One Down, a Million More to Go…

Last night we had the final exam for the real estate course. I felt like I was walking into the Jaws of Doom, so convinced was I that I was gonna bomb the thing. I was totally unprepared, and so exhausted I could hardly walk. The past 5 weeks have devolved into one time-consuming, headache-inducing screw-up, hassle, bugaboo and freaking catastrophe after another, and so I’ve had almost no time to study the content. I figured I was going to fail for sure.

Well.

When our Realtor friend said getting the license was “easy,” he wasn’t kidding. Of the 80 questions, I’d be surprised if I missed 10. Most of them were factoid questions, and of those most were so intuitive you probably could answer a good 80% of them without ever reading the book. There were five or six math questions, which of course I’m incompetent to do. Of those, I know I got three correct; I made a good guess at one, leaving two almost certainly wrong. So: two or three of the math questions wrong. Three or four of the factoid questions concerned material not covered in our textbook (the instructor draws on two texts for his questions)—had to make guesses on those. So I’m estimating I missed about six or seven questions.

To get 75%, you’d have to get twenty questions wrong! And…to get twenty of those see-Dick-run questions wrong, you’d have to be so far out in left field you’d qualify as mentally retarded.

All of which is neither here nor there, because on Tuesday, when he reminded us that because it’s a five-week course the final was scheduled for last night, not next week during the regular final exam period and I realized that on Wednesday I wouldn’t have a chance of finding time to review 14 chapters, I asked him what would happen if I failed this exam after having scored a 96 on the mid-term. And…brace yourself…at that point he said not to worry, everyone in the course would get an A or a B. No one would get less than a B in the course.

Heh.

Anyway. It is ridiculously easy. And it’s pretty interesting. You certainly learn a lot of things that you should have known before ever setting a pen to a purchase contract, a mortgage agreement, or an apartment lease.

Bitch of a week here. I told you we fired the client who converses with the dead, right? That leaves us without work, which has Tina agitated. Two incoming queries appeared today; one looking for someone to edit his thesis, another from some outfit trolling for slave labor. Last week of instruction—finals coming up next week. Students are also agitated, lobbying for hurried return of their gigantic final papers. Much nagging, whining, and nail-biting in those precincts.

This morning I’m going out to Tempe to drop by and sign some paperwork at the new insurance agent’s office. Thence to the credit union branch on the main campus. Then over to the GDU library to scour Literary Market Place for leads to publishing houses Tina and I can hit up for freelance work, and then it’s off to meet Tina for a nice lunch to celebrate the end of the semester and, more to the point, to calculate a strategy to bring in some more (and better) work. Back to the house to write up an exam for my own students and send that off to the copy center. Then have to translate their grades out of my spreadsheet into the hated Blackboard so they can view their final score, a process that takes about eight times as long as it should because it has to be done manually and because BB screws around with you as you enter Each. And. Every. Score.

So that will fill absorb every moment of productive time today, I expect.

Discovered a $1230 discrepancy in my checking account and can NOT find the error(s), so had to make a balance adjustment in that amount. Fortunately it’s in my favor; otherwise I’d have ended this month with about a $300 balance. But it looks like I’ll have to hire the accountant to untangle whatever mess I made there.

Noticed last night that the pool is busted again. Gotta get up from writing this post and go fix that, or else turn off the power and leave the thing to grow algae while I’m racing around the city today.

Had to buy a new toilet, the facility in the middle bathroom having given up the ghost. Actually, neither that one nor the one in the so-called master bathroom had a very strong grip on the ghost when I inherited them from Satan and Proserpine. I like this new one so much, I may have WonderPlumber come back after I recover from the summer’s penury and replace the one in the alleged master bathroom.

Told him about my idea to turn the fourth bedroom (now the unused TV room) into a luxurious spa, complete with vast bathtub and a walk-through into the closet-like master bathroom. He thought it was a great idea. Estimated it would cost around 10 grand.

Well…when I’m a rich old real estate agent, eh?