All's well...

... that ends well!

When I got home from work yesterday, I called several times for Pepper while I was checking on the dogs' food and water.  I heard a faint 'meow' and instantly remembered the time he got himself stuck in a tree!  Oooh!  I was worried he had spent last night's agonizing cold up a tree.  But, no, after calling and hearing him several more times, I saw him running up our driveway, crying for me!  He ran right up to me to be picked up and brought inside for some cuddling and pampering.  He had a slight motor oil scent clinging to him, so I guess he found a place to weather the night in a neighbor's carport.

I am so glad he heard me and came running, because last night was even colder than the night before!  With the wind chill it was down to -20* F.

-20!!!!!

Once Pepper was settled in, it was time for Helena and I to focus on her senior year registration.  I had spent the afternoon on Skyward researching the correct name for each of the classes she wanted and making sure I knew how to run this year's version of the process.  I had no troubles with accessing the system.

Right at 3:30 we tried to log in.  Um.  Right.

Every senior-to-be tried to log in at 3:30.  The system crashed.

We managed to get in, but it was taking 5 minutes just to load each successive page.  Grrr!  I made the mistake of thinking that maybe it was just my pc laptop that was struggling (after all, I had no troubles on my mac earlier), so we logged back out and tried to sign in on the mac.  Bad idea.  Now we couldn't get back in at all!

Meanwhile, Helena logged into Facebook to vent her frustrations and found a LOT of other students venting about the very same thing!  The servers couldn't handle the load.

Helena and I finally got back into the system (on the pc... apparently Internet Explorer was more successful than Firefox) and finished the painful process of registration.

All in all, it took an hour and 15 minutes to process 5-10 minutes worth of registration and she was fortunate enough to get all of her preferred classes.  Apparently, many of her friends were not so lucky.

So, what is she taking in her final year of high school?

Seminary
Philosophy
AP Euro History
AP Art History
Honors English
US History
Advanced Photo
Government & Citizenship
Symphonic Orchestra
Foods 1

You will notice that there is not a single math or science class.  Most people recommend taking both math and science in your final year, because colleges like to see it.  However, we decided that the risks outweighed the benefits, in this case.  Helena has struggled so much in maths and sciences that it would not necessarily reflect well for colleges to have it continue to destroy her GPA.

Now it is time to start preparing for Will's registration!