And phew.

Happy two days after Christmas everyone!

No really. That's what I heard on the radio this morning.

Ridiculous.

But I do hope you had some nice holidays. We did.

It finally started snowing for reals in Tahoe, so we've been skiing. And sitting on wind hold. And skiing some more. And then gaping at two mile long gondola lines. And then ditching gondola lines for some backcountry skiing on the ridge instead. And then snowblowing the driveway.

And repeat.

But whatever - it's finally snowing, so it's happier around this place.

And also school is over for the semester so phewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. It's happier around my Inside The Head place, too.

See, I really wanted to be past that first semester of Going Back To School. Even more than being past it, I wanted to have the grades in front of me to prove that I'd done it.

And even more than having the grades in front of me, I wanted them to be As.

Straight ones.

Because I did not turn our lives upside down for Bs, people. I just did not.

And that fact alone was stressing me out more than trying to learn 100 plants' Latin names, sections 200-602 of the National Organic Rule or how to calculate the winter heating costs for a 10,000 square foot greenhouse in Santa Cruz County.

The What Ifs were making me nutty.

What if I studied all that stuff and my grades weren't the Straight Nerdy As I wanted so bad down to my bones?

What if I quit my job, spent half a year driving up and down highway 17 to school, irretrievably muddied up my shiny red rain boots, bored Bubba half to death with talk of CCOF this and compliant compost that and then...Bs?

WHAT IF FAILURE?

BLECH.

Blech, I tell you. That would be blech. Failure and blech.

You know how I get.

Anyway, I was starting to freak out a little bit, is what I'm saying. Toward the end of the semester, shit started to get real.

Those grades that I wanted so bad down to my bones were getting closer to being finalized by term papers, and final projects and finals and WHAT IFs were taking root in my brains.

It was a dark time for a minute there.

Thankfully it was a dark time which I responded to differently than I did during my undergrad.

Specifically, I did not get shitfaced, decide that "If I don't know it by now, I'm not going to know it." and then blissfully forget about my finals until the moment they were plopped in front of me on the last day of class.

I did not do specifically that.

I studied. OH MY GOD DID I STUDY. (Also, there was some shitfacing BUT ONLY AFTER STUDYING. That's the rule now.)

People, I've never studied so hard. Which may sound ridiculous when you know that I was studying for Horticulture and that probably seems easier to comprehend than, say, anything I took during my undergrad (except for maybe Humor Writing which wasn't so much about studying as it was about placating the wannabe comedian "professor" running the class), but I will tell you that when I want As - hard studying is the only way that it's going to happen.

I'm no genius that automatically commits all important facts to memory. The only photographic things that I own have "Canon" stamped on their fronts. In order for me to remember things - even super important things that I'm very interested in and even riveted by - I have to hear them, do them, write them, rewrite them, tell them to someone else, meditate on them, sing a song where they are the antagonist and protagonist, tattoo a memorable acronym to the backs of my hands and hire a nice yet skeptical man to write them in the sky behind a biplane every day for a week.

This is the only way that my brain will finally give up and accept new information.

So I did almost all of those things in preparation for my finals and then...

So, phew.