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Newt Gingrich Has Promised America the Moon, But Can He Deliver?

FreelancersOffice.com — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:38:14 +0000

Scientist-astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt stands by the American flag during a moonwalk on the Apollo 17 mission.

In his speech to Republican voters in Cocoa, Florida on Wednesday, Newt Gingrich addressed the issue of what he intends for the future of America’s space program if he is elected president of the United States.

In his commentary, Gingrich promised, “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”

In addition to his desire for a permanent American base on the Moon, Gingrich wants to make the Moon the 51st State in the Union.

In talking about Governor Romney’s opinion of Gingrich’s plans for the Moon, Gingrich told an audience in Cocoa, Fl, “The weirdest thing I have ever done, and I am going to tell you all, because sooner or later his researchers will find it. At one point, early in my career, I introduced the Northwest Ordinance for Space. And I said when we got, I think the number was 13,000, when we have 13,000 Americans living on the Moon, they can petition to become a State.” He went on shortly after that with a promise, “And I will, as president, encourage the introduction of the Northwest Ordinance for Space to put a marker down, that we want Americans to think boldly about the future and we want Americans to go out and study hard and work hard and together we’re going to unleash the American people to rebuild the country we love. ”

There are a few obstacles to Gingrich’s dream to transform the Moon into the 51st State of the Union. Once the issue of financing such an undertaking has been overcome, and the logistics of colonization has been sorted out so that colonists can begin to sign up to be taken to their new lunar homes, there is still the small matter of ownership of the Moon. Can Gingrich promise the American people the Moon?

Nevada entrepreneur Dennis Hope might have something to say about Gingrich’s proposal. Hope is the head of the Lunar Embassy Corporation, and his corporation has sold land to over 3.5 million Lunar land owners.

In 2004 Hope started his own Lunar government to assure the property rights of his customers were protected. Hope claimed in a July 2009 National Geographic article that his government had a ratified constitution, a congress, a unit of currency and even a patent office.

“We’re now a fully realized sovereign nation,” Hope said.

While Hope has expressed his confidence that his claim on the moon is a secure one, the Lunar Embassy Corporation is not the biggest obstacle to Gingrich’s plans.

Beyond the Lunar Embassy is the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). The UNOOSA website has a PDF version of the United Nations Treaties And Principles on Outer Space which was adopted by the United Nations on December 19, 1966 and entered into force on October 10, 1967.

The formal Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies is a part of the treaty and deals with specific concepts included in the 1967 treaty. Adopted on December 5, 1979, it entered into force on July 11, 1984.

Of significance to the issue is Article II of section A of the treaty:

A. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities
of States in the Exploration and Use
of Outer Space, including the Moon
and Other Celestial Bodies

Article II
Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to
national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or
by any other means.

Article XVII
This Treaty, of which the Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish texts
are equally authentic, shall be deposited in the archives of the Depositary Governments.
Duly certified copies of this Treaty shall be transmitted by the Depositary
Governments to the Governments of the signatory and acceding States.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF the undersigned, duly authorized, have signed this
Treaty.
DONE in triplicate, at the cities of London, Moscow and Washington, D.C., the
twenty-seventh day of January, one thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven.

Another, more clearly worded part is to be found in Article 11 of section E:

E. Agreement Governing the Activities of States
on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies

Recognizing that the Moon, as a natural satellite of the Earth, has an important
role to play in the exploration of outer space,

Desiring to prevent the Moon from becoming an area of international conflict,

Article 11

The Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind, which finds its expression in the provisions of this Agreement, in particular in paragraph 5 of this article.

The Moon is not subject to national appropriation by any claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person. The placement of personnel, space vehicles, equipment, facilities, stations and installations on or below the surface of the Moon, including structures connected with its surface or subsurface, shall not create a right of ownership over the surface or the subsurface of the Moon or any areas thereof. The foregoing provisions are without prejudice to the international regime referred to in paragraph 5 of this article.

The United States entered into an agreement over 40 years ago that the Moon, and all celestial bodies, should belong to all mankind and to all nations. It was recognized in that treaty that no single nation should ever have the capability to lay claim to an area of such significant scientific importance to all mankind.

Given the commitments made by the signing of the UNOOSA treaty, and its specific negation of ownership of the Moon and other celestial bodies, it is difficult to see how Gingrich could promise that the Moon could be made the 51st State of the Union.

Surveyor 1's shadow on the Moon on June 2, 1966.

We need to clean out the credit check system

FreelancersOffice.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:18:06 +0000

In December my bank asked me if it would be okay if they closed a joint account I had open that had been an account my father and I had shared. I agreed, since I had kept it open after he passed away simply because my parents had had that account for over 20 years and if there were any debt collectors out there that would be how they would best be able to point out to me that I had missed them.

One year later I had long since contacted all debt holders and no one unknown had shown up to ask for money, so I felt it was okay to close the account so the bank could have a clean end to the fiscal year.

As part of my efforts to establish my credit worth, and hopefully buy my home of 20+ years, I have been working with a lady at a credit recovery place to assure I’ve not missed any unknown debt of my own lurking out there from trips to the emergency clinic and such. Today I called her and talked to her and she asked if I knew _________. That gave me a moment of pause, after some discussion about things she could not discuss but could only say “I can’t say anything” she referred me to another number and to talk to a specific someone in that law firm.

Okay, I immediately call the law firm and state what I am calling about and give the coded number that the other lady had given me. The lady at the law firm is totally confused for why it is even an issue since the debt is over 14 years old, well past statute of limitations, and was marked as being canceled and closed because the person in question is deceased. She marked it “canceled and closed” again, zeroed it out and said not to worry, that she would make sure it was all cleared up and I no longer need to concern myself with the issue.

I thanked her profusely and she emailed the other lady, who I called back to let know what the law firm had said. I was again assured that it was all taken care of and cleared up and not to worry about it anymore.

End result, after multiple calls this morning, is that the debt was canceled out and closed 14 years ago and should not have been showing up as a debt anywhere. I have to wonder just how many more false active debts there are floating about out there in people’s credit files mucking up the system.

Rent A Center Frustrations

FreelancersOffice.com — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:37:52 +0000

A couple of months ago someone’s dryer stopped working so I suggested they try to get a new one at the local Rent A Center. At their request I called the place to find out if they had a dryer, and identified myself as a current customer since I thought I recalled that they would give a store credit for referring new customers. My first referral. KEWL! Or so I had thought.

The first month, payment time on the dryer approaches and I get a call to remind me to come in and make a payment. Wait… what? No. I am not the one that got the dryer, someone ELSE rented it I should not even be on that contract. What happened? I got it sorted out – until the next month, when I was called again. I keep trying to sort it out, and so does the person that has the dryer, but Rent A Center does not comprehend that I am not the person who rented the dryer.

They just called me again.

Me: Hello?

Her: This is ___ at Rent A Center, this is just a courtesy call to remind you that you need to make a payment on the dryer.

Me: …. what dryer?

Her: You rented a dryer.

Me: No, I did not, ____ rented a dryer, not me. You should call them.

Her: Oh.

Me: What number do you have there?

She rattled off my number and said it was marked as “Courtesy call.” And another number and said it was marked as “Courtesy call.” Then she read off a third one, the right number.

Me: And what is that one marked as?

Her: Call about dryer.

Me: That is the number you should call.

Why can they not comprehend the basic detail that I am NOT the person that rented the dryer, it was someone ELSE. Both me and that person have asked, on multiple occasions, for them to call the person who rented the dryer, to list that person as the number one contact about the dryer, but the local store can not do that. I’ve even talked to the manager and explained the situation to him and asked him to please fix it – but he can’t seem to correct the referrer being listed as the renter.

I don’t get my free rental time as a referrer and instead I have to face the headache of having them calling me to talk about someone else’s rental. It is really starting to annoy me and tick me off. I’m not renting anything from them again, I’ll go to the other rental place in town and give them all of my business and future referrals. Rent A Center just can not seem to understand my only part in the dryer was to ask if they had one and then hand the phone to someone else as a referring customer. I never signed anything or even saw the store people in person when the dryer was rented, and it was not delivered to my house, so they need to stop harassing me about it unless they can not contact the person who rented it. PLEASE, can they just try the other number first for ONCE?

Cold day in he– errr, Alaska

FreelancersOffice.com — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:14:27 +0000

We seem to have got off to a record making year here in Alaska.

First we had the worst storm that the west coast of Alaska has seen in 40 years. Hurricane force winds and blizzard conditions buffeted the coastal towns along the west coast of Alaska. Then that cold seemed to move inland. At least it seems like that to me. On the 18th we hit the lowest temperature we have had in the Anchorage area since 1963. Weather reports for Alaska placed it at -8 F on the 18th, out here where I am in the north end of the Valley the outside thermometer read -18 F. And I was out of heater fuel – again.

Seems like I have consistently been taking a full can of No. 1 heating fuel and about 4 large armloads of firewood a day to get me through the night this past week. I have hopes that the weather might go back up, but I am also a little scared to see just how many more records have been broke so far this year. I still clearly recall the thermometer hitting -60 on the porch here back in the 80′s and I really do not want to have that to happen again. Especially not when I can not yet afford to have heating fuel delivered and have to buy it one can at a time as I can scratch the money together.

The good news is that I have things settled down to the point I can actually get work done during the morning and afternoon once again, I think this is the first time since 2008 that I have actually felt like I could work and not get buried under the effort.

Is it true that even bad press is good?

FreelancersOffice.com — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:33:43 +0000

If you are a business owner, then the last thing you want to see is a negative review of your business. It feels terrible. Trust me, I know, I am a writer.

It seems to me that writers take criticism better than many others. Perhaps we just have thicker skins? Or maybe we have been trained that being criticized is part of being a writer? Twenty years ago, when I first started to write, I submitted a short story to a critique group I was a member of at that time. The story was nothing fancy, just your basic spaceship crew investigates why a mining colony has stopped communicating, finds nearly everyone was killed after they unearthed a dormant nest of nasties deep down in the mine. I got the idea from a news piece at the time about Io and the possibility of finding useful material in the ice, coupled with another report that there could possibly be life down under the ice sheets of Io. One of the reviews I got back from the group was scathing, not for my writing, but for me! I was accused of ripping off Heinlein, whom I have never read. I’m more of a fantasy genre person, and just had a muse tickled by news reports so whipped out a shirt SciFi story. The lesson I learned: there are no original plots.

I kept right on writing. I now make my living as a writer; granted, it’s advertisement copywriting that pays the bills, but I still work from time to time on my novels and short stories as well. I do not hold any ill will toward the fellow that accused me of ripping off Heinlein, it was his perspective on the situation and I took that perspective and let it make me into a better writer. Which is why I do not understand why other professions do not take a cue from writers and take the bad with the good.

Everyone has an opinion, and the best we can do is to make sure we give reasons for more good opinions than bad opinions. This is of particular importance in the age of the Internet, where a review of a company (good or bad) is able to be linked to, commented on, and lives forever in the silica landscape of Cyber Space.

A 2009 article on a lawsuit that was filed over a negative review on the website Yelp includes a statement by a Yelp spokeswoman who said: “Most businesses engage constructively with customers who haven’t had a good experience. When that doesn’t work, they recognize that they can’t always make one hundred percent of their customers happy one hundred percent of the time, and don’t risk the huge expense and potential negative publicity that comes with suing one of their customers.”

And that is what people seem to forget. In so many cases, there is far more harm done by a lawsuit than a negative review could ever have done. If, rather than filing a lawsuit, the person had practiced good business and improved their business based on the negative criticism, their reputation would have been so much better off.

Take for instance the above mentioned lawsuit. The customer of a business gave the business a negative review on Yelp. The business owner took offense and asked the person to remove the review, stating that it was all a misunderstanding of his office procedures and that the review unjustly characterized him as being unethical and dishonest. The business was, in fact, a sponsored advertiser on Yelp at the time, and encouraged his customers to write reviews on the website. The person who wrote the negative review removed it two days after they were sent a letter by the business owner’s attorney threatening a lawsuit if the review was not removed. One month later – the lawsuit was filed.

The review, according to an article on the case, caused no decline in the number of referrals that the business received from Yelp, however, after the business owner opened the lawsuit there were fewer referrals – this according to the defendant’s attorney, who cited Yelp documents as the source of the information.

So, by filing a lawsuit against someone that had given them a negative review, the business did far more harm than the review ever could have. And that is not a unique situation. Consider the case of Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who recently filed a lawsuit against the Washington City Paper. An article in the newspaper, accompanied by a picture of Snyder on which devil features had been doodled in pen, listed reasons that the writer felt Snyder was a bad owner. Snyder felt that he was “forced” to file a lawsuit to protect his good name and reputation. Unfortunately for him, the lawsuit did far more to harm his reputation and name than the article ever could have.

The lawsuit lead to public scrutiny – via Twitter – of Snyder’s prior activities and gained the attention of the media. Because of the lawsuit many people that might not have seen the article sought it out to read it. Worse, for Snyder, people began to look into his past on their own and started discussing it online in blogs and on social networking sites.

Snyder’s reputation would have been much better off had he ignored the article, and instead focused on what he could do to counter the comments that had been made about him.

And those are not the only situations where a lawsuit has caused the person who felt they were defamed or slandered to end up doing themselves more harm by opening a lawsuit than the item they found offensive and are suing for. Since I can name several cases, I am sure there must be many more situations where a lawsuit has done far more harm than the original bad publicity. There might be instances where legal action is the right move, however, I think that if one looks at what has come from such lawsuits, it would be discovered that in many instances the damage done to a person or company by filing a lawsuit, is far worse than the perceived defamation or slander ever was.

My advice to anyone thinking that they might sue someone for a bad review or a bad article about them or their business, would be to first consider what kind of response the lawsuit might spark in the media and social networking sites. Then consider if it might be better to simply correct the issues the review or article brought up and build a solid reputation going forward that would not leave one open to negative reviews or articles. Especially if, such as is the case with Snyder, there are things in one’s past that would be raised by the discussions a lawsuit sparks.

Criticize my writing all you want, but watch what you say about my mom!

FreelancersOffice.com — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 15:13:56 +0000

I just realized that I have been spending far too long this evening / morning reading over bad writing with the same kind of morbid ‘what the—’ that makes a person stare at something that they really do not want to look at. So, why would I spend so long reading seriously badly misspelled words? Well, they were sort of connected to me. I’m not going to go into any details here, mainly because I am not sure that it is worth giving the person in question the attention they seek by going into details, but I will say that I have learned a few things.

First, the importance of knowing how to spell if you are going to be writing. Or at least using a spell checker, since most of the blatant errors I have been wading through were seriously blatant spelling errors.

Second, that someone can sue a third party for “loss of marital consortium”. …… yeah, I was stopped short when I read that. I had to go look it up, because surely it can’t mean what it looks like, right? Well… LexisNexis, the Iowa Law Review, defines it thus:

…. Loss of consortium is an action that has existed in various forms for centuries. ¹ At early common law, only a husband was able to bring a consortium action for the loss of his wife’s marital services. …..

…. The modern action for loss of consortium permits either spouse to sue for loss of the other’s love, society, affection, or sexual relations ….

So, uhh, yeah. It really does mean that a man can sue someone who he feels has caused his wife to stop performing her ‘wifely duties’.

Third, I just wasted a lot of sleep time that I will never get back, and the end result is being left wanting to speak up about someone that has in a roundabout manner dragged me into something I have no time or actual desire to be involved in. But tell me, how exactly does someone easily ignore having it implied that they are unethical? How does someone ignore it when a person brings up their deceased mother and insinuates that she was a bad mother in how she raised her children, in how I was taught? How does one ignore insinuations by someone that never knew them or their parents that they were neglected as a child?

I don’t know. I have been trying to think for a while now if I should respond to the insinuations that were made about me, but I think I will try to leave that to others to respond to for at least a few more days. I will raise one question, however, since it is still puzzling me.

The person who made a not-so-round-about attack on my character and ethical position as an Internet Journalist, brought up something about Click Fraud. They outright accused someone else (not connected to my family) of having performed click fraud – which means boosting the number of clicks on something such as Google AdSense ads. Now the way they explained it was that someone had claimed to have clicked on someone else’s ads to make money… I have been an AdSense participant for many years, and I will tell you that in my understanding of the program, you can not go to someone else’s website and make money by clicking on the ads on that other person’s website. That person would make the money. So… how can the person in question that is insinuating click fraud seriously accuse someone else of making money by clicking on the accuser’s ads? I don’t understand that. And it is confusing enough that I apologize for the headache I likely just gave you trying to puzzle it through. I’ll go ask people in the Internet Advertisement Copywriting community.

I am going to go get an aspirin for the headache I have after the last seven hours of reading through posts that were attacks on myself via attacking my family, then get some much needed sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a long day, and I already lost far too much work time to trying to sort out what I had missed by not following what was being said about my family until last night. I’m still wanting to respond directly to the negative insinuations made about my ethical character, and the attacks that were levied against my mom. Instead, I will go get some sleep, and calm myself down, and yes, if you know my number, or instant messenger information, you can call and get all the details I am not posting here – just… wait until afternoon, please?

Oh, and, for the record. My name is Sandra Fikes. And yes, I do make money via my websites and blogs, and if I decide that the issue is worth my time I will be discussing it on a website that supports itself with advertising. I was quite content to ignore the situation, and would not even have bothered to read up about it for at least another month or two, had the person in question not made it a point to drag me into things, insinuated I am unethical, and made provably untrue and slanderous insinuations about my parents.

Rebuilding

FreelancersOffice.com — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:24:32 +0000

I’ve had a long series of ups and downs, as anyone that has watched my websites has likely noticed. It has been a nasty battle with depression that has, for far too long, caused me to experience failure after failure in trying to get my work back up to the level that it was in early 2008.

A lot of the time I had not even realized what I was feeling was depression, I just had no desire to really do anything more than I needed to do in any given day and pushed people away from me. Dark parts of my mind whispered that they hated me, that no one wanted to be around me, and in my depression I had no way to fight back – particularly when I am in a continual battle to not hide away from everyone and live my life inside my house. Yes, I hide it fairly well, but I am only a few panic attacks shy of being a shut-in. I steadfastly refuse to let myself become one, however, so even if it is just sitting on my porch to sip a cup of tea I make myself step outside when I find myself thinking that I could just live my life inside.

This inclination toward hermitage makes it very easy for me to listen when the voices say no one likes me, and that makes it rather hard to battle depression that leaves me feeling miserable and like my time would be better spent laying in bed than working. What is bad is that despite the fact that I knew that I was having issues with depression, have been battling it for years, I had not actually realized just how much it is affecting my work until I realized that I had not yet got my work back on track. I have been working, and making money at it, but when I step back and look at just how much I am making, it is just a bit over what the cost of my websites are. I am making enough that my sites are not costing me anything out of my own pocket (which is good since I can’t pay hosting companies with lint), but my sites are far from supporting me.

Part of that is my fault. No, it is entirely my fault. I let depression and feelings of low self-worth affect my ability to work. I allowed hackers to attack one of my websites when I was at the bottom of a depression and they left it in complete ruin. And yes, I do mean complete ruin. It was this website, which I am fairly certain has been blocked by a lot of search engines thanks to some bastard that hacked it and left some very vulgar and sexually explicit trash all over the site. I had not known anything was wrong with my own site until I hauled myself far enough above the depression clouds to start trying to work and realized that Google had banned the site from its advertising program.

My initial impulse was to ask them to reinstate the site, which I had torn down entirely and rebuilt from scratch, but then I decided that I should wait until I had rebuilt it some. And then the depression crept back in and I was left, once again, neglecting to get things done for I don’t know how long.

I am through with that. Or at least I am in a good enough mood today that I am telling myself I am through with it. I want to rebuild my sites, get them back up and moving along how they are supposed to be, and get back to working at a level that I am not only keeping my business from failing, but it is starting to turn enough of a profit to allow me to meet my bills once again.

So, I am going to start with a few websites that I have been managing to keep afloat, then expand outward from those once they are running smoothly. It is going to be a long slow rebuild, but I am determined that I am no longer going to allow depression to affect my work.

College postponed

FreelancersOffice.com — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:41:26 +0000

After thinking it through, and pondering where I want to be in 3 years, and in 5 years, I decided that I am going to postpone entering college until at least the spring semester. There is still a lot going on in my life at the moment, and on top of all of the stuff that I am currently juggling, I really don’t want to be a nurse so much as I want to be a caregiver – or rather, I want to help other caregivers. So, I did some more poking about, and I do not think I need a nursing degree to do what I want after all: although it would help, it is not a requirement.

Armed with the information I just spent the past three hours looking into, and given a few calculations on what I would be getting into if I went for a nursing degree, I have decided that it would be best for me to hold off on college for a few more months. In that time, I am going to make some calls to some folks in the field of work I want to get into, and take a few courses offered by them over the next few months that would have conflicted with college stuff if I was in college. By the time it is time to apply for college in the spring, I will be far better armed as far as knowing what I actually need, and will not waste $5,000 and a dozen credits going after a degree I might not even need for what I want to do, and if I hold off, I could still get an AAS in Human Services, which I think meshes much better with my goals, by the spring of 2014 if I want to go for it. I could likely get an AA and an AAS in Human Services by 2015, since so many of the required classes overlap.

Right now, however, I have canceled the placement test I had been going to take tomorrow – which would have cost me $15 and $10 in gas to take a test that I am not going to be needing after all – at least not until the Spring semester.

I still fully intend to get into caregiving, or rather to continue working in the caregiver field, I just am not going to jump so fast into a degree program that I might not even need. No sense in dropping myself $20,000 into debt in the next two and a half years if I don’t have to to get to where I want to be, right?

Contemplating Options for College

FreelancersOffice.com — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:42:33 +0000

I’m contemplating my options for college. I know that I would like to learn more about nursing, but I really don’t want to *BE* a nurse, if that makes any sense? I want to be better able to provide care for people, but I don’t want to sit in a doctor’s office or hospital waiting for one person after another to wander through needing my help for 15 minutes at a time. I want to get into caregiving, where I can provide nursing level assistance to someone like my parents.

As for what I want to do for a living… I still want to write, of course, and I would like to be able to do something like directing new family caregivers on what they need to know and do as they provide care for their loved ones. I’m aiming for nursing, but my end goal is a bit broader than just being a nurse, I have a bit of a specialization I want to aim for. Just need to line things up right to get there now.

Return to College

FreelancersOffice.com — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 01:23:52 +0000

I took the first official step in returning to college… I stopped in at the Mat-Su Community College and spoke to a lady in the student services about what to do. Specifically I stepped up to the counter and in reply to her “Can I help you?” I said “I really hope you can, I am totally lost and not sure what I’m doing. I want to go back to college and get a degree in nursing, so I need to talk to someone about what I need to do and what financial help I might qualify for?” She asked if I had ever been to the college before and I explained that I had taken a few semesters back around 1994 or 95, she then took me over to the computers and helped me locate the place to sign up for the placement test.

I got all signed up to take a placement test on next Monday, then stepped back over to the counter to find out about what else I needed to do while I was out there. She told me I just need to take the placement test on Monday, then I will go back there and talk to a guidance counselor once my tests are all in. She then gave me a few pages of paper in response to my asking about who I could talk to about financial assistance. Apparently there is no longer anyone at the college, I need to handle my own financial assistance locating and applications at home? That does not seem right to me, but…. it’s what she said.

I left student services and headed down to locate the testing place that she said was across from the library. The building I was in was a new one since I had been to the college before, so I was sort of blindly feeling my way along looking for where I remembered the library used to be. I found it, and found the learning center. Just as I was pondering if I go in and ask the lady at the counter to be sure that was the right place a lacy in a MSCC shirt passed me in the hall and asked if I needed any help. I explained I was looking for where I take a placement test on Monday and she confirmed that was the place, then told me that I needed to go a bit further down the hall, and showed me down past the Atrium to where the place I pay for the test is located. I had assumed that I was to pay in the learning center, so good thing that lady thought to let me know there was a different place to pay for it. I jotted a few notes on my little note pad, then went back to a seating area just outside Student Services where, thank you whoever, I found maps of the new floor layout for the college. I spent a few moments sorting out what buildings were supposed to connect where on the disjointed map, then marked out my route for Monday, grabbed some degree fliers off a nearby stand and headed home.

Now I just need to check out the practice tests online and brush back up on my poor algebra skills that have not been used since the last time I went to college… over 15 years ago.