Something my nine-year-old self would be horrified to hear me utter: Will summer break just end, please?

In addition to being a part time OU student, I also work in education.  Well, okay, I work in a school.  I’m not sure it has much to do with education.  The point is, both my full time job and my part time studies shift considerably during the summer.

For work, I stop fixing small, day-to-day things, and start fixing enormous things that take months.  It’s normally fun, because I get to do a lot of research and learn a lot of things.  However, this summer I’m alone in my department for various reasons, so don’t have time to do any of the large projects, so we’ve outsourced them all.  I mostly keep things running in between looking over the shoulders of consultants.  It’s frustrating, but hopefully this will be the only year.  (Although we’re converting to an academy, so who knows what to expect next.)

For my studies, I transition to MOOCs of personal interest.  This year has been wonderful for that, because I’ve really come a long way both in terms of programming languages and programming design concepts.  But … It’s just small hobby stuff.  And I can’t get involved in big hobby stuff, because I don’t want it to overlap and eat into my OU studies.

Last summer by this time, there was an Introduction forum open, followed by course-specific early-bird forums.  I’m anticipating early-bird forums amost as much as my grandparents used to anticipate catching dinner at Sizzler at 3 PM.  I hope they still have them.  (The early-bird forums, not the early-bird dinner special.  Though if Sizzler’s around when I retire, I’m definitely down for dinners before the school run.)  It seems like a good way to gel the nation-wide footprint of students for the presentation before splitting us off into tutor groups, so that we can bond and feel more comfortable in the FB groups.

But really, I just want to get stuck in again and be studying properly.  My poor nine-year-old self would have fainted by now.