The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

It was nice of the weather to be warm yesterday, but it was awfully wet. I know, because I stood in it for half an hour at Harvard Ave waiting for the T. I did have an umbrella, but I also had a bag of cat food, which I wasn't interested in walking all over hell's half acre with, and wasn't quite willing to walk into a bar with (although I was sorely tempted to give up and go have a drink somewhere). So I stood in the rain for half an hour. At least it got me over being annoyed at myself for the latest tutorial session disaster, which I had known about but which got shoved into the back of my brain behind competencies and summatives and Mozart. So I have to reschedule two tutorials, but fortunately only for one of the four groups. Problem being that this is a split course; it happens for two weeks and then there's a three-week break so the students can study for and take the National Board Exam Part 1, and then the course picks up again for another three weeks. So if I can't reschedule the tutorials for next week, they'll have to wait until May. But I'm human, therefore I'm not perfect, therefore I can stop kicking myself about this, right?

Not taking any vacation this spring has been rough on my brain. I did it on purpose this year, though, because taking vacation in March has never been really convenient for this job; waiting until after graduation would be better. But I got used to having a break in March, and not having it is making me unhappy and making me eat too much (operating on the premise that I eat too much when I'm unhappy, I'm trying to figure out why I'm unhappy. The answer keeps being some variation on "I need a break."). Apparently I need more of a break than a single four-day weekend last month. At this time two months from now, I will be in Iceland. For today, I'm glad it's Friday. And I'm very glad I splurged on an hour and a half of massage appointment tonight, because bits of me need it.

The career development course continues to be interesting. Yesterday was mostly about skills, which is what you get hired for, and how skills often have nothing to do with what you like doing, and how to figure out how much of that disparity you can live with. In my particular situation, the next step up (which I won't be looking to take for at least two years, probably longer) is to become management for somebody. I don't want to manage people, partly because I don't know how. So I'll have to learn how, but at least now I know that. I also know I'm an excellent second banana if somebody else wants to be in charge, so I'll have to get used to being in charge (well, sort of. There's always another layer of management.). But I realized that the distinction between "working with" and "working for" is important to me too. So if I could get into management by learning some management skills and then being the manager of one person, I might be able to stand it. Throw me in charge of a five-person team tomorrow and it would be a disaster.

Speaking of disasters, I gave up. I'm having a bad shoulder day anyway and when I sneezed this morning and it didn't like that at all, I decided to go to the doctor (on Monday morning, apparently). I'm tired of knowing it's going to hurt to do necessary things like putting on sweaters, and I'm really tired of not knowing what else is suddenly going to hurt. I just hope it doesn't take a week, a GP appointment, an orthopedist appointment and an x-ray appointment to tell me they can't actually see anything wrong, because I know there's something going on in there; I just don't know exactly what it is.

On the subject of things being wrong, I put my hand on the front door at work today and the fire alarm went off. Timing is everything. Fortunately I was already equipped with coffee at that point, and had brought my best umbrella (the one that's wide enough to keep both of my elbows dry, and doesn't leak), so 20 minutes standing outdoors drinking coffee wasn't so bad.

As of 2:00 yesterday afternoon, the rest of this week can go suck on a warthog. It's not that there's anything in particular going wrong; I'm just DONE. I need it to be April so I can go Away for a while. Away is nine points of the law right now. Even when it's warm(ish) out and I'm cheerfully looking around and saying "Hey, that snowbank is shorter than it was yesterday! There's melting going on!", I'm still in Boston and life is still about snowbanks and work and errands and chores and lack of time to do both what needs doing and what I need to do. At least the cats are still happy to see me when I get home.

However, here I am at work, because the Curriculum Task Force meeting that was going to be yesterday got moved to today as of Monday. (Confused yet?) So, since somebody's got to go to the task force meeting and write things down, I'm here waiting for noon. At least there will be lunch. There will, in fact, be way too much lunch, because the reason we have task force meetings on Tuesdays is because nobody can come to meetings on Wednesdays. So I ordered lunch for 12 when the meeting was on Tuesday, and now I have four people I know of coming today. Usually there are at least three or four people who never reply when I ask who's coming but show up anyway, so maybe I'll only have four or five extra lunches. Sigh.

Speaking of lunch, now that Townsman is finally open, I want to go there (for dinner). But I may wait until my birthday weekend, just so I can have a serious blowout of a dinner.

Some kinds of help are the kinds of help you don't actually get, apparently. It's been just about two weeks now and I've heard from EAP once to the tune of "we're working on it but everybody's booked solid". I'm debating now whether I should call them back and tell them to forget it, or whether it would be useful to tell somebody what I thought I needed help with so I know what, if anything, to do with it next time. I hope there won't be a next time, because one crisis at a time is plenty, but just in case...

In other news, my right rotator cuff is giving me issues again. I wish it would decide what exactly it doesn't like, because so far it seems to be random amounts of sore on random days. I know it didn't like the peculiar stretch I had to do the other night to shut off the light on the nightstand without shoving Snip off the bed, but I haven't done anything like that lately.

So far my attempts to, as my family puts it, "remember the good things" have resulted in at least one good thing per day without my having to think about it terribly hard. That leads me to believe that this is a thing I should keep doing, because there's always SOMETHING good, no matter how trivial. Today it was the look on Lily's face when she yawns, which makes me giggle every time I see it. It's been about seven years now and I still giggle every time I see it.

I need to make some time, sometime, to start drawing again. I'm passable at it as long as I pay attention, and there are at least three things I've seen lately that I want to try drawing. I've been carrying a painting around in my head for ages now, too, but I absolutely cannot make paint do what I want and I don't think it's something I can describe to somebody else and have painted for me. The painting is sharing brain space with the children's book I should write down someday. Meanwhile, I keep embroidering.

I'm done with this week and it isn't even Tuesday afternoon yet. I shouldn't have started watching that football game last night, because it was a mess and I went to bed feeling depressed about it. And then this morning I woke up and went off to work and discovered that today is the second of three straight days of lunch meetings. The fact that there's going to be lunch doesn't mean I want to go to lunch meetings, though. Mostly it means I am so sick of scheduling meetings, I could scream. (Although tomorrow's wasn't mine to schedule, which is nice because it got rescheduled at least twice before it ended up tomorrow.) I'm just tired of dealing with people's lack of availability.

Add the above to the apparent conspiracy to make everything happen on October 8 (faculty development day, first day of CNA course including lunch meeting, caries evaluation exercise including evaluation forms and surveys, furnace replacement, chorus rehearsal, and probably three or four other things I've suppressed), and I want to hide in the back of the spelunking closet until November.

September 30 is St. Jerome's Day. St. Jerome is the patron saint of translators, and it always makes me a little sad to get to St. Jerome's Day and not be doing any translating, again. Granted, I get paid pretty well for what I am doing, and I get some satisfaction out of it, but I got more satisfaction out of translating than I had ever gotten out of anything else in my educational or professional lives.

You wouldn't think it would be so hard to find boxes to keep model skulls in, but for some reason Google thinks that "skull storage" means "it has skulls on it". Which is not what I meant. Oddly enough, when I tried "model storage", I got a lot of results for boxlike things to keep dental casts in. Close, but no cigar. The search continues.

It appears to be fall again already. I shut the windows last week and haven't opened them since. This doesn't bode well for the rest of the winter. (Speaking of which, winter=furnace, furnace=conversion, conversion=don't forget to call and cancel November oil delivery. Preferably way the hell before November.)

I really can't explain why I'm almost completely unmotivated unless caffeinated lately. I can be productive while uncaffeinated, but I have to absolutely force myself to do anything work-related, and I procrastinate like mad for anything else. (Except grocery shopping, but that's part of the weekend routine these days.) Maybe it's the season changing. Whatever it is, I've got to figure it out because it's annoying me. Yes, there's a difference between what I need to do and what needs doing, but that isn't an excuse to put off the things that need doing for a couple of weeks. I put off doing laundry for so long I nearly had to go buy more underwear. I should probably do that anyway, just so I absolutely have enough for two weeks.

OK, canceled the November oil delivery, so I can stop remembering that I haven't done that yet. (Yes, I know that gas explodes; and no, I don't want to stay with oil, and even if I did, it wouldn't be up to me anyway. All I want is for you all not to pump oil into a basement that won't have an oil tank in it in November.) Also got two of the three people who assisted with the head and neck anatomy lab session last year to agree to do it again this year, and expect the third to say he'll do it too. If this course won't fit into the redesigned curriculum, I won't be terribly sorry. The schedule is ridiculously complicated and the director is somewhat entitled and never here, so she gets to tell me to do things I wouldn't usually have to do. At least I get paid to do it, and the leftover curriculum committee meeting lunch included an egg salad sandwich (my favorite!) so it's a good day anyway.

It was a pretty good weekend, in that it was three days long and it only snowed once. That meant I could go stomping around outdoors, breaking in my new sluck-puddle boots (after Sunday) and breaking out of a case of the fidgets at the same time. The new boots have stiffer soles than the old ones, which is taking some getting used to, especially when walking on ice. But they also have shorter laces than the old ones, so Snip can't destroy them quite so much. (She has her very own set of shoelaces; why can't she play with those?)

Speaking of Snip, I have discovered that she Does Not Like human beings under the age of 10. I have no idea why that is, but she got VERY upset, to the point of hissing at me for a while after the perceived threat had gone home. She's only ever hissed at the vet before. At least she had calmed down again by bedtime, so whatever the trauma was, I've been forgiven for it. And I got to be social, and got rid of a significant number of pairs of pants that don't fit me these days, so it was all good in the end.

Today hasn't been quite so good. I managed to scrape my hand and tweak my ankle this morning in the process of getting the ice-encrusted lid off the trash can. Trash day isn't until tomorrow and I could have waited, but I wanted to get rid of a couple of pounds of chicken bones I had made stock out of. (I wanted black bean soup, but got sidetracked by Whole Foods selling chicken bones for soup and ended up making stock instead of soaking beans.) I'm having to learn to cook all over again, sort of; it's not so much that what I cook is bad for me, but I have to get used to smaller portion sizes and either cook less of whatever it is, or eat it for two or three straight weeks, by which time I'm thoroughly tired of it. Freezing some things would be lovely, but I don't have enough freezer space to keep ingredients and meals at the same time. Someday I'll figure this all out.

Then I got to work and, of course, Dr. C had to come tell me there's something wrong with his online course materials. He comes at least once a week and asks me why things don't work the way they used to when it was all on paper and how am I going to fix it. (First, have an orientation meeting with your tutors, like we asked you to three times. They can do what you're asking me to do as easily as I can; they just don't know that because you didn't tell them, or they don't want to, or both.) This course ends at the end of March and I hope March goes quickly (although I'm not expecting it to, between the weather this winter and the fact that it's never even warmish by the end of March).

In cheerier news, yesterday I treated myself to a latte, and it was wonderful. Part of me thinks it's silly to make such a big deal out of the existence of coffee with milk in it, and the other part thinks it's great that it made me that happy and can't wait (another three months?) to do it again. I generally side with the part that thinks it's great, because it's fun to enjoy things. I wonder what the next thing I enjoy that much will be?

I still don't know why it takes three days to transfer funds from one bank to another. Maybe if it were several million dollars, or if it were going to the Cayman Islands or Switzerland or somewhere like that, it wouldn't take as long? But at least my life savings went where I sent them, so I can stop panicking about that and get on with closing the accounts at the megabank. (This is one of the things I started last year and would like to finish.)

Things I think about while walking home: When I turned 35, I had two or three goals I wanted to accomplish before I turned 40, and I'm going to get through two of them this year. I can't remember what the third one was, which means I've either already done it, or I was being silly and didn't actually mean it. In any case, I don't turn 40 until next year, so well done me. One of the two is a good thing to keep doing even though I already did what I said I wanted to; not so much with the other, though, so I guess it's time to think of something else I want to get done before I'm 40.

Given a three-day weekend with no voice lesson in it, I feel like I should have an adventure of some sort or other. Unfortunately I have no idea what constitutes an adventure this time. I do think it's going to be an adventure, rather than an Adventure, though. I tried to figure out an Adventure for February, but everywhere I thought I wanted to go seems to be booked solid through April. At least I'm not quite so desperate to go somewhere warm now that the polar vortex has let up.

New phone may happen before new toy, but only because it seems the Lego Millennium Falcon is on backorder for a couple of weeks.

It's nice that I forget what "burned out" feels like, but it sucks when I remember. I've been remembering for the last two weeks. Mostly it means I'm always cold, and I eat too much because I'm overstressed (and cold), and I go to bed an hour early to keep getting up in the morning from being a major annoyance. And I have to be very careful not to say what I'm thinking. (It does not help that I got stuck answering the main phone, the Dean's phone and my phone this morning, in the midst of trying to get the January P&R meeting materials online.)

Meanwhile, I'm apparently supposed to be extremely upset about various political and/or social issues, but I don't want to spend all of my spare time being upset.

However, today is one day closer to Thursday, and on Thursday the office closes at 2:00 and we all go bowling for the afternoon. And then I don't come back to work until January 3. That is a lovely thought. So is the thought that I'm not traveling until Saturday morning, so I can have Friday absolutely off.

I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning and groused my way through the shower and the feeding of cats and all the other weekday morning stuff. And then I got to the bus stop and found somebody already having a worse day than I was. Suffice it to say his car wasn't going anywhere, due to something under the hood being unhappy. Compared to that, I have nothing to grouse about.