Ugh, it's Tuesday

Tuesdays are ninja Mondays: just as bad, but you never see them coming.

So far this morning, I've:

1. Dropped the box of cereal and then had to sweep bits up off the floor
2. Found a flea (????) on my ankle.(I do not have pets)
3. Knocked over the shampoo bottle and had to wipe up shampoo
4. Stepped outside and gone, "It smells like an armpit out here." Well, it does. It's super, super humid, and it's that kind of stale, no-breeze humidity that traps every bad smell and holds it in.
5. Found out the battery in my garage-door opener remote is dead (Note to self: go get new one after you get out of class)
6. While trying to deal with that (punching it repeatedly to try to make the door close), I ran up on the side of my lawn and probably have a tire track there now.
7. None of the promised soil for tomorrow's lab has shown up (sigh), so I will have to go and dig some out of my backyard and from campus and hope there are a few bags left behind in the prep room. (I'm just HALF tempted to change the lab and make them do a different lab, and shrug and go, "But no one brought me soil and three or four of you said you would.")
8. Got an upset, "YOU ARE BEING UNFAIR" e-mail from someone who misinterpreted how I entered the number of absences they had into BlackBoard. Granted, a big part of that is that BlackBoard is megastupid in how it allows you to do that and it's open to misinterpretation, but still, having someone immediately assume I'm trying to sink their college career on the basis of one tiny thing is not a good way to start the workday.
9. Got an e-mail alleging to have a (late) assignment attached, but nothing was attached. I am very suspicious of this because it seems like a plausible way someone could buy themselves some time and yet just look like an innocent mistake.

Ugh. I don't know. I think this overload - which is not even that great of an overload, two classes (one of which I merely co-teach) is doing me in. I saw a story in the new Mary Jane's Farm about a woman who works as an architect by day and makes incredible art quilts by night. And that makes me enormously sad; I count it as a good night when I have a half-hour to work on anything. I haven't "designed" anything in a long time (as much as I ever "designed" anything - mostly just plugging a fancy stitch into a standard 64 or 72 stitch sock pattern). I don't know what's wrong with me that I never seem to do anything meaningful. I feel like when I'm gone I'll be totally forgotten because there's nothing I'm leaving behind that matters. I'm not even doing that much research because it seems so much of my teaching life is running from crisis to crisis and just trying to keep the plates spinning.

I really wish when I was a kid growing up that people had said to me, instead of saying, "You're going to do great things!" they had either said nothing or have told me I'd never make anything of myself. That would have been more realistic and would have set me up for far less disappointment in life.