I have found time to audit an accounting course at night at UNC in Chapel Hill. The wife of a guy in Lou’s class was taking the course and suggested I join her. The professor is nice and lets me sit in the class and take the tests even though I’m not actually a student. I’ve done well so far, and it’s a nice change for me to be back in the classroom. I have a slight advantage because I studied the material when Lou took accounting. He likes having me give him quizzes and review material together, and I learn a lot in the process. His management game class was one I didn’t like to be anywhere near, because there was too much drama around the whole thing. The class was broken down into teams of companies, and everyone on the team had a position in the organization. Lou was initially a friend of the guy who was his team’s company President. But Lou soon didn’t agree with how the team was being managed, the decisions being made, and the presentations to the pretend executive board. So, Lou basically got the guy demoted and took over as President. The team was divided on what to do; the change was finally made just so they could move on, but in the end, they still didn’t do well, and he actually got his first Low Pass grade. He does feel that they would have done great if he had been President from the start.

Now, the focus is on Lou finding a job. We rented a typewriter like the one I have at work. It has a memory, so I can type a standard form letter and store it with automatic stops in certain places when I can type specific company info, and then it takes off again. We got tons of letters out. He’s gotten tons of rejection letters back already too, and he keeps tacking them up on the walls in the bedroom by his desk. I don’t know why he wants to look at them all the time, but he says it keeps him focused. Personally, I’d find it depressing.

I’m planning to go back to college, hopefully into a hospitality and culinary bachelor’s degree program, so I studied for and took the SAT and am ready to start quickly. I did well, since I’m generally a good test taker. For a lot of reasons, I am anxious to get back into school. I want my parents to see that I could finish up what I started. When I graduated from community college, my folks gave me a little gold star necklace. I felt like a star then, but here at Duke, I feel like I am at such a lower status level than everyone else. When I meet professors and other students in the MBA program, they almost always first ask where I went to college; they then ask what I do for work. Neither of my answers to those questions is impressive, so I usually joke around and say, “I’m getting my PHT degree, aka Putting Hubby Through.”  They laugh and seem to appreciate all the work it takes for us to get through financially. But I feel like they just move on pretty quickly and don’t really have any interest in getting to know me because of my education status. I wouldn’t dare tell them I dropped out of high school and had a GED.