Happy Wally Wednesday! As many of you know, Wally recently had to have some minor surgery. We found a weird looking mole on his neck and his vet wanted to remove it to make sure there wasn't anything wrong with. To be honest, the thing that worried me the most was that they had to put Wally under general anesthesia and he's 9 years old. I was extremely happy when he woke up and I was able to go pick him up and bring him home. He was quite groggy for the rest of the day, and his little sister was worried about him. We had to wait nearly a week before we finally heard back from the biopsy they had done of the mole - it was benign! Yay! I was extremely concerned from having not one, but two friends with yellow labs the same age as Wally who died of cancer in the same year awhile ago. Thankfully, Wally is well and will be with us for a long time to come (knock wood). Here's a photo of him from almost two weeks ago after I brought him home from the vet after his surgery:

In another day or so, his wound should be completely healed and he'll be cleared for a much needed trip to the lake.

So, I'm returning to college after a nearly 20 year break to finish my Bachelor's Degree in English. It's a long story of how I came to have an Associate's Degree that somehow doesn't fill the math requirement in the state of Texas. Because of this, I need to take a placement exam, very similar to the SAT, so they can place me in the proper math class. My goal is to waste as little time and money as I can toward fulfilling my college math requirement. If I were to score low on the test, which is what would happen if I didn't study for it, I could end up being stuck in as many as three refresher math courses that wouldn't even count toward my degree before being let into a college level math class that will. That would take about a year and a half - a year and a half of my time and about $6k in wasted tuition. No thank you. This is why I've been studying math for the past weeks. I'm going through the study guide for the exam - the THEA (Texas Higher Education Assessment) - and am amazed both by what I've forgotten and what I've retained. I have numbers and equations floating around in my head, and I can't wait until the time comes when I think I can score high enough on the exam to take it. Just yesterday, I went completely through a chapter on graphing algebraic equations that would have taken maybe three weeks to go through in high school. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of x and y axes. Not fun. My only hope is that math majors everywhere have to suffer equally through the writing and literature classes I can skate through.