In which Rachel was working like a rented circus monkey.

It's getting near the end of the semester, and there are many chapters in our Intro to Chemistry book that we have not touched on at all. Our teacher said she was going to give us a take-home test over the last unit, and then we would spend the rest of the remaining classes reviewing for the final next week.

She gave us the take-home test last week, but I didn't even look at it until after we finished testing on the previous unit, and then there was Thanksgiving, so I really didn't start working on the take-home test until Friday night at work. Which is when I found out that it was all over my head.

I told Rachel I was going to need her help, so Saturday afternoon I went to her house and she looked over the test and started coaching me through a couple of the problems on it. I did those, with her help, and then she suggested that I do some of the practice problems from the book, so I did that for about another hour, which is pretty much as long as I am able to focus on Chemistry before my brain melts and starts running out of my ears.

Sunday there was no time to get together with Rachel, but I did more practice problems at work. Rachel was at work, too, so she was trying to talk me off the ledge through it over the phone in between taking care of her patients.

My friend Diane, who is taking the Chem class, too, was at work on Sunday night and then we both went to class in the morning to sit through review and she was complaining about how tired she was, but I had no sympathy, because I have worked the night before and gone to class in the morning this whole semester! I blame my poor test scores on having taken every test while I was half-asleep!

I went back to Rachel's yesterday in the afternoon for more practice problems, and then last night at work, Diane and I had to really put our heads down and work on that test! We did all of the fill-in-the-blanks questions and but then today we still had the equations section to work on!

I went to Rachel's at 4 in the afternoon and started working on blah blah woof woof - you know you don't care what it was, but it was hard, let me tell you! Diane got there at about 6:30, and by then I was unable to focus anymore, so I took Maddy off to the other room and played with her while Diane and Rachel went over some of the things I was done with.

Ash took over amusing Maddy when I was ready to go back to doing horrendous equations, and he played with her and gave her a bath while we made the final push to finish my test! Yay! It was done and I was as wrung out as a used dishrag, so I went home at 8 to get a nap before work.

I'm at work now, and I just talked to Rachel, who said that Diane stayed until almost 9, and then she had to leave for work, but she got through it all. Rachel is exhausted, and Ash pointed out that she had been tutoring us for five hours!

What I'm thankful for today:

I'm thankful that Rachel was willing to spend the whole evening teaching us to do ridiculous crap that we will be unlikely to ever need to know in real life.

Now I just have to review all the stuff we covered early in the semester that I immediately forgot after we were tested on it.