The good news is that I have found a sure fire cure for insomnia. The bad news is that it’s my self taught in-service courses. I’m still sticking with my story that it’s do-able but O-My-God it’s boring!

The worst part is that there is no audio component to this course, making it much more difficult for me to absorb the material. If it came with tapes or CD’s I could play, I’d be able to get through it much more quickly. When confronted with texts like this in a college course, I’d read them, but I’d count on picking up the high points in the lecture. With this there is no lecture, and so I’m forced to cram it into my brain by taking notes on the text. We also aren’t allowed to write in the books, so I can’t even highlight. I guess they recycle them.

If it wasn’t for the bird trying to eat the workbook the whole time I’d have surely fallen asleep on the sofa while trying to study this morning. (Since you can’t write in the books I imagine that turning one in that had been beaked to death by a parrot would be frowned upon) When I was in college I almost never studied at home because if I tried I’d get up and start doing housework. Believe me, the worst housework looks much more appealing than sitting around trying to care about the names of regulatory agencies in Canada. As it was, I made a peach pie this morning and baked it while I studied. The edges burned a little bit, but the worst part was that I didn’t even have time to eat a piece before I ran out to work.

And also, another complaint (entirely unrelated to anything else in this blog. But what the hell) … what is the POINT of light cream cheese? I grabbed a bagel and cream cheese out of the refrigerator to take with me for dinner. I must have picked up “light” by mistake at the market. It was like spreading semi-solid white plastic over the bagel and it tasted just about as good. Yuck.

I mean I know that cream cheese is not a low fat food, so I don’t put a ton of the stuff on my bagel. If I get a bagel and cream cheese out somewhere, I usually wind up taking half of the cream cheese off and leaving it on the plate. But I want cream cheese to taste like cream cheese! If it tastes good a little bit of it is fine, because you get that nice, rich taste of cream cheese. As bad as the light stuff tastes, there’s certainly no way I’m going to put more of it on my bagel. Now it’ll be hanging around in the fridge forever, and I’ll be forced to eat a little bit day by day because I can’t stand to throw food out (that’s why I made the peach pie, because The Hub bought a whole peck of peaches and I have to put them in stuff so they don’t turn bad before we can eat them.)

Hmm. Maybe I can mix it in with the dog food. The truth is, even he didn’t look enthused about it when I shared yesterday’s bagel with him. Though Winston seems to feel better in general – I think his fleas are dying off, but I’m still checking him over carefully every day, and we keep him out of the field now.

Anyway, I tried to motivate myself by going over to the part of the office where the underwriters work. They have larger cubicles over there, flat screen computers, and also they have their very own toaster. They also have coffee pots everywhere…probably because they practically live on the job when volume is high. But that’s okay, it’s not like I mind working.

I bet that once I’m on the job nobody asks me the name of any Canadian insurance regulations!