Wahey, two posts in a year that aren't ITPE related? Work continues as usual and I've finally made myself take the concrete steps towards getting my full certification. You know, the steps I've been telling myself to take for at least three years now?

So, I've finally applied to a per diem generalist job. And I'll be idly looking at other generalist positions until I find one that a) isn't nights because I'm not going back to that again and b) will actually tick off all the boxes I need to qualify for the exam on work experience. Doing this per diem will take forever but I'm hoping that it'll be a good start and let me do a fair amount of review/studying to get myself back up to speed and remember what all the weird cells look like and what the crystals look like again. Nevermind micro and the plate choices/antibiotic testing. I'm also hoping that being per diem will mean if they have a full time opening I'll already have a foot in the door and can jump in as FT or 0.8 and stay on per diem at my current job. Because I like everyone there, I just really really need to get my certification so I can have some real flexibility in where I can work.

As it stands, within the city most labs require the full MT/MLS certification rather than my MLT and separate bachelor's degree. I can take the MLS exam, but I need to prove a certain amount of time spent in different departments and being considered competent at specific tasks. UNFORTUNATELY, a lot of labs don't perform all of these tasks and send at least some of them to a reference lab. (One of my former coworkers had an opening at his lab and I was interested until I learned they don't do any of the micro testing in-house, not even the really quick and easy stuff. Which, wild.)

(ETA: I also keep wondering how much I would hate my life and could I stand it for 2 years if I took a job with lab corp?)

I'm also channeling a lot of my general anxiety about the future into looking at real estate and finding houses that I would happily live in and then making myself sad because they won't be available when we do finally manage to buy a house some time next year. My mom keeps trying to get us to "take advantage of interest rates" because everything's so low with the pandemic right now. But like, we're not actually ready to buy anything right now and want to have the flexibility to be picky. Because once we move, we don't want to go anywhere for a WHILE. So, I just keep making myself sad that I can't do anything like paint or set up a kitchen the way I want it or garden or anything.

 Argh, trying to register for classes. It was supposed to open at 5:55 am today, it is now 6:24 and I haven't gotten past the preliminary read-this-or-else pages. Can they not schedule things so they actually have the server capacity to handle it? Because that would be awesome. Though, this is the same group of people who keep telling the students doing user interface that they can't fix the broken registration and library sites, so...

6:44 am - finally registered for two of the five classes I wanted. Two of the others require me to talk to the advisers so I can override the system's lack of my prerequisites and I can't register for the last until after the last day of classes because it's currently freshman/sophomores only (but I want my swing dancing).