14. EXPEDITING THE PROGRAM

So this is the plan.

I spoke with the director of the cosmetology program yesterday, and told her that I wanted to finish the program much sooner than the 18 months that it takes for the evening students to complete. Since the daytime students are so far ahead in the material that they have already covered, it would be a diservice to me to try and catch up on my own without proper hands on instruction on the various techniques that they have already done and that the evening class is yet to do. I have to agree with this.

So the deal so far is this: around mid-April we are due to finish our classroom work and will be ready to start working in the salon. At that time, I will start coming on Monday mornings as well as the evening, and also on Friday mornings (there's no evening class on Fridays). This will give me another 12 hours each week, plus we are allowed to clock in 15 minutes earlier than our scheduled time, which I do every day, giving me an additional 1 hour per week presently, and another 1/2 hour for the 2 extra days that I will attend. After doing the math, it is feasible that I can complete the course in a year, rather than 18 months. I will still work in the office 3 days a week, and can see patients on weekends to supplement my income. I still have my shows that I have scheduled to do, so starting March 1st I will not be working on Mondays and Fridays and will use this time to sew inventory for my upcoming shows, and then when April rolls around, Mondays and Fridays will be used for extra class time. That's the plan.

Tonight we had another exam on the material that we studied with Ms. Ellie on design and form, etc. I was really surprised that I got 100% as well as the additional 10% for the workbook. The chapter I dislike the most is on pincurls and all kinds of weird styling that looks like a throwback from the 1940's. It just seems like a ridiculous amount of work for such a short lived style. Plus the chapter is over 50 pages long, and we were to have a test on it tomorrow, but Mr. Sanchez was kind enough to postpone it until Thursday.

We are now starting on the chemistry involved in hairstyling. Judging by the material, I feel like I'm back in college. I happen to love chemistry-it makes sense to me and I absolutely find it fascinating to learn how things work on a molecular level. This I don't mind studying and devoting a good deal of time to.

It seems Latisha has disappeared from the program. For someone making a second go-round, she has been absent for 3 exams and has missed over a week of class. The rest of us seem to be very dedicated. One other student and I (it turns out she is a bit closer in age to me than I thought-she has no kids so there are no worry lines, no frown lines, and not as many smile lines :)) show up every day at the same time with the same enthusiasm. As exhausted as I am from work, I still look forward to class.

I worked on Sunday, as I have a patient that lives fairly close by. Whenever stuff like the following happens, I just envision never having to do this again: I had an appointment to come to this patient's home at 10:00 AM to fill all his pill boxes with his medications. This guy is a nut for bridge. It turns out that when I arrived, he had just gotten a call to fill in as a player, and was running around his house like his butt was on fire, trying to get dressed and worrying that his caregiver hadn't shown up as of yet to drive him to the bridge hall. I told him to finish getting dressed, and that I would start on his pills. I finished "pouring" his medications into the little daytime boxes, which still had the lids up, when he announced that he had forgotten to take his morning meds and turned the pill box over to dispense the meds, not looking to see that all the containers were open. So now there are dozens of pills scattered all over the table and floor, I am standing there dumbfounded, and he decides to call his caregiver to tell her that I will be taking him to bridge and she didn't have to rush to get to his house. I ended up taking him to his bridge game (what could I do? The guy was out of control!) and then had to come back at 6:00 PM when he came home from playing 6 1/2 hours of bridge to clean up the medications and put them back in their proper places in the pill boxes.

There are times, like I tell my husband when he annoys the crap out of me, that I wish I had a bat that I could pull out of my purse like a switch blade, and hit him over the head with. This was one of those times. No "thank you", no "sorry I made a mess"-nothing. This is when I think about school with a smile.