Record Breaking Week

I'm a guy who likes to keep records. I like to keep track of things and see when I can break them. Like keep track of how many dates I can go on in a semester, or how few hours of sleep I can run on without crashing, or how many hours I can clock in at work in a week, stuff like that.
Well, Sunday, Nov. 8th began a week in which I would break 3 personal records. (And some how manage to survive the week relatively unscathed.)

All of the records had to do with work, I would set a new record for the most hours clocked in during a school week, the fewest hours of sleep required to function for a full day, and the most nights worked in a row.

Previous records

Most hours worked during a school week: 24:58 hours

Fewest hours of sleep yet still able to function for the whole day: 3:05 hours

Most night shifts in a row worked: 3 nights

New records

Most hours worked during a school week: 37:01 hours

Fewest hours of sleep yet still able to function for the whole day: 2:40 hours

Most night shifts in a row worked: 5 nights

Now, you might ask, "How did that happen?" It wasn't too difficult actually. Going into the week I knew that it was going to be a busy with work, but that just seemed to be the way that everything fell in place.

I normally have 20 hours, but this week I had to fill in for traffic for people who were training for intersection traffic, so that's 4 extra hours. Then I did night watch one day which is another 4 hours. Then two people specifically asked me if I could sub for them on Saturday, so that's two more 4 hour shifts. (Actually the one guy had an 8 hour shift that he wanted to give me, but I said that I could only do half of it. Otherwise I would have had 12 hours on that Saturday. :\ He found a sub for the other 4 hours though. )

So, if you've done the math, you'd see that that is 16 more hours that I normally don't have. So, that makes 20+16 which equals 36, and then an extra hour is time added up from the beginning of shifts, because the four hour shifts are really more like 4 hours and ten minutes, because I get there a little early to set up and get into position. But anyway, that is how I managed to get 37 hours in a single week.

How did I end up only getting 2 hours and 40 minutes of sleep though? Well on Tuesday night I was working night watch and that goes from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. Then I went to night watch breakfast which adds another half hour or so to that. Then also, Tuesday night was a mess as far as weather goes, it was cold, raining, and windy, because of the nearby tropical storm, so I got drenched, from both the rain and my sweat because I was wearing a raincoat which doesn't breath.

So, yeah I was sweaty, nasty and cold, not a good combination. Since I wasn't really super excited about going to bed like that I decided to get a shower after I got back from nightwatch breakfast. I got back from nightwatch breakfast at 3:35 a.m. and then hopped in the shower to get clean. After my very hot, refreshing shower I snuggled in bed and set my alarms for 6:30.

Right after setting my alarm I noticed the time, 3:50 a.m. Then I thought to myself, "So, you basically have two and a half hours to sleep before you have to get up again to go to breakfast then traffic, then classes." "Also, you have classes until 1, and then work from 1 until 4. So, if you do get a nap it won't be until later in the afternoon. And even then, you have to study for your big Pentateuch test tomorrow, and then your Greek test the day after. So, you probably won't get a nap at all."

I wasn't able to get a nap, but by God's grace he allowed me to stay awake for all my classes and chapel, and even that afternoon when I was studying for my tests. It took some doing, but God did it. By 9 that night I looked pretty rough. I was so looking forward to going to bed that night it wasn't even funny. (Even though it was only going to be for 3 and a half hours because I worked that night too.) I went to bed that night right after prayer group at 10:45 and by the time the 11 o'clock bell rang I was already deep in slumber. And when I woke up at 2:30 to go to work again, I actually felt refreshed and ready to go. I think that somehow the Lord compacted 7 hours of sleep into those 3 and a half. :)

Then I was tried, but still fine for that whole day until I was able to get a glorious, full 7 and a half hours of sleep that night. It was amazing!

Then, finally working the night shift for 5 days in a row. This isn't nearly as intricate as the previous paragraph, but that's good. Anyway, I normally work Sunday night, Monday night, and Wednesday night. But I subbed for a guy for the previous Saturday night, which gave me Sat, Sun, and Mon nights in a row. Then I worked night watch on Tuesday night, so that connected Sat, Sun, and Mon nights with Wednesday night, making Sat, Sun, Mon, Tues, and Wednesday nights all in a row. I figured it out, and I got about 18 hours of sleep in those 5 nights put together, averaging out to be about 3:36 hours of sleep a night. A bit rough, but doable.

Well... All in all, a very memorable week. Busy, but good. (And to tell you the truth, I've been busier with school work some weeks.) And don't feel sorry for me, I bring this upon myself. If I didn't want to work 5 nights in a row, I'm quite sure that I probably could have gotten a sub, but I didn't because I wanted to see what working 5 nights in a row feels like. But yeah, don't feel sorry for me, I love my job. I wouldn't give up this job for any other job on campus.

This is Tim. I hope that you enjoy your night's sleep.

Thanksgiving Break!

I am so glad that it is Thanksgiving break.

At the time of this writing, I am in a vehicle packed with 8 college students on the freeway heading south. Heading down to Woodardsville where we will stay for the 6 days that comprise the Thanksgiving break.

For the past two weeks I've really been struggling to keep my head above the school work waters. By God's wonderful grace I have been able to hol

d things together until now, but I'm not sure how much longer I could have lasted. I know that God planed for this break and He's going to use this time to allow me to recharge and refresh.

There are several factors that have made these past two weeks quite stretching. First, Greek really seemed to pick up the pace and it's been taxing to devote the time to understand the lessons and learn the vocab. Not to mention the fact that we meet 4 times a week, so basically, I am having to spend probably about an hour of my study time every evening working on Greek homework alone. At least I am also taking Logic, which takes almost no time to study for. Logic has a really nice setup because if you have an "A" in the class, then you don't have to turn in the homework, which is super nice because, I can understand the concepts when he gives the lectures in class, so I don't need to spend any time outside of class doing Logic problems.

The other thing that has been taxing on my time has been work. I'm not really sure quite how it happened, but for the past 4 weeks I've had consistently more than 20 hours. This past week I had 31, and the week before that I had a record breaking 37 hours. (I have a different blog post dedicated to that week.) But the point is, I've had a lot of work recently, which has been taking away from my time and my sleep.

Last week was one of the hardest week that I've been through in a very long time. I honestly never even considered suicide, but I did think about how easy it would be to just go down to west gate--that's where public safety keeps all their equipment and stuff--and taking one of the guns and just simplifying my life by a great deal. And I think about how wonderful it would be to be in heaven, and not have to worry about school, or relationships, or anything anymore. I would be in heaven, and I would see Jesus, and I would be able to sing wonderful praises to his name. I would be able to sing with a voice far more beautiful that I could even imagine. It would be amazing.

But then I stop myself, and get back to work. Knowing that if God wanted me to take the easy way out then he would allow me to somehow die in a tragic accident or something. I definitely would not take my own life.

But, to the point. I was feeling really tired, frustrated, and just plain feeling down one evening when I was coming back from studying at the library. And on my way in I checked the night mail pile like I always do, not that I expect anything, but just incase. And to my surprise I had a small note. So, I opened it and it was a note from Sarah, just telling me that she was praying for me, and that she knew that I had been having a hard time with work and people and other stuff. I seriously almost cried when I read that note. I plopped down in my chair at my desk and prayed to God and thanked Him for the amazing friends that He has blessed me with.

That one short note brightened my whole week. Just to know that I'm not going it alone.

So yeah, I've been burned out, and this break is going to be an amazing time to recharge.

Looking forward to it!

School update

 Well, this is my first time posting a real post via the E-mail feature, so we'll see how it goes.

 

I haven't written anything on here since school started so I'll start all the way from the beginning when I came up to BJ for IST (In Service Training). All public safety workers have to come back to school early for training, 1 week for freshmen, and 2 weeks for returning students. So, as a returning student I came up to school in the middle of August to beginning my training. Even though I worked over 120 hours in that 2 week period before school, I wasn't nearly as busy as I am when school is in session. I checked out a few books from the Library to read in my spare time. All of the books that I read were beneficial in at least some respect (non-fiction books). My favorite though, was The Five Love Languages which was recommenced to me by a friend during the summer.

 

Although I was greatly enjoying absence of school work, I was still excited for school to start up. Classes started well, albeit extremely fast. I can remember that every semester it seems that after only one week of classes, and I get down in the routine, it feels as though I've been at school for ages already.  Now, half way through, I'm still doing well in classes, could be doing better in English, but that should change soon. :) Photography, Logic, and Greek are all going extremely well.

 

I am in Photography Fundamentals, (Pho 100) which is my easiest class by far. I am miles ahead of anyone else in that class. Since, as an entry level class, most of the students have had little to no experience with DSRLs, whereas I have had my own since May 2008 and have been researching photography since February earlier that year. Our teacher, Mr. Block, has called me the "assistant teacher" on several occasions, and I have had a couple different people from my class stop me on the sidewalk and ask me a question about an assignment. :P It's fun. It is very fun, and even though the book work is stuff that I've known for a long time, I am still learning in the class, through the various assignments that we have. When I get off campus, I plan on uploading my pictures that I have been taking for the assignments.

 

I have been staying very busy so far this year, but God has been gracious, and has allowed me to keep things under control.

 

Work has been interesting. I have been working a lot at the welcome center so far this semester. I have 20 hours a week scheduled normally, but for the past 3 weeks I have subbed into an extra 4 hour shift, so it's been keeping me busy. Last week I got 30 minutes short of 25 hours, half of that time was between 11 at night and 7 in the morning. But I'm enjoying it. I love my job! I am so glad that I chose Public Safety over say the dinning common, or custodial, or any other on-campus job. The job itself isn't necessarily "fun," because of the pressure and the stress. There is quite a looming responsibility when working as a Public Safety Dispatcher. But I enjoy the job so greatly because I know that I am learning so much from this job. Not only am I learning problem solving techniques, and other valuable life skills, I am also being trained as a 911 dispatcher. If I were to work for the police department, or EMS as a 911 dispatcher, I would already have an excellent head start on training over someone else who had never worked as a dispatcher of any kind.

 

Well I guess girls is the next topic at hand since I've touched on everything else that I can think of. No girlfriend yet. *parents breathe a sigh of relief* And none on the near horizon either. I suppose that could change quickly, but several things would have to happen before that. One being a phone call with my parents getting their advice.

But anyway, even though I am very busy with school and work, I have been able to find time to have a social life. On Oct. 3rd, I went on my first dating outing which was not my own society's outing. Charity Taft was the girl who asked me to accompany her on the Ambassador's dating outing. The main attraction was horse back riding, but since everyone couldn't go at once, they had games organized to keep everyone who wasn't riding busy. The games were quite enjoyable. I had heard about the legendary "hand-holding games" that people play on dating outings. I must say though, it did feel weird when we joined hands to participate in the first hand holding event. Having never held a girl's hand before (aside from my sister's) it was a new and enjoyable experience to me. Charity's hand was a great deal softer than I was expecting, but I'm sure that was due to my inexperience in this area. Although holding Charity's hand felt weird at first, after a while I got over that, and I realized that hand holding is quite enjoyable, and something which I wish to pursue sometime. Like, when I'm married. ;) The rest of the day was enjoyable as well, especially the horse back riding. We were able to ride the horses on a train in the woods for about 20 minutes. I hadn't ridden a horse since I was probably 7 years old or so, and even then I can barely remember it, so this was basically the first time that I've really ridden a horse, so it was a lot of fun.

 

I'm going on another dating outing here soon. (Oct. 17th) Jessica set me up with one of the girls in her society, so that should be fun. :) Other than that I've had several other dating opportunities, such as artist series, a performance hall play, and a couple vespers. But I shan't bore you with details, so I'l simply say that they all went quite well, and leave it at that.

 

Well then, let me try this E-mail update thing, hopefully with success. :)

 

Tim Petersen

Life at 100 mph

Life at the Woodard's house is never quiet.

Let me recap what has happened since I got back from Alaska a little over a week ago.

I landed in Tampa international airport at 2:13 p.m. Friday, July 31st. Traffic was creeping along so it was 4:00 p.m. before I got to the Woodard's house. I took my stuff in and said "Hi" to everyone, then pretty much went straight to work jogging coupons. Unpacking and stuff like that had to wait until later that night. I finished working around 10 p.m. and got my clothes out that I was going to sleep in. Checked e-mail, and Facebook, then uploaded some pictures and went to bed. Having traveled all day, then working for several hours on top of that, meant that I was feeling very tired. Not to mention the fact that I only slept for 2 hours during the night before. Tired I was.

Saturday was pretty much filled with coupons. I filled out orders for almost 10 hours. Gaaaaaa… Mind numbing. But anyway.
I ate meals and caught up with friend on Facebook in my spare time.

Sunday wasn't much of a day of "rest." After church I worked another 6 ½ hours on filling orders and jogging. Before I was able to unpack from my Alaska trip, so that I could pack for camp, because I honestly hadn't had time to do it before. I was up till 2:45 a.m. working on coupons and getting things ready for camp.

Monday, we got up at 5:30 a.m. so that we could leave by 6. It was a long, 9 hours and 43 minutes later before we arrived at camp.

Camp was fun. I was working the week as a volunteer op-staff guy, so I got to wash lots of dishes, and do some yard work, and cleaning, and setting up, and tearing down. Fun stuff. It wasn't all work though, I did get to do fun things too. I got to climb the rock wall, I didn't make it to the top, but it was fun none the less. I played in some of the games, I unicycle around the rollerblading area, and I went tubing in the lake. I'll put pictures of facebook sometime, they'll be able to better show what I did.

Overall, it was a very good week, the messages were excellent, the work wasn't miserable, and the company was quite pleasant. I've been pretty much planning on working there next summer for a long time now, but I officially picked up an application while I was there, so that I may officially apply, so that I might be officially accepted. So, unless something drastic happens, that's where I'll be working next summer.

We got back from camp yesterday (Saturday) at around 7:15 p.m. then we went back out to eat and then got home about 8:00 p.m. I started work, sorting coupons and jogging until a quarter past midnight, after which I checked my e-mails that accumulated over the past week. Yey.



Started tomorrow, (Monday) I'm going to work over at the Coupon Clipper's office, filling orders and stuff. It'll be intense. Hopefully I'll be able to get everything done that I need to before Friday when I leave for college. :O

Life at Woodardsville never slows down, so you've got to learn to run faster, or go mad trying. ;)

Tim

My first experience with amnesia

The stage opens with me getting up and out of bed at 7:30 on Monday, the 20th of July. I am at my aunt and uncle's house in Wasilla, Alaska. Uncle Mark left for Anchorage for business earlier that morning, Aunt Cindy and cousin Stephanie just left for the gym, so I'm home alone with the dogs and cat.

I get up and have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, then Facebook. I hadn't had time to go through my pictures yet, so I spent some time looking at them and choosing all the ones that I wanted to upload. I was going through my pictures and catching up with all my friends on Facebook until Steph and I went over to Grandpa Pete's house and talked with him for a while and then played some pool. It was a fun game, neither Stephanie or I are very good, but we had a fun time anyway. On the way to Grandpa Pete's Stephanie bought me a Latte. I had told her that I didn't care for coffee, but she said that I had to try a Latte, because it's mostly milk anyway, and doesn't have a strong coffee flavor. So anyway, we're at Grandpa Pete's playing pool and sipping our Lattes, which are not that bad by the way, definitely better than any other coffee product that I've had. After our round of pool Grandpa Pete showed us his workshop that he's been working on. Then we departed for the ice rink.

Stephanie is an excellent skater. She has won trophies and tournaments and stuff. Whereas, I can just skate, forwards, and that's about it. So, Steph and I were at the skating rink, and we met up with two of Stephanie's cousins. (My cousin's cousin, but not my second cousin.) We all had a fun time skating around and playing tag and just having a great time. There weren't very many people at the rink at all, 4 people other than our group, so we pretty much could do anything that we wanted. Tag was fun, I never was able to catch Stephanie, she can skate circles around me any day of the week. :P

We finished playing tag and I was just skating around, and I must have fallen. I don't remember falling, but I must have. I remember sitting on the bench… with an icepack…. I couldn't remember what the time or date were. I looked at my watch: Monday, 20th of July. I remember thinking, "Monday, the 20th. So, I'm done with fishing. I'm staying with Uncle Mark and Aunt Cindy… Monday… I've only stayed with them one night then…. Wait. 20th? Yeah, ok. So, I'm still in Alaska, I haven't gone up to Grandpa Art's farm. Monday… yeah, Steph and I played pool this morning…, and I had a Latte? Wait, no. That was a dream, I didn't have a Latte. No, wait, I did. I remember Stephanie getting a picture of me with my Latte. Yeah. That was this morning. When is it? Oh, it's the 20th. That's right, it's Monday. 20th of July. I'm done with fishing. I'm leaving on the 30th? Yeah, that's right. I drove up from Ninilchick yesterday. That's right. I kept looking at my watch, and at the pictures on my camera. I also kept reaching for the candy bar in my pocket which I picked up at Grandpa Pete's. I was checking to make sure that it wasn't a dream.
That sort of thought process kept going on for a while, I'm not sure how long. I must have fallen at around 1:15 because I have a picture of me with an icepack to my head taken at 1:21.

I don't remember returning my skates, I don't remember driving back, I don't remember coming back in the house. I do remember that on the way home Stephanie kept asking me if I needed to see a doctor. I kept saying that I was fine, I think. I remember looking at my watch, 2:00. I remember Aunt Cindy asking me what I wanted for lunch, I remember sitting down at the table, but I can't remember what I had to eat. I went downstairs and showed my cousin's cousins my juggling and rubik's cubing. I juggled 3 ball mills mess, Rubenstein's revenge, Factory, Chops. Then I picked up two more balls and juggled 5 ball cascade. I can't remember if I did well, but I remember that it was fun to juggle again. Then I solved the rubik's cube. 1:16 min:sec the first solve, 48 seconds the second solve. Then we came upstairs and Jayden (one of Stephanie's cousins) showed us her violin playing skills, she was pretty good for a 7 year old.

At 3:00 p.m. the whole morning seemed like a dream, I knew that it really happened because I kept looking at the pictures that I took on my camera. But it was weird, it really just seemed like a dream. I'm pretty sure that I was acting rational and reasonable, but I don't really remember what I was doing. A little before 4 o'clock, I went out on the porch and Stephanie was in one of the chairs relaxing, I asked her what she was doing, and she said that she was just relaxing until Dad (Uncle Mark) came out and told her to paint something. I kept talking to her, and sure enough, 5 minutes later Uncle Mark came out and asked her to paint some round wood things for the yard. I went out and helped her paint the "stepping stones." And then from then on I can remember things like normal. I can remember painting the wooden boards, and everything after that. But the whole morning is kind of fuzzy, but I think that I remember it pretty well now though. I can remember playing pool, but from the time we left for the ice rink, to the time we got home is a little fuzzy. And I don't remember falling at all.

It was weird. I feel fine now. I've been fine from about 4:00 p.m. yesterday. Other than some pain on the left side of my head, I feel perfectly normal. I had a headache yesterday, but it wasn't a bad one. Several people told me to take pain medication, but I generally try to stay away from Ibuprofen, or Tylenol, or stuff like that unless it really, really hurts, and there's no other option.


So, I'm fine now, it still hurts a little to chew, because my jaw hurts on the left side. Other than that, I feel great. I want to go skating again though, because I can't remember what skating feels like. :P

Well that's all for now, I'm having a great time chilling with Stephanie. :P

Tim