CrazilySane

Well, I finally kicked myself in my girlyballs to finally restart highschool again. I am 22 years old at the moment… I had to drop out about 3 years ago because of my financial situation. It was either work to put food in my stomach, and a roof over my head, or go to school. Things were fairly unstable in my life due to family mental health problems and I had been living on my own since I was 15.
Now life is feeling a lot more balanced and stable, and I think it’s time where I can work on this goal again without having to worry about my homelife, my family, and money (not like back then, at least).

I ordered my coursework a week and a half ago through ILC.org (online/long distance education in Ontario), and just received my course package on Tuesday.

I only have 4 credits left (five if I want to redo my last credit which I got shoddy marks in before I left school). I’m working on my grade 12 university English at the moment. I have roughly 10 months to finish this course, but you can finish it at your own pace, so I might be done it sooner than that.

The only depressing thing is that I know, and knew it even before I signed up for these courses, that once Im done highschool people still won’t stop. It won’t be “When are you going to finish Highschool?”, but instead it’ll be “So… when are you going to go to College/University?”. You can NEVER please the masses.
The most important lesson I’ve learned in life is that life is not a footrace. I do not have to feel pressured to finish highschool at the same time as everybody else. Everyone has their own paths in their life and can go at their own pace, just as I will have my own as well.
I feel so much better this time around trying to finish highschool because I know that this will be on MY own terms and I won’t feel so pressured while doing my courses.

I enjoy learning, I really do. I’ve always gotten pretty good grades in almost all courses that I’ve done (except for the early years of math, and of course my dreaded chemistry courses.) When I get to it, this will be my third time attempting grade 11 chemistry. This time around though, I think I have the support and help I’ll need to get through it. My chem/bio teacher in highschool was wonderful and tried her best to help me with different learning techniques for it, but I still had such a hard time with it. It happened often when I would be frustrated to tears in that class. I just didn’t get it. Chemistry was also the breaking point of when I left school, I just couldn’t handle it anymore.
I need to get through this and be able to take and understand chemistry though. I love and am pretty good at biology (which was my favourite course in highschool), and unfortunately chem and bio tend to go hand in hand with each other.

But, at least I’m trying to get this done! We’ll see once I get to my chemistry courses again, but I hope I can stay determined enough to pull through it.

When I was younger, I learned how to play the Alto Saxophone for school. I also taught myself how to play the keyboard.

I’d like to one day teach myself how to play the piano & the drums… I’d also love to learn how to play the violin, and the Australian didgeridoo.

I decided to finally try and grow my first garden this year. It’s all potted plants, since I’m not sure about the soil quality around where I live… But they’re doing actually pretty good! Unfortunately the area that my backyard is facing, I only get partial sun… which is hard to grow a lot of specific types of herbs & veggies since a lot of them enjoy the sun. Right now I’m growing two baby tomato (Sweet 100’s) plants, chives, rosemary, oregano, chives, and chamomile. This was my first year attempting to grow anything, and they’re turning out fairly well. My tomato plants are growing a lot taller than they’re supposed to, I guess because they’re reaching for the sun more… but they’re still producing lots of tomatoes. They’re delicious eating them right off the stalk!! It feels amazing eating your own food you’ve grown yourself because you KNOW where its come from, and it just tastes that much better because of it (probably a psychological thing, but hey, it works).

Since I had no idea how to plant the chamomile or how it would grow exactly, I used bamboo reeds to tie the plants up tall… next year I think I will just try putting them in a big pot and seeing if they’re happier growing like that instead of having to grow straight up.

I’ve just harvested my rosemary, oregano, and some chamomile flowers last week & are drying right now on some racks. Hopefully they turn out well! :) Now I just need to buy jars to store them in >.<

Definitely making sure next year before planting that I have everything already for harvesting afterwards…

Hope to try growing peppermint next year as well. I have to find out if any of my herbs can be grown indoors for the winter…