It's sure Monday

I woke up around 3 am last night and couldn't get back to sleep quickly. So, I decided: I was out in the field Saturday and I mowed and edged Sunday, I'll reset the alarm for 6 and not do the exercise today.

Ugh. If I'm going to have a bad dream, it's usually the last one of the night, and usually right before the alarm goes off. Without going into too much boring detail: I dreamed that one of my favorite quilt shops (no, not the one here in town) was going out of business. I hadn't known that because I hadn't been reading their e-mail updates and I made a trip there. They were closing out all the fabric but the only stuff left was drab and ugly and not the kind of fabric I wanted. I bought one small piece mainly to be polite. The owner checked me out and I made some comment about the closing, and she said something like, "No one brings quilts in for quilting now...." there was, apparently, some new small-scale quilting device on the market that lots of people had bought, and she could no longer support the business.

And I woke up just feeling sad and unsettled, and with that sinking feeling of "Everything and everyone you love is going to leave you some day, whether they want to or not. Eventually you will be in a gray hole of nothingness." I guess the death of the family friend affected me more than I had thought....I also had those late-night worries of getting the phone call. You know,. THE phone call, the one bearing bad news, the one where you have to figure out how to get your work-stuff covered while still dealing with the shock, and travel a long distance while bereaved. (I also never finished reading Penhallow because I was reading it at a time where my dad was somewhat unwell and the concern was that the pain he was suffering wasn't "just" arthritis. It's since been concluded that it was....but reading a mystery in which the father of the family ("Oh, the guv'nor....the poor old guv'nor") is the murder victim when your own dad is ailing....well, even though Adam Penhallow is NOTHING like my father (Penhallow was a tyrant, he had multiple illegitimate children, he drank heavily....), still, it made me unhappy enough I just quit reading it).

I mean, I survive: I've always survived the losses of people I thought were un-loseable. But I tend to forget that I manage to survive those losses, and wind up in the thought pattern of "What will I do if" or, sadly, in a few cases, "What will I do when".

And then I came in to find that print shop apparently interpreted "I want fifteen copies of this nine page document" as "I want nine copies of this" and I found myself short several exams this morning.

And I'm being tapped to "take one for the team" - go to some horrible un-fun meetings that involve missing a day of classes. Oh, I agree, I'm the logical one to go, as it's in my area and I only lose a day of principles I lab this fall to it - but still. Meetings, argh.

I'm also worrying about getting done what I need to get done this week: two days of fieldwork, plus collecting the soil-invertebrate samples, and then NEXT week I lose perhaps half a day to effective fieldwork as I have a dental appointment. (And it's supposed to hit 100 or so this week here. Ugh. I was really hoping for a slightly cooler summer, or at least one that didn't come on so fast)


ETA: At least I got my exams all graded during my between-classes break. So tonight I can go home after my long lab and relax.

E-ETA: and a "life is short" realization - I decided to go ahead and visit family during my August break. I had thought of sticking here and working on research, but you know? I have all kinds of time during the fall semester to do that, and I may only have a limited number of opportunities to visit my parents again. So I went ahead and bought tickets. I don't regret it and if anyone here (at my uni) thinks less of me for not staying and working, they  can go soak their heads.