I'm alive!

Gosh, it's been a while, hasn't it? Something like four weeks, in fact, which I think is the longest posting break in BigFlax.com history. But I have my reasons. #1, of course, is that between working full-time and going to school two nights a week, there's not much time to blog. And then #2 is that between working full-time and going to school two nights a week, there's not much worth blogging about, either.

To answer the obvious question first: school is going fine so far. The first exam in Intro to Psych is next week; I'm really looking to maintain as high a GPA as I possibly can, so I'm definitely shooting for As in these first two classes, which ought to be doable. Anyway, it's a start.

I've also been sick recently, so I spared you a week of "ohhh, this suuuucks" updates. I'm still shaking off something which first showed up on Friday the 15th, knocked me out over the next few days (to the point that I missed Monday and Tuesday of work that week, and only through sheer force of will dragged myself to class on Tuesday night), and has pretty much been lingering in sporadic cough and intermittently stuffy/runny nose form ever since. At this point I'm probably at 90-95% health, or at least 90-95% of my usual, which may or may not actually be "100% healthy," but the last 5% of illness has proven tough to shake. I could probably stand to sleep a little more, which would probably help, but it's hard. To get as much sleep as I'm "supposed to," I would need to go to bed around 11pm every night, which just. Isn't. Happening. I could barely get to bed by 11 during the period when I was getting up at 5:30 for work.

What else? Well, due to my combination of work and school commitments, and the fact that (also due in large part to same) I have watched pretty much no college basketball this year, I'm actually not going to run the Tournament Challenge, for the first time since 2000. Maybe if people want to get an ESPN group together or something just for bragging rights, that'd be cool, but I'm not feeling collecting money, organizing and updating brackets, etc. Just too much work, this year, with everything else going on. This news will undoubtedly please Alma and any other readers who give zero shits about college basketball, although it means I'm going to have to find something else to post daily about if I want to keep up my usual March volume. In 2006 I made 28 posts in March. 28! Please note that it is highly unlikely you will ever see me make 28 posts in one month ever again, for any reason.

This winter has been kind of soul-sucking, which may also have contributed to my lack of posting. Alma's car got stuck on a patch of ice a week ago Tuesday; I went up on Wednesday night and attempted to use some traction-creating plastic things I found at Target, but they didn't work. We ended up going to Ace on Saturday afternoon and getting an ice chopper, and Alma sat in the car while I chopped at the ice around the right front tire so that once I got part of it stripped away, she could try to back out of the space. It still took several attempts and I eventually realized that the problem was not just the ice behind the tire but in front of the tire as well, oddly enough. Alma took some pictures which maybe she'll post on her blog at some point. At any rate, that whole struggle was emblematic of the winter as a whole. It's just snowed a ton, and when it hasn't been snowing it's been really cold, except for like the one weird day when it wasn't. I couldn't be more ready for spring to get here, although I suspect we're not going to hit 60 degrees until about May 20th.

So that's what's been going on. Slogging through a shitty winter, working, and getting used to going to school again. Not much more to say than that, I suppose, but hopefully I can get back to posting a bit more often than once a month, lest you think I've gone all Matt Pearl on you.