Annual Update

Back to School
Yep, I'm in my 30's and I'm heading back, again, to finish what I've started. I'll will be attending Metropolitan State College of Denver. My first class is tomorrow, Human Biology & Anatomy. Tuition is supposed to be cheap at this school, but I'm still floored by the amount of extra fees and crap they tack on to the price of tuition. It's kind of like charging for luggage at the airline ticket counter, but you don't know how much luggage you have until you get there. What the big print giveth, the fine print taketh away.

I signed up for 3 classes originally. Part of the lengthy strategy was that of avoiding a health insurance mandate. 3 classes would put me at 9 credit hours. 9 credit hours is just under the hour maximum that requires the student to purchase an annual premium insurance policy that covers virtually nothing. I'm going to leave that issue for another day. So according to all the handouts and online information my tuition was supposed to have been $356 per class, or $1,068 for all I had enrolled.

Well, as your cynical mind might imagine, that was not the case. my tuition bill for the 3, 3-hour classes amounted to $1,711! So I decided to back it off and take only one class for the semester to get better control in the financial/cash-flow department. I backed it off to 1 class, Saturday mornings, and figured that would be a pretty good start. As you'll recall, the per credit hour charge was supposed to be $356 for a 3 credit hour class. No, no, no, no! Still after dropping 2/3's of the classes the tuition bill was still over $700!!How did this happen your brain is asking? Well, check out this list:

Spring 2010
Spring Student Affairs Fee $38.22
Intercollegiate Athletic Fee $29.53
Spring Health Services Fee $31.22
Registration Fee $4.09
Spring Immunization Fee $2.00
AHEC Facility and Bond Fee $37.23
Metro Bond Fee $15.75
Iformation Technology Fee $18.29
Bus Pass Fee $46.00
Clean Energy Fee $5.00
Spring Matriculation Fee $50.00
Service Charge(s) $58.68
Spring In State Tuition $560.25
BIO Program Fee $8.85
Term Balance: $701.11

Can somebody please tell me they understand that this education system is a racket?!?! I mean honestly! How can a degree in rocket science take the exact same amount of hours and classes as a degree in English...in an English speaking country!?!?Advertising and disclosure. I'm sure somewhere in there I completely missed that the price of this college was going to double after I agreed to the price advertised and then subsequently agreed to over pay.

Job Loss
Come May 27, Tyrant left town and had his henchmen fire me. A new guy who had only worked there a month or so was assigned the task. I was a little taken back, but left quietly and quickly. I had been done with that place for so long already. My little joke had been "I quit 18 months ago, they finally decided to stop paying me." Honestly, my heart was not in it all because of the leadership, or lack of leadership in the place. I'm happy but lost.

Coaching Little League Football
An old buddy of mine coached his step-son's football team the fall of 2008. During that time I coached him on the things I could see wrong from a lineman's standpoint. They had no line coaches at all. About mid summer after I lost my job he asked me if I'd be interested in stepping up and coaching. I joked that as long as I was the biggest kid on the team I'd do it. Those 8th graders are big boys. I was tipping the scales at 275-280 and had most of them beat by about 25-30 pounds. My role was offensive line coach, linebacker coach, special teams coach, conditioning coach. All things I did in high school. That lasted from August through the awards banquet in November. My gift from the head coach for my contribution to the team was a team picture. Truth be told, I was the biggest guy on the team, coaches included. That was about that time I started growing my hair back out from shaving my head the Thanksgiving prior.

Weight Loss
I had been working on my figure in the gym starting in February. After tax season I got much more serious about it and went even more regularly. I followed the body for life model by Bill Phillips. I just wasn't seeing the results for which I had been hoping. By October I got frustrated with my lack of results from spending hours and hours and hours and hours in the gym for months on end. October I decided that output wasn't enough, it was time to modify input as well.

So I went on a calorie counting diet with a new iPhone application that helped me out tremendously. Dropped weight out of the gate, but stalled quickly. 1,800 calorie a day diet plus exercise. And I had given up lifting a month prior just to be sure I wasn't trading lean muscle for fat. My attitude got grumpy (as told to me by my roommates later). I saw the old Atkins book on the shelf and thought I'd give it a go. I thumbed through the thing and figured out where I had gone wrong before. Biggest mistake: listening to others' "versions" of Atkins instead of reading the book and understanding it as it was written. I started shedding pounds to the tune of 1/2 pound a day over a 2 month period. As of today I've dropped somewhere between 25-30 pounds. Oh, and in November I started growing my hair out. Christmas I packed on 8-10 while hosting the Orphan's and Travelers Holiday Potluck for Couchsurfing, but it was so worth it.

Couchsurfing
I hosted my 2nd annual Orphans & Travelers Holiday Potluck over Christmas again this year. I decided to open my house up on the Eve and keep it that way until the day after. It worked out very well. Everybody had a great time and was super thankful to have had a place to go in lieu of family. It made me happy to see, although it pulled on my wallet a little more than I had hoped. One of the CSers fell madly in love with me over the 2nd half of the football season and right into the holidays. She had some serious daddy issues, not to completely overshadow many of the other issues she had. Don't get me wrong. She's a super sweetheart with a lot of potential, I just have a hard time seeing her potential realized.

Roommates
I've gone through some roommates in the last 12 months. Lost Swallow, Cookie, Bubbles, Boo. Swallow promised the entire time she lived at RWDTC that she'd give us 2 months notice and help us find a replacement. Well, it didn't play out like that. Cookie found a Facebook post on her page posted by one of the folks she was house hunting with. this was about 3 weeks before she moved out. Swallow blew a gasket and deleted her FB page. She then informed us she'd be moving in 2 weeks and the person she picked as her replacement was going to be Bubble's new boyfriend, Boo. Boo didn't pay anyone a deposit either. If I had some say-so in the ordeal that would not have happened. I have about 2 hard and fast rules about roommates: a) No kids, b) no couples.

It's not a kid friendly house. It's an adult house with adult activities. Living with a couple upsets the balance of influence tremendously. If the couple is fighting, sides are chosen and lines are drawn. If one person in the couple feels a certain way, the other automatically, with or without merit, throws their support behind the other. Well, it happened. Bubbles decided that she was going to change the amount of rent her and Boo were paying.

Well, I disagreed with their unilateral change in our original rental agreement and posted a demand for payment on their door for the remainder of what they owed. I ended up going out and sleeping in way late. When I woke, I found they had moved most of their stuff out of the house. While I was sleeping they came into my room and took the two rent checks back. I got stuck with their rent, and their bills and had only 1 deposit (Bubbles original) to cover the shortage. Shortly after they moved out, Cookie moved out early too to move in with her boyfriend. So me and the Decorator were on a mission to find replacements and fast. We were fortunate and ended up finding 3.

Cookie and I got a little sideways as we started going through roommate changes. Since then we've been able to kiss and make up and we're back to being friends again, probably even better than before. She's actually going to go back to school as well, Mortuary Sciences. According to Cookie, Swallow is moving back to AZ after tax season. But they don't talk anymore (currently). The job referred Swallow to when she moved here finally fell through. Bubbles is rumored to be a recruiter for ITT, Boo lost his job as an electrician. We went in on a condo in Silverthorne for the remainder of the ski season. $$125/mo each + $40 deposit. Not too bad of a deal. Honestly I could probably just stay with my friends any time I wanted, but I think Cookie is a better play partner.

Decorator & I picked up Nurse Brown, Educated Retard, and Mr. Powder over the end of last summer. They've been great roommates so far. But the Decorator is moving out now. I swear she found a boy and is making the move because of him...just like she found a boy in Denver, found a job, then moved here. She would never admit it, but her wiring is doing it whether she'll admit it or not. Less than 6 months and she's moving even Further west, Vail to work in an optometrists office. Her new boy/date lives in Breckenridge. And the boy she moved to Denver for all but fell through.

Career
I'm looking at getting into the bartending business for real this time. I took the class right before I lost the job and found unemployment to be adequate so I just decided to take the time off instead of changing careers. I had been kicking around with trying to get a private financial services practice off the ground, but it's a struggle. Any business is a lot of work. I have done some part time gigs here and there but certainly nothing that is consistent or would pay the bills.

I decided H&R Block was a crap place to work if I wanted to make any money. I really enjoy the people, but they certainly don't make up for the lack of compensation H&R Block pays its preparers. They are just a tool in the machine. That and the former district manager, demoted to preparer, then promoted to my former office manager...well, me and her never really got along when I started calling her out for not doing her job and it was affecting my ability to do mine. I handled it as best I could until it got to the point of ridiculous. Well, she apparently got put in the position of office manager in place of the guy who had been mine for the 3 years prior. I decided right then that I would not return. The compensation was already not worth it, let alone worth it for putting up with people like that.

So I plan on doing taxes on my own this year. That might keep me reasonably busy for the next several months if I can find a few people who'd like me to do theirs. I'm already getting a few hits from friends. I need to figure out how to capitalize on it and make some money at it. I bought a laptop for that very purpose. I got the idea from a buddy of mine who started with Block and then went out on his own...taking his laptop to client's homes and preparing returns. I think I have a pretty good chance at it.

More to come...