Puddintopia

OK, so it appears that Operation Graduate School was somewhat short-lived, as I ended up only taking the one class.  Sure, I earned that ever important “A”, again demonstrating my life-long psychological need to attain acceptance and validation though my GPA.  After one semester, though, I realized that as the father of 3 children (and with a fourth bun in the proverbial oven), perhaps the amount of time and energy required to attain a Master’s degree that would ultimately have a very limited effect on either my job title or bottom line could be better spent on something else.

As it turns out, that time is, in fact, better spent nowadays in the nightly exercise of kitchen clean-up while simultaneous feeding prunes to an infant, reminding a very talkative 3 year-old that you need to *stop* speaking in order to consume food, and preventing the breakout of WrestleMania 67′s Battle Royale on the family-room love seat.  So, my options were a) continue with grad school or b) prevent household Armageddon.

As an extra bonus, though, less time spent working on grad school means that I still have a little time each week to dedicate to Arrogant Bastard I mean, you’ve got to have priorities, right?

pud’n

I hadn’t written a new post for Puddintopia in nearly two years.  Things have happened since then, lots of things.  Hell, I’ve changed jobs and we’ve moved again.  So like I said, lots of things.  I told my mother (and only regular reader) last week that Puddintopia was on hiatus.  She whacked me in the shoulder and suggested I was perhaps “full of it”.  She had a point.  My hiatus was beginning to appear rather more like full-blown cancellation.

The long and short of it is, I’ve been thinking getting back on the horse here for a while, but the site needed a whole redesign.  I have neither the time nor energy for a full redesign, and I also wanted the whole thing to work differently so that entries followed more of a web-logging standard.  By that I mean shorter, more frequent entries archived by month.  So I put down my html/php/css coding tools and went out and picked up MovableType.  I suppose this is what guys in construction feel like when someone else finishes their basement.  Nonetheless, it’s nice to know that while I’ll probably make little tweaks here and there to the layout, nothing has to change.  Which is good, really, since I’m about to start graduate school.

That’s right, boys and girls, puddin is headed back to school.   I found a program at Purdue University that offers the same accredited courses that a resident student would take, but offered online for working professionals.  So, watch out children, puddin is going Back to School.

Of course, that’s part of why I’ve decided do this now too.  I’m intent on providing a day-to-day account of the trials and tribulations of a near 35-year old who’s got three kids 5 and under trying to pick up a highly technical Master’s of Science in Engineering.  So buckle up, ladies, I’m sure this will be fun for at least 2 or 3 days.  Until then, I’m proud to offer you Puddintopia II: Chronicles of a Middle-Aged Grad Student.