Superwoman Has Left the Building

There are many times we kid ourselves into taking on too much. We think hey, I can manage. I can figure out a way to make this work. It is temporary. No trouble, I can do this. Then partway through we realize, nope, I was wrong. I can't manage. There is no way to make this work, temporary or not. This is too much. Welcome to my realization this week. I will confess that try as I might, I am not superwoman. Go figure. While I could whine and complain, I won't. I will simply say a 4-6 day work week and finishing my Masters is a no-go. I thought I could somehow balance that, but I can't. I am behind in my school work. I feel stressed out. I am tired. I feel my perfect 4.0 GPA slipping away (quite literally. This is a rant for another time... but I could have picked an easy no-brainer elective but instead I chose a course on Epidemiology which is sucking away my soul... and I'm not getting a 4.0. So in my last semester of my Masters I will screw myself out of my perfect GPA with a course I chose to take when I could have taken an easier class). I need more hours in the day, more coffee, more strength. Instead what I found was a new hygienist who is wanting some hours to fill in. Perfect. Take some of my days. Please give me relief. I now have three days off in a row (not including the weekend). I plan to use them fully and get as much done as possible. If I can get ahead, that would great if. If I simply get my head above water, that will be sufficient. So nope, I'm not superwoman. Damn.

On to happy things... I booked our cruise. Well, the first one. Instead of focusing on the homework which was stressing me out (in my defense, it was a night when I got off work and I was too exhausted to process what I was reading... so I decided to surf the internet instead) I went about finding the cheapest price for our cruise possible. Found it, booked it. BOOM. A little side note - after searching around I discovered something amazing... I love the website vacationstogo.com - if you're looking for a cheap cruise and are a bit flexible with your time, there are some great prices on cruises. But. What I found was through USAA (a military company for banking/insurance - we bank and have all of our insurance through them) offers travel booking and discounts. I got our cruise cheaper through them than through any other place. PLUS when I was doing the pricing of it, I basically got a military discount AND a USAA discount. Awesome. This has made me slightly obsessed with looking up the pricing for our other cruise in February... Vacation here we come. Here are some exciting details of our Greek cruise:
Departure port: Venice
Day 1: Split, Croatia
Day 2: Corfu, Greece
Day 3: At Sea
Day 4: Chania, Greece
Day 5: Santorini, Greece
Day 6: Mykonos, Greece
Day 7: Athens
Day 8: Katakoln, Greece
Day 9: At Sea
Day 10: Return to Venice

I bought myself two travel books to look through and decide what we want to do at each port. We are going in mid-October - which means less tourists, weather which will still be in the high 60 to low 70s (perfect in my book), and timing which works perfectly with both of our works. There is a possibility of more rain than what there would be in the summer months. Oh well. I won't melt. I am looking forward to this much needed vacation. Now if I can keep myself focused on school work instead of trying to find the cheapest airfare to and from Venice or figuring out what to do at our ports of call...

Happy 4th of July!

Happy 4th of July from Spangdahlem Air Base!

Land of the free because of the brave.