One Down, Two to Go

Earlier this afternoon, I finished up my neuroanatomy final which officially brought my first year of PT school to a close.  I’ll tell you this: back when I walked into that first chemistry class in September of 2008, I don’t think I ever really expected it would go this far.  Yet, it did and it’s been awesome.  I don’t miss my old job at all (although I do occasionally miss getting my own paycheck) and despite the challenges of 90-mile round-trip commute everyday and a crapload of information to stuff into my brain, I never spent a second regretting my decision to go for it.

Which is not to say I’m not looking forward to having the summer off.  My brain is tired and needs a break, yo.

Here’s to a summer of fluffy books, mindless TV, and time spent relaxing in the sunshine.  I think I’ve earned it.

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In other news, you can now find my blog on Facebook!  ”Like” Running at Dawn over there for new post notifications and sporadic random updates.  It’s basically all the goodness of Twitter for those of you that aren’t into Twitter.

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Increasing the Awesome

(Title somewhat stolen from Sarah.)

In the spirit of, well, increasing the awesome in the universe, here are a few things that have been exceedingly spectacular lately:

• The knee is adjusting to the running spectacularly, just like my PT said it would.  By Sunday, it wasn’t even getting sore after doing my walk/run on it, and this week I’ve knocked it down to a 1/3 interval (one minute run, three minute walk) with no problems.
• The knee is also about 95% ok with doing yoga, which means I can go in, modify or skip just a few poses, and leave feeling like I just got my ass kicked in the best possible way.  Absolutely nothing beats that post-yoga limp noodle feeling.  I missed it.
• The sun is trying to come out!  Most of our days are still cloudy, chilly and damp, but over the weekend we had 12 glorious hours of sunny & almost 70.  Spring is on its way, even if it is taking its damn time.
• This tea mug, which I picked up in a little tea shop in Leavenworth a few weekends back.  It’s incredibly handy, holds two full cups of tea, and the built-in infuser and drip tray mean I never have to search for a tea ball or worry about it popping open or figure out what to do with it once my tea is done brewing.  Between this mug and the weather, my tea consumption has increased dramatically.
• I am less than two weeks away from being done with my first year of PT school.  I have no idea how that happened.  I have also now forgotten more anatomy then I ever thought I would need to learn.
• I am just four weeks away from going to France for our honeymoon, which is something I’ve wanted to do for just about as long as I can remember.  I am going to spend two weeks living on cheese, bread and wine and it is going to be glorious.

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My Life is NOT Revolving Around My Knee

Well, maybe just a little bit, but only because I really, really miss being able to go out and do something without worrying about how it’s going to feel the next day.  It’s not like I’m counting down to the surgery or anything.

OK, maybe I am.  A little bit.  (10 days!)

However, in between all of this knee stuff, I’ve been chugging through the beginning of my second semester of PT school.  In short, it’s going to be awesome, although it’s going to be a lot more work.  We’ve got four classes that are all obviously, directly relevant to the clinical work we’ll be doing after we graduate.  We’re starting to learn some treatment modalities and techniques as well as the how and when of using them.  We’re also seeing a lot of wound pictures.  Which is what happens when you have a wound care expert teaching one of your classes, I suppose.

(In that class, we have yet to get through an entire lecture without seeing a wound picture.  Some lectures have had more numerous and more grisly pictures than others, but there’s been at least one every class.  I was starting to think we were going to get through our diabetes lecture on Friday without seeing one, but then BAM!  Foot ulcer!)

(Which actually, was just a small picture and was totally not all that disturbing.  But it was still there.)

(Also, that class has convinced several of us that we have no desire to do wound care, ever.  God bless the people that spend their days cleaning out festering bed sores and hopefully I will never have to be one of them because: ew.)

We are also being absolutely drowned in reading.  I’m even finding myself doing the optional reading for my neuroanatomy class, because I think the optional textbook is really awesome and useful.  (Our primary textbook was written by a neuroscientist and the optional one was written by a physical therapist.  It’s actually really nice to get both perspectives on the material – one is insanely detailed and one is focused on what things mean clinically.)  I’m just glad that I can read pretty quickly, because I have no idea how I’d be getting through it otherwise.

Of course, while I’ve been keeping up on the daily reading, I haven’t been doing as good of a job with studying material as we cover it.  (Not that I’ve ever been good at that, but that’s a separate discussion.)  Which means that as Irwin will be spending his weekend preparing for and watching the Super Bowl, I’ll be spending my weekend studying neuroanatomy in preparation for Tuesday’s exam.  One of us certainly knows how to party, that’s for sure.

And with that…. back to the books.

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One Down, Five to Go

This news is a week old at this point, but: I successfully finished my first semester of PT school.  It was busy and I spent far too much time in my car getting to know the stretch of I-5 and I-405 between my house and Tacoma, but overall?  It was awesome.  I learned more about bones and muscles than I ever thought would fit in my brain, as well as how to find most of those bones on muscles on actual people.  I started doing background research for my capstone project and discovered that I find research articles on knee and ankle injuries and dynamic balance testing downright fascinating.  (No, seriously.  I did way more background reading than was strictly necessary to write our research proposal because I just couldn’t stop myself.)

The classes this semester were relatively mundane, since it’s all foundational knowledge we’ll need for the rest of the program.  We learned how to measure strength and motion, how to move dependent and disabled patients around, how to read and critique research and a TON of anatomy.  Next semester we get to dig into neuroanatomy, ambulation (gait analysis) and our first couple of treatment oriented classes.  Based on how quickly this semester flew by, I have a feeling that I’ll be facing summer vacation just as soon as this winter break is over.

Despite all the studying and driving, though, I am absolutely loving it.  This move, drastic as it may have seemed, was exactly the right one for me.  I come home excited about what I’m learning and when Irwin asks how my day was, the first thing out of my mouth isn’t a string of foul language.  Sure, it’s stressful, but not in the same way the old job was.  Someone asked me this weekend if I missed my old job at all and I didn’t even have to think about it: No, no I do not.  Not even a little bit.

I’ll be paying for PT school for most of the rest of my life, for sure, but it’s totally worth it.  On one hand, five semesters seems like an awful lot of school left to go, but on the other?  I’m really excited about what I’ll be doing in those five semesters, which somehow makes it all OK.

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An Inch of Snow

Last week, they started forecasting snow for the weekend.  Naturally, no one paid attention to it.  This is Seattle.  In November.  It’s 40 degrees outside.  There’s absolutely no way we’re going to get snow.  Maybe some flurries over the weekend, but nothing that was going to stick or be worth worrying about.  I figured that went double for me, since I didn’t have to be at school until 12:15 on Monday.  Even if we did, somehow, get real snow on Sunday night, surely it would be gone by the time I had to head out.  I refused to get concerned.

Then we got an hour or so of real flakes on Sunday, and while I still wasn’t too worried (the air temperature was still above freezing, so surely the ground isn’t anywhere near cold enough for it to stick), I said a silent prayer that it wouldn’t last very long because I had a test on Monday.  Wimping out of my drive to Tacoma just wasn’t an option.  If we had snow that stuck?  It could be a very ugly drive, which I just didn’t want to consider.  So I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the flakes ended without anything sticking and the flurries started.  Flurries never stick.  It was all going to be OK.

Of course, I woke up Monday morning to snow on the ground.  Apparently we got more real flakes overnight, but there was barely a covering.  Not enough snow to get worried about.  I headed to the gym like I planned and figured I’d just head down to school from there instead of coming home in between.  While I was doing my laps in the pool, though, I spied big, giant flakes falling down from the sky.  Crap.  Double crap.  My plan had been to swim for a half hour or so and then hit the weights for a while, but if there was snow falling?  I needed to get on the road ASAP.  So I jumped out of the pool, skipped the weights and was showered, dressed and on the road shortly after 10 a.m.  I had just over two hours to get to school.  Surely that would be plenty of time.

It wasn’t.  Some places the roads were legitimately bad and required slowing down to 30 mph or so.  However, there were several stretches where speeds were down to 5 mph because a lane was blocked from an accident or… well, for no good reason that I could see.  I left the gym at 10.  My checkout was at 12:15.  I got to campus shortly after 12:30.

Whoops.

Luckily, my professor was very understanding and happily rescheduled my test for the next day.  I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen victim to the weather, so I’d even have a partner to work with.  Of course, that meant I’d have to be back on campus on Tuesday.  It wasn’t supposed to get above freezing, which meant the inch of snow that was on the ground would still be there in the morning.  I wasn’t about to deal with another 3-hour trek down to Tacoma, especially not for a 9:30 a.m. class, so I made arrangements to stay with a friend near campus that evening.  I honestly hadn’t even considered what my trip home Monday night would have looked like.  I was just afraid of the drive down Tuesday morning.

We got another half-inch of snow Monday night, which meant we woke up Tuesday morning to the news that campus was closed and there were no classes.  So, it sort of turned out that I’d stayed down there for nothing, but at least I could drive home in broad daylight and not have to worry about it getting dark while I was on the road.  I figured it would take me a good 3-4 hours to get home, but I was home in 75 minutes.  Just 20 minutes longer than the drive would normally take me.  It wasn’t because the roads were in awesome shape – nothing had been salted, and while most of it was just wet there were most definitely some slick spots – but because there was almost nobody on them.  I cruised on home around 40 mph with no problems whatsoever.

While I was driving home, though, I heard reports of Monday night’s commute on the radio.  It was, in short, hellacious.  Thirty minute drives had turned into 6-hour treks, and some people were reporting, no shit, 12-hour trips to get home.  I wouldn’t have had it quite that bad, since my afternoon/evening drive is in the opposite direction of most of the traffic, but I’m guessing it would have taken me 4 or 5 hours to get home.

I feel like now is a good time to remind everyone that my commute is about 45 miles each way, and it’s 95% interstate highway.  I could walk that in 12 hours, and from what I heard, several people decided to do just that and left their car by the side of the road.

All this because of one inch of snow.  An inch.  That’s it.  Sure, we don’t have salt trucks or plows or the infrastructure to make the roads safe and happy with any snow on them, but I feel like an inch of snow shouldn’t be this much of a disaster, either.  I love a lot of things about Seattle, but how it deals with snow?  Is not one of them.  I was about ready to pimp myself out for a salt truck by the time I got to school on Monday, and the whole thing just really, really made me wish I still lived somewhere that could deal with this kind of weather.

I used to love snow.  Love it.  Now?  It fills me with a complete sense of dread.  I’m just hoping that any other snow we get this winter is limited to the four weeks I’m off school for winter break.  I refuse to consider the possibility that it could snow during finals week because, quite simply: oh hell no.

On the plus side, if you give college kids an inch of snow?  They’ll give you an eight foot tall snowman.

The hat is my favorite part.  It’s just brilliant.

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Not Dead! Just Studying.

Hello, there! I honestly have absolutely no idea where the past few weeks went. Grad school has rocked my world and kicked my ass in a hugely major way. Just when I think I’m starting to get into the swing of things and get caught up, I realize that I’m only at the tip of the iceberg. There’s always more reading or more studying or more thinking about studying to do. Our first test is tomorrow and I’ve spent the past week trying not to freak out while cramming what can only be described as an overwhelming amount of information into my brain. Seriously. If it’s a muscle, nerve, bone or blood vessel in your body somewhere south of your hips? I need to know everything about it. It’s… a little insane.

Given that, right now would be the perfect time for me to have the, “Oh dear lord, what have I done?” thought and start wishing that I’d never left my crazy-making cushy job in IT. Yet, somehow? I haven’t. Not for one second. I don’t miss my old job at all, and as worried as I’ve been about trying to learn all of this stuff, I’ve been loving it. I don’t think I’ve ever studied this hard for anything in my entire life, and while my brain is threatening to melt down and start running out of my ears, I keep going. I take one more look at the ligaments of the ankle or go through just a few more muscle flashcards and realize that… hey! I’m actually learning this stuff! I might just get it all figured out, after all.

After spending so long in jobs that did absolutely nothing for me, I can’t even describe what it’s like to be doing something that I’m genuinely excited about. Yes, the commute kind of blows and some of the days are long and I’m rediscovering the depths of my love for Diet Coke as a caffeine delivery mechanism, but it’s all totally worth it. Because last week I felt up my lab partner’s foot and could identify all of the bones in there and it was one of the most fun school- or work-related things I’ve ever done. I’m exhausted when I get home but half of the time I can’t stop talking about what I did in class or what I’ll be doing the next day or later that week. (After we get through this round of anatomy tests, we’re doing a gait mechanics unit, which is all about how people walk. I realize that most of y’all are sitting there going, “you’re going to spend three weeks talking about how people… walk? Really? Three weeks? On walking?” but I think it’s going to be just about the coolest thing ever.)

This is all to say: things are busy. Insanely so. But I’m loving every minute of it and wouldn’t have it any other way. This whole crazy “go back to school to get a totally different job” plan may be one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.

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Wedding! School! Wedding! School!

Well, here we are, a week out from the wedding and the start of PT school, and it’s starting to feel a little crazy. I spent most of last week running around picking up a bunch of things for the wedding and trying to figure out the commute to school. Objectively, I know that we’re in a good spot, we have all of the major things covered, and we still have plenty of time to get everything done (especially since Irwin’s taken this week off of work). However, that doesn’t mean it feels any less crazy or frantic inside my head. I’m blaming the fact that even though Irwin has tons of time this week, I don’t. Here’s what my coming week looks like:

• Wednesday: Manis & pedis with the bridal party, bachelorette party
• Thursday: Wedding luncheon and rehearsal
• Friday: PT school orientation
• Saturday: Wedding!
• Sunday: Relax
• Monday: School

So, yeah. Let this be a lesson to you: If you are planning a wedding and starting grad school at the same time, check the calendars of all the schools you apply to so it’s not all in the same week.

On the plus side, I did get a lot done last week, even if it felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I picked up all of the stuff that we need to put our out-of-town bags together, I got the seating chart and escort cards all done, and I figured out the details of my commute to school.

That last one is one that’s been hanging over my head for quite some time. See, school is 45 miles away, which is a distance I’d rather not drive to and from every day, five days a week, if I can help it. So we figured I’d take the bus down there. Which was a good plan, except the bus stops in Tacoma are a good 3-4 miles from school, and campus is located such that it would take another 2-3 bus transfers (and about 30-45 minutes) to get myself there. No good. So an idea was born: I’d drive my car down to school on Monday mornings, then leave it parked in Tacoma during the week. I could bus down there and back and then drive myself to and from campus. Irwin and I figured we could work with one car up here during the week, so it just left the question of when he’d have to drop me off and pick me up from the bus station. Oh, and the minor detail of whether or not there would actually be an appropriate place to park my car overnight in Tacoma. Minor detail.

I was going to have to drive down there and scope things out, which is something I kept putting off because: ew. A 90-mile round trip recon mission? Surely I had better things to do, like study my medical terminology or worry about some sort of wedding-related stuff. Plus, I was sort of afraid that if I checked it out, I’d discover that there was some reason that the plan wouldn’t work at all, putting us back at square one and leaving me with the distinct possibility of a lot of driving, which: ew. So I lived in happy ignorance, assuming it would all work out just peachily and if nothing else, I could scope it out when I was down there for orientation.

Then this week, I got motivated. I decided I was just going to do it, and the fact that Tuesday brought a gorgeous sunny day where Irwin offered to trade cars with me totally sealed the deal. Driving down to Tacoma in crappy weather? Not so fun. Taking the convertible sports car out for a drive on the freeway on a gorgeous day? Well, that’s a totally different story. So I headed on down to Tacoma. I confirmed that the bus stop did indeed have an appropriate parking place for my car (there’s a huge garage right there – free to park in and slightly more secure-feeling than an open lot) and proceeded to figure out how to get to campus. It’s an easy 15-minute drive to school, and when I got there I spent some time walking around campus. UPS is a tiny, tiny school with an adorable campus that’s even smaller than CWRU’s.

I love that all of the buildings look like historic brick structures, even though they’re all relatively new.

Well, all of them except for the current home of the PT/OT programs, which are in the last building on campus to get rebuilt/renovated.

That’s OK, though, because PT is getting a new home! Just across the way from this building is the construction site where they’re putting up a new health sciences building. It’s scheduled to be done next fall, which means I’ll get to spend most of my program in there. Talk about your good timing.

After Tuesday’s successful recon trip, I decided to go one step further and do a dry run of my transit journey down there. I looked up the bus schedules and discovered that it would be really easy for Irwin to pick me up and drop me off. There’s a stop right by his office, and most mornings he can just drop me off on his way to the gym. On my late class days, I’ll be getting back there right around the time he normally leaves work. I’ve got two days a week where I’ll be back up here early (assuming I leave campus right after class), but I can just walk over and take his car for the afternoon, picking him up later. The only really ugly day is on Friday, when I have to be in class by 8 a.m. Which means I have to be on a bus by 5:45. Naturally, this was the day that I opted to do my dry run.

We won’t talk about what time I got up, or about the fact that it was still very much dark when I did. We’ll just say that it was a successful trip down and back and that, hey! It gave me a great chance to take some cool night pictures while I was waiting for the bus.

So, yeah, things feel crazy, but they’re really under control. As much as I’m looking forward to this week (because it will be a ton of fun!), there’s a part of me that’s just hoping to survive it.

Six days to the wedding, eight days to school. Totally doable.

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The Rest of the News

Man, I totally left all you guys hanging, didn’t I?  I did hear from UW with the mail on Saturday.  On one hand, this made me very, very happy, what with yesterday being one of those no-mail holidays and all.  On the other hand, my enthusiasm was quickly diminished when I saw they’d just sent me a plain standard letter-sized envelope.  Big envelopes equal good news, right?  Which means that small envelopes….

While it wasn’t horrible news, it wasn’t great news, either.  I didn’t get in, but I had made their list of alternates.  However, they normally admit about 30 alternates into their program, and I’m number 62.  While it’s possible I could get in?  It’s not looking very likely.  I figure I’ll wait until the acceptance deadline for UPS to see what happens, but I’m not holding my breath on anything.

This is not necessarily bad news.  UPS also has a great program, and there are a few things about how they’ve structured it that I actually like better than UW’s program (now that I’ve looked at it).  I think it’ll be awesome, and it’s something that I’m genuinely excited about, even if it doesn’t quite line up with my original plan.  However, because it wasn’t part of the original plan, there are a few somewhat important details that I hadn’t quite fully thought through or looked into.

Detail 1: It’s 45 miles away.  That is one hell of a commute.  That’s an hour (one way!) with no traffic and odds are pretty good that there will be traffic.  The Boy and I have been brainstorming ideas, ranging from ways to make the available transit options work for me to finding an apartment that I can stay in down there during the week.  I’m guessing we’ll go back and forth on this about 47 different times between now and the start of the semester.

Detail 2: Speaking of the start of the semester… they’re on semesters.  Not quarters.  You know who’s on quarters?  UW and pretty much every other school around here.  Which means while I figured UPS would be on quarters, too, I never actually checked.  You know what the big difference between semsters and quarters is?  Fall semester starts about 4 weeks earlier than fall quarter does, which makes my first day of class Monday, August 30.  Two days after the wedding.

This one is killing me, because it’s something that I totally could have avoided had I done about 2 minutes of research back when we got engaged.  Clearly it never actually crossed my mind that I might be going to UPS – I think I figured I’d either get in to both places or not at all.  And it’s not like I didn’t spend any time reviewing UW’s program – I’ve been practically living on that web site for the past year, and I knew just about everything there was to know.  What classes I’d be taking.  What the overall format of the program was.  What I had to do to get in.  What last year’s entering class profile looked like.  When school started.  I just assumed UPS would be pretty much the same, which… it’s not.

Which isn’t an entirely bad thing, as I’ve mentioned.  It just makes the calendar for the end of August a little… busy.  We did briefly toy with moving the wedding up a couple of weeks, but some of our main vendors wouldn’t be available if we did that and I am not about to start all over on this whole thing.  We’ll just make it work as-is and do our big honeymoon trip next summer instead of right after the wedding.  No problem.

If only I was that calm about it.  All of the above, combined with some crappiness at work got to me last night.  I felt icky and awful and tired and couldn’t eat and was in bed at 8:30 pm.  I wasn’t asleep then, mind you – I wound up watching Olympic coverage until midnight or so – but I was in bed because I had just hit my limit on what I was going to deal with for the day.  I’m feeling a little better today – it’s not like any of these concerns need solutions today.  They’re big things to worry about, but we’ll figure it all out sometime in the next six months, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned a very important lesson in all of this – if you have a backup plan, just spend a few minutes to see if it’ll work how you think it’ll work.  Just in case it becomes The Plan.

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Woo. Hoo. Bitches.

As we’re nearing the time when I should be soon finding out about whether or not I’ll get to go to PT school next year, I’ve been feeling the crazy creeping in.  Yesterday?  I almost left early to go home before class and check the mail, to see if there was anything in there.  The odds of there being something?  Very, very tiny.  But we’re approaching the time when those odds should be going up every day, so I wanted to look.

I didn’t leave early, and it turned out to be the wise choice because there wasn’t anything in the mail yesterday.  Which was OK – I wasn’t realistically expecting there to be, but was just sort of optimistically hopeful.  Maybe tomorrow.  Or the next day.  Or the day after that.  But soon, right?  Please?

This morning I was sitting at my desk at work, once again banging my head against the wall on some SharePoint stuff (oh, yes, I’m back in the SharePoint stuff and it’s joyous as always) when my phone rang.  The number wasn’t one I recognized, and it was from an area code south of here.  Normally I don’t pick up unrecognized numbers, especially if I’m at work and in the middle of something, but for some reason I did.  Which was the right choice.

It was my second choice PT school, calling to let me know I’d been accepted into their program.  I didn’t even know what to say, I was just surprised and amazed and, if we’re being honest here, relieved.  She asked me if I had any questions (which, I didn’t, because I was so not prepared for the chance to ask them) and suggested that I set up a campus tour, since I hadn’t already.  I felt a little bad because when I said I hadn’t visited them yet, she said, “Oh, you’re local – you’re probably hoping to go to UW.”  Which… is true, and I’m guessing they get a lot of that, especially since UW is a public school as compared to their private school, so for locals UW is about a third of the cost.

(That reason, plus the fact that commuting to Tacoma would be a gigantic pain in the ass – it’s an hour each way without traffic, and there will be traffic – is why I’d vastly prefer going to UW.)

I was surprised at how excited I was to hear I’d gotten in, especially for a school I wasn’t planning on going to if I could help it.  However, hearing that I got into one place certainly boosts my confidence that I’ll get into the other.  And, if I don’t?  At least I know I’ll be going somewhere in the fall, which is awesome.  And, if I don’t get into UW for some reason?  I’m really, really glad I got this news first.

February’s shaping up to be a pretty awesome month, so far, and 2010 isn’t doing a half-bad job either.  Now all we need is for UW to get their word out, and I’ll be all set.

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The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

Today is the deadline for my physical therapy school application.  For the longest time, the one last thing that was hanging over my head was the application essays.  Over this past weekend, once I was finally free of any obligation to study for my fall classes (since they were over), I got them done.  The Boy and a few other friends read them over, I did some editing and rewriting, and then got them to a spot where my review committee was happy with them.  Then, on Sunday afternoon, I double-checked that everything was entered correctly, handed over a chunk of change, and clicked “Submit.”

And now?  Now we wait.  Until mid-February, which just seems ages away.  I know it’ll go fast – after all, next week is Christmas and then once I get back from that trip I’ll only have a week until my spring classes begin and I’m sure the first six weeks of the quarter will fly by, especially since I’ll have wedding stuff to keep me busy as well.  This week, though?  There’s no school, no application to worry about… nothing.  It’s the most free time I’ve had in months, and it’s making me a little nutty.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about “have applied to PT school” that’s very different than “going to apply to PT school.”  I think it boils down to now that I’ve sent the application in, it’s suddenly much more real.  Before?  It was an idea.  A plan.  I thought about what I might do if things didn’t go according to plan, but it was all still purely hypothetical.  Now?  Things can go wrong.  The plan can go totally out the window.  I could not get into either of the programs that I applied to.  Failure is now a totally real possibility.

Do I honestly think I’ll have a huge problem getting in?  Not hugely.  My grades and GRE scores are above the averages for the program, and I’m hoping the fact that I’m a “non-traditional student” (i.e., not 22 and fresh out of college) will also work in my favor.  While the overall odds look scary (only 1 out of every 10 applicants is admitted!  yikes!), there’s a better than average chance that I’m on the right side of them.

Still.  My past 15 months of work has been bundled up into an electronic file and sent off to two separate committees that will look at it and evaluate it and decide if I make the cut or not.  To say it’s a little scary is an understatement – if I let myself think about it like that, it’s downright terrifying.  I’ve done my best to use the essay to convey just how much I want this and why I think it’s a brilliant plan, but I’m not the final judge on it.  I just have to take a deep breath and trust that I’ve done all I can up to this point and that it’s enough

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