Start of School Stresses

Brian and I started school this Monday. This is always a very stressful time for me, but it has become doubly so for some other reasons this year.


1. Last week, Brian's car died. Well, just the clutch. So he took it to a car place to fix it. We borrowed his parents car for a few days and got by fine. The price of fixing it was supposed to be $890, which was stressing me, but I figured we could get by.


2. Tuition. Always a big stresser, but this year it is more so, because we're trying to get financial aid, and the stupid school is taking forever deciding whether or not they want to give it to us. I wish they would just tell us one way or the other, so I can either stop stressing or try and find a different way to pay for school.


3. Brian has started the Architecture program and is very stressed out. This is stressing to me, not because he's hard to be around when he's stressed, because he's not, but because he never gets stressed and the fact that he is stressed is stressing. (Can you feel the stress yet? I think I need a different word to describe how we're feeling right now.)


4. We finally get the car back last night, and they've fixed the clutch, charging us $960 to do it. But as Brian is driving back to school, he finds that his car has no power. It died on him multiple times trying to get to and from school, and he has no power to get up hills or get going or anything. It's like they forgot to reconnect something. It really bugs to begin with, but the fact that the shop is all the way out in Draper makes it worse. So we've got to take the car back down to them on Saturday and hope they can fix it in one day. So we're once again back down to one car.


(Side note: My dad is letting us borrow his old Honda because it gets better gas mileage, so my Jeep has just been sitting in the driveway. Last Thursday, my dad asked to borrow the Jeep for a friend. No big deal. Then Friday hit and Brian's car broke down. What timing!)


5. Then there's just my regular stresses of trying to get back into the flow of school and work at the same time. Always a juggle. I'm taking three English classes, and while I knew this was crazy, I was hoping I could take it. I know I'll get there, it's just a little daunting right now.


6. To top it all off, we were in the process of trying to buy a computer for Brian's program. The one we were looking at was $1600+ and that was also a big stress at the beginning of the week. Luckily, Brian's dad was nice enough to let him use a computer he received for Christmas that had never been out of the box. So that's one less stress. We might need to get him a bigger screen and we bought him a desk chair, but those expenses are minor compared to a brand new super duper computer.



Wow. Sorry to just dump all that out. Last night Brian had to work on a group project and since we only had one car, I just went and hung out and read all of my readings for my classes. We didn't get home until 11:30. At this moment (9:00 pm) we are still sitting in the Architecture building, while Brian works on more projects. We talked to a 2nd year student and he said the first semester is the toughest because they're trying to weed out the ones that won't last. I want Brian to last and I know he will, so I'm trying to be as supportive as possible. It'll be nice though when we can get into a regular rhythm and know what we're doing again. It'll also be nice when we live closer to campus.


Here's a picture of us in the Architecture building: