43 pages per application, plus 7 envelopes in each one (separate transcripts and recommendation letters), times 13 applications to various sites in the Boston/NH area, plus let's not think about the number of copies that had to get thrown out for one reason or another, plus Priority Mail postage for each and Delivery Confirmation for five of them, plus application fees, plus endless, endless hours of counting up all my clinical hours and trying to find some way to make the essays both professional and un-boring and wavering about which sites to select and kicking myself for having already gotten my heart set on a site before I ever even mailed in the application... $193, and that's low because I was able to get most of the supplies and copies from work!

Now I have to sit back and pretend the whoele internship application process doesn't exist for a few weeks. Hopefully by mid-December I will have been granted a few interviews - I can't get placed at a site unless they like my application enough to ask me to interview. I promise that I will cry like a baby if I don't even get an interview slot at my #1 choice. Interviews will be scheduled throughout January. We get notified of our final placement at the end of February. Nothing like a long, drawn-out process to really make you bleed from the ears.

(For those of you who don't know, I'm in my final year of grad school - clinical psychology - and am applying for an internship placement for next year. If I don't get placed, then I have to take a year off and apply again - I can't get a full-time job or a professional license until I have completed the internship. No pressure.)

Hmm. I suppose now I should go reintroduce myself to my husband and children. Maybe even bathe them. I could consider doing housework... of course, that would mean that first I have to find the house under the mountain of toys and clothes and such that have accumulated over the past few weeks while I was drowning in this application nonsense.

EEEK now I get to start preparing for the holidays. Sometime in the midst of filling out some form or other, my mother-in-law suggested that we host Christmas at our house this year. Brilliant! But at least with this project, I can make my husband and kids help!