Back to School

It's been a while since I wrote anything here about anything. On Thursday, I officially become a student again, and will be back in class for the Fall and Winter semesters at Mount Royal University. I finished the requisite courses for my entry by the end of May, then fitted in two more around our various summer guests. That leaves 11 to go between now and next summer.

It'll be nice to be back in a classroom, since almost six months of sitting on your own in the spare bedroom every day induces a bit of cabin fever every now and then. L and I went to the bookshop today to gather together the books for the four courses. It seems the going rate for textbooks these days is nearly $200; as you can see, I'm nearly running out of room on my accounting shelf already.

It's going to be more than a bit strange, and I'm sure I'll be plenty of novelty value, what with the silly accent and me being old enough to be some of my classmates' dad....

The Running Man, Season 3

After the Friday exam terror, came Sunday half marathon terror. The downside to having to start a race at 6:30am is having to leave your friends' housewarming party at 9pm the night before and be in bed at 9:30, while it's still light outside. And then get up at 5am to run for 2+ hours.

My goal was to run in 2:05:00-2:10:00. I'd been roughly averaging a speed of 9:45 per mile for my long weekend runs, and 2:10 was, I thought, a fairly conservative goal, given it was 10:00 miles. I knew to not go dashing off at the beginning, and wanted to run well over 10:00 miles for the first 4 miles just to be safe and not run out of steam at the end. I did feel a bit concerned that I was sweating heavily after no more than 1.5 miles after I was running down the main street in Inglewood; I put it down to adrenaline, but in hindsight, humidity approaching 90% as the race started is probably more to blame. 

There was a lot of on course entertainment (Elvis singing on the zoo island, bands in Bridgeland, on 17th Avenue, 14th Street, Memorial Drive), and lots of crowds for stupid o'clock in the morning. I felt fine as I ran past L (who had enjoyed a nice coffee on the patio at Analog), felt fine through Kensington, got to the 10 mile mark feeling a bit warm. And then, approaching the drinks station on Memorial drive at the 10.5 mile mark the roof fell in. Legs went, heartrate went up, my core

overheated horribly. I stopped and started walking, which I tried and tried to put off because I knew it would be a killer for my time, as I knew I wouldn't be able to get my legs going again once I'd stopped. I soldiered on the best I could, with big thanks to the crowd of volunteers in superhero costumes by the Centre Street bridge, and eventually limped over the line in 2:20:37. Had I run all the way I may well have made 2:10. 

Once I'd got home, and had a very long bath, the inquest began. I looked at my split times (on the right). The pace was not that fast (I've run faster in training over the first 4 miles pretty much every weekend for the last month beforehand). I can only put the sudden collapse down to either a) the heat/humidity, or b) a relative lack of food. Once you get to Memorial, there is no shade whatsoever, so the last four miles were conducted in blazing sunshine. That shouldn't necessarily be a problem at 8am in the morning, but the sun is strong here and combined with the humidity meant I was probably overheating long before I noticed. And I felt, oddly, very hungry in the middle of Kensington. On my long weekend runs, I ate as I went along, maybe I should try that the next time.

I say the next time. Last Sunday I said you'd have to twist my arm to do the whole thing again. A week later, though, and I'm already finding potential ways to improve matters. Because I got my email link to the official photos taken on the course, and there are a sequence of photos of me being overtaken by a man in a banana costume. And that just won't do.

New Adventures

Lots of things have been happening in the last week. Last Friday saw the third round of FRIDAY EXAM TERROE for the final exam of my second accounting course, which went very well, particularly in comparison to the practice exam the day before where I screwed up a bond amortization schedule not once, but twice. 

It's really distracting sitting at the Athabasca downtown campus; the exam room faces out over the CTrain station outside City Hall and so you hear nothig but CTrain drivers honking their horn at pedestrians for three hours. I am there that often now I'm beginning to think the invigilation staff recognise me. 

Two courses down, thirteen to go before I am eligible for the workplace again! I'm on the third course now (highlighted in red on the spreadsheet page to the left.). Safe to say, I think the textbook I am currently using is possibly the worst textbook I've ever read (and goodness knows, Physical Chemistry textbooks take some beating on that score), and the online interface is infuriating. I'll be glad to get into some actual classroom lessons again in September.

The Running Man: Season 3

Last year's half marathon escapade ended up with a four figure sum of physio/electrotherapy/acupuncture on my back and, er, behind. 

This year, there was a lot more spare time to train thanks to the crash oil prices and the ensuing mass layoffs in the oilfield services industry. The better weather has meant that I've been running since mid January. I learnt my lesson from last year and didn't try a short training program, instead slowly ramping up the distance on my long weekend run. Only when I was reasonably convinced I could complete the distance did I stump up the cash to enter. Here's my longest run from two weekends ago:

It was a very long way, especially since I've spent most of the last month nursing unhappy calf muscles, thanks to the start of the outdoor football season. I've spent the last two and a bit weeks easing down the distance to try and save my legs, with the help of hot baths, foam rollers, stretching, and torturing leg muscles with lacrosse balls. I now understand why the race has been scheduled for 6:30am, given that even at 8am, it's bordering on uncomfortable if it's a sunny day.

My general pace has improved from the run you can see above, so I hope to be somewhere between 2:05:00 and 2:10:00 for the race itself. Running under two hours is just too far away. Reward for completing Sunday's run will be a trip to the far south of the city for proper, English-style fish and chips.

A Good Start

I know it's not modest to show off, but I was notified of my first exam result on the great accounting adventure last night. "A good start" was a euphemism from my lab days in Warwick, essentially meaning "it's all over the place". But the little report I got from the exam marker said "I hope you're considering majoring in accounting". So please allow me to bask a little in the marks below:

I'm currently doing the first of two intermediate courses. Every one of Lisa's friends/colleagues who finds out I'm doing Intermediate-I screws up their face and says "I'm sorry". Provided I haven't smashed my laptop at the terrible user interface for the second course, there's a midterm exam on May 1st and then a final exam  sometime later in May. And then another course, currently to be determined.

One down...

Given my first accounting Introductory Financial Accouting course officially began on March 1st, to do the exam on April 2nd was pretty good going to get through the material at such a rate I could essentially spend a week revising. Spending between six and eight hours a day on the material gets through it quite quickly though, and there's a fairly strict timetable to follow to get myself to be potentially employable at an accounting firm by next April/May. 

Being sat on my own in the study all day with no-one to talk to until L gets home does occasionally make me go a bit mad; if you asked me what I miss the most about my former job it's the interaction with other people on a daily basis, but it's been something new to learn, and it's been quite fun up to this point. I walked into the exam with 98.8% of the online assessment part of the course (55% of the total mark) certainly helps with enjoyment. I am told by L that it won't last; she has repeatedly told me that the Intermediate Financial Accounting-I course I am about to begin will be like having my fingernails pulled out, or whatever torture idiom works for you. As long as the exam is done by the end of May to satisfy the application criteria for the Mount Royal course in September, if that particular adventure goes ahead.

If it does, then by this time next year there will also have been courses completed in Intermediate Accounting-II, Advanced Financial Accounting; Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced Management Accounting, Taxation, Economics, Audit, Strategy & Governance, Statistics, IT, and Business Law. A busy old year in prospect.

New Adventures

Yes, I'm still here. The time and effort required to write blog posts had declined somewhat in the second part of last year as my workload increased. But that's not a problem at present.

As some of you know, but doubtless not all, I was laid off from my job at 7:10am on a Tuesday morning in early January due to the crash in the price of oil and a need to cut headcount due to slashed budgets by most of my employer's clients. The ins and outs of it all are probably not best discussed here, except to say what a thoroughly demeaning experience it is to be walked out of the building by HR as your colleagues are walking in, clutching your severance agreement in an envelope. It might be standard industry practice, but the 'walk of shame' stinks. 

There followed probably the saddest Tim Hortons breakfast combo in history, followed by a week of feeling pretty numb, and a week of being in turn upset and angry. That died away when I found out two weeks ago that the axe fell on numerous other lovely, hard-working people who I had a great time working with, plus salary roll backs for those still there. Again, it's hard to say what you really think when prospective employers might stumble by this page; suffice it to say that it looks from my point of view that my former employer learnt very little from its experience as a company in 2008/9.

Personal circumstances mean that the above news was not quite as bad as it might have been 18 months ago. But it's given me a lot of pause for thought about where L and I might be, and financial obligations we'd have by the time of the next such price crash in the boom/bust nature of the oilpatch. This was write large with the situation of some of my now ex-colleagues There's not much call for chemists in Alberta if you're not in oil and gas, and even less so if you've got a Ph.D. So there have been decisions to make. We like living here. A lot. There was a need, therefore, to find a career path that took advantage of the transferable skills I have (time/project management, data collation/analysis, technical writing, and so on), but is much more in demand. Technical consultancy is one such avenue, and I'm hoping to meet with some people downtown in the near future; and there's also the chance that one day, the government ends SR&ED tax credits and I'd be in the same boat. SR&ED is a very small part of the accountancy industry, in effect I'd be in the same position of being ultra-specialized. So there has been much talk and deliberation about a scorched earth, nuclear option of going back to school and quickly retraining as an accountant.

L's accountant friends and colleagues think I'm utterly mad. L had said "I'd never date an an accountant". But then her colleagues think that Ph.D. chemists make way, way more than I actually did. I'd still get to use all the skills I mentioned above, but the industry stability would be much higher, as would the salary in the medium to long term. And, so L tells me, a senior accountant with a technical background is a killer combination a long way down the line.

To get to the point where I'd be chartered, I have to first take two pre-requisite courses through distance learning (you can see the books for the first two above), then a two semester course at Mount Royal University. The former I am enrolled for, and if I complete the courses before August 1st hopefully the application to the latter is approved. There'd be other courses I have to complete in and among everything (there are 12 modules to be completed to be accepted into the CPA program), but hopefully in the summer of 2016 I could be in a firm, working in their Chartered Professional Accountant training program, which would take another two-ish years of concurrent rotational work experience and classes, followed by one last three day exam.

So more exam fun then. And finally, a need to pay tuition fees. This old dog is going to learn some new tricks.