one for the 2024 school year instead of 2023. why the fuck is that even an option? who on earth is filling out the 2024 fafsa in october 2022??? this plus the fact my GI benefits still haven't rolled in yet were stressing me OUT yall!!!! i shot an email to the financial aid people explaining my fuckup and they were really cool about it and told me i could still submit the correct fafsa form.

another problem i'm having is waiving the insurance for school because obv i don't want to be charged for it. right now i'm under a specific insurance for my job but i'll be losing that as soon as i'm no longer in this job- but since i'm going to be getting va healthcare when i get out there's a brief lapse where i have to wait for it to start. i still have pletny of time to wait on waiving the healthcare but yeah you see what i mean it's lots of Little things like that adding up that make me explode.

but for now everything is taken care of, i have a few more questions i need to email about and try to steer things back on track. my brother and i joke a lot about how ouor family has a bad luck curse or something so usually i'm prepared for the absolute worse case scenario. i guess i'm just extra sensetive with this stuff because i'm hinging a lot of my immediate future on being able to go to school. this stuff like enrolling into college is completely foreign to me despite having done it once before, i'm still figuring out everything on my own. i'm also really bad at badgering people to make sure my stuff is taken care of, i dont like coming off as being naggy or anything but as i mentioned up above with that administrative stuff going wrong? that happened because i /assumed/ ppl were doing their jobs like they were supposed to and i ended up slipping through the Cracks. this job has kind of put me in the mindset of i need to touch everything to make sure it's there.. does that make sense lol

finally got the email from my school this week about getting advising appointments/etc figured out so that was also a really big relief. took all the placement tests that i needed to take and bombed all of them which i guess isn't a bad thing as thats just what placement tests are for. i was only able to answer 13 out of the 40 questions for the math placement test and i got 11 of those 13 right, 2 of them were ones that were kind of beyond my range and i had kind of just guessed at and the rest of the questions i didn't answer were all calculus and trig which i have Zero experience with.

i was also able to do a little bit better on the chemistry placement test than i originally thought i would, there was a lot of stuff that looked familiar to me but i didn't really understand so i avoided putting an answer down for them just because i really feel like i need to build a base layer for everything before trying to jump directly into stuff, especially now that i'm considering doing an environmental science degree and i'm sure there will be a lot of things that are probably not that advanced to other people but are extremely advanced to me. but thats why i've been self-tutoring because i have to get to that point one way or another and there's no use sitting here lamenting over my poor education.

which brings me to something i want to highlight... in case you haven't seen it already i added a page under "etc" where you can access learing resources. i specifically made this for ex homeschoolers who feel like they didn't get a good education but obviously anyone can get something out of the resources that i listed. there's a spot for academic resources and a spot for social or other resources that don't fall under the tutoring category because i feel like that's a big thing that homeschoolers miss out on. a lot of homeschoolers did have some type of homeschool group or co-op but even then your social sphere is extremely small regardless of these groups so i feel like i wasn't able to develop socially in a lot of ways as a kid and it left me feeling pretty stranded here as an adult. if you have anything that you think might fit there, shoot me a message either here on my neocities profile or on one of the contact points under my contact page.

im already planning a new site layout. maybe some people think it's excessive to change it so frequently but i think it's probably the most fun part of having a personal site is being able to change it however/whenever you want. keeps it fresh and stuff. i really like how a lot of old frame-based sites were pretty compact and small in their layouts but i feel like that doesn't really work for the content that i have on this site and its better suited for blogs or mostly text-based websites. so i have plans to rework the layout a little bit and make it to where it's easier to see the actual Content on pages but there's a lot of stuff i need to fix/undo because tbh this whole layout is kind of held together with duct tape lol

at the same time im also starting to feel art inspiration Slowly return back to me. so it's hard trying to decide between what to work on, writing outlines, redoing my layout, drawing or reading. i'm trying to soak it all in because i know once school starts i'll probably be in over my head a little bit. there's probably going to be a month where i dont do anything except fully focus on what's happening in my life bc i feel like that's the easiest way for me to get over huge amounts of stress... getting used to living in a new town, getting my pets adjusted to a new place, getting adjusted to a new pattern of life.. getting used to doing school again!!!!! it's been 7 years since i last went to school. that's so weird for me to think about.

yesterday i was looking at a few websites pertaining to radiowave stuff and i really like seeing all these websites that are so simplistic and still being updated by these old guys who are just really passionate about solar weather, radio, radar, etc. it got me thinking about how eventually these people will be gone and what will happen to their websites? who will carry on their passions? then today just a little bit ago i went to look at the website wise-old-man for an html tutorial to send to a friend when i saw that the site was down. "wise old man's help pages" was run by dave thomson. he was an army vet born in 1931 and his website was full of useful html/css/javascript tips and tutorials that were really great for beginners.

he first built this site in 1997 and the most recent capture of it being online is from january 2022. i referenced this site a lot when i was younger and even for building stuff on neocities. i cant say anything for sure what happened to him or the site. you can view the archived version here if you want to read about him and look at his tutorials.

i dont know, it just got me thinking about how people talk about living on through the traces we leave online. theres the age old saying of "the internet never forgets" but i dont know i'm just spending a lot of time thinking about digital immortality and if it's really immortality like we think it is because there has to be some kind of a limit to it right? either way i'm glad that the wayback machine has a lot of mr. thomsons pages still archived so people can still look at them if his site never comes back online. i'm thankful for internet archivists/historians who take the time to record and remember stuff that most people wouldn't think is important because to somebody it is.

right now i'm rotating cats jumping on my desk, simon keeps getting up here and i'll kick him off just for margot to take his place and rinse and repeat. margot keeps getting stuck behind my monitor so i don't like her being up here and simon's very insistent of sitting on the keyboard which makes it hard for me to finish writing this. so i guess im gonna wrap things up, hopefully im able to get a lot of shit done this week but we'll see... gotta try and get this mess settled before things start shutting down for the holidays. anyways idk how to end these posts it always feels awkward. see ya