Financial & Travel Musings

For the first time in a long time I find that I’m finishing off a number of courses at pretty much the same time.

First to go was Human Biology (SK277) which I really miss doing as it was a really, really interesting course. It was far from being an easy course for me as it was my first ever biology course but the fascination more than made up for that and I ended up getting through the course books much faster than expected.

This week I posted off the final assignment for the Investigative Biology (SXR270) summer school. They’re an odd breed of course as they basically only take up a couple of weeks of your life but have such an intensity that it can take a month or two to wind down from them.

Coming soon is the final assignment for the Astronomy (S282) course which seems to be taking forever to do. I’m really dreading the exam for that but then so are a lot of people so perhaps it’ll work out fine in the end.

Alongside that I’m well into the assignment for the Planets course (S196) which I should get away sometime in the next week or two.

By the time I’ve that lot done “all” I’ll be doing is the revision for the astronomy exam which is in mid-October so, all being well, I’ll understand it much better than I do now. And the Molecules, Medicines and Drugs course (SK185) which is just as fascinating as the human biology one was so chances are that I’ll finish it well before the end January deadline.

As this should leave me with a bit of a lull in activity I’m toying with fitting in another course, probably the one on fossils which is in its last run this year and sounds both easy and interesting.

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Finding a decent online school isn’t so easy as you would think as there are heaps of fly-by-night outfits out there aiming to take your money from you.

The problem basically is that you’ve no way to judge which Online Schools are going to be the best for you. You might think that, as a first cut, the big names would be the ones to go for but that’s not necessarily the case as they’re more geared up towards serving onsite students and may not work nearly so well in dealing with online students.

Thus you need to take account of comments and ratings by students who’ve already taken courses with the various schools. Since online education is a relatively new affair you need to bias your consideration of those comments much more so to recent years too.

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At the moment this is looking like it will be our first year without a holiday in a very long time.

Quite how that came about is basically down to our ongoing attempts to get the French property sold. Essentially without that sold we can’t really go anywhere as we need to be around if/when a buyer does come along thus planning anything much in advance is very difficult. With our luck we’d be off on a long haul holiday and come back to find that a buyer with a suitcase full of notes had been at our door whilst we were away but had now changed their mind

Somehow I think the “no holiday” feeling will eventually get to us and we’ll head off somewhere though with the weather as it is at the moment we’d probably end up stuck inside unless we go a fair old distance to catch the sun.

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