Remembering self-care

I dislike the last week of the semester. Everything's crazy, everything seems to take longer than it possibly should. I don't get enough sleep, I can't take enough time to cook proper meals, it feels like all I do is grading. (I managed to achieve Grading Zero - well, for yesterday - at 7 pm last night). Also piano practice suffers, which I justify to myself by saying, "You're not currently doing lessons" but I also know the only way to continue to progress is to keep playing....

Self-care really suffers in this time. Cooking is one of the first things to go. I didn't pack a lunch yesterday, on the grounds that I was done shortly after noon and so, could run home and get lunch. But. I had to go to the library that afternoon (I had been asked to write up a short history of the local AAUW branch...more on that later) and also go pick up my new skiier (and drag the broken one to the curb; today is supposedly Bulky Waste pickup). And I had forty-some student short papers to read and grade.

Because of different things, mainly putting the new skiier together - I had to remove it from its box in the yard because while I could wrestle the box out of the car, it was too much for me to drag up my front steps. (It said it weighed 30 kg, which is about 66 pounds - pretty much the upper limit of what I can lift and carry, but negotiating steps with that is too much), I didn't get to the grading until after 5 pm.

So anyway. Dinner last night was a salad (originally I wasn't even going to have that) and a jelly omelet. (I had had cheese at lunch - it was a rushed lunch - and I feel like eating cheese at more than one meal in a day is too much cheese). I HAD planned to make pickled beets and maybe some other kind of vegetable and I don't know what for a main dish, but it defaulted to salad and omelet, because of time and tiredness pressures.

(I also didn't get up this morning to work out; I remembered I had to send an e-mail late in the evening and got to bed later than I anticipated)

I haven't knit much since getting back. I had hopes of finishing the first pair of the giftsocks, but maybe tonight. I have one more repeat to knit and then the toe (Toes always take longer than you anticipate, though).

I've already decided that as long as I can push myself to get my grading done after class on Friday, I'm going to Sherman - for a few groceries but also to look for the new issues of magazines I buy off the newsstand. And maybe get myself some little treat, I don't know. (And I need to think about my traditional "Buy a toy my brother or I would have liked when we were kids and donate it to Toys for Tots" purchase. I'm thinking of getting some kind of Lego set this year for that....) Saturday I SHOULD come in and start counting my fall sample's inverts, but I might just take the day off, because I'm TIRED and because I have several days during and after exam week when I could get that done, I don't know. I'm at the point where it's really hard for me to work effectively on stuff any more; I find myself procrastinating when I should be grading (putting the skiier together - I could have left it in its box in my car for a couple days.)

But yeah. I'm tired. At this point I'm saying "Three more days" even though I have exams to give (however, my two sections of intro class have a machine-graded common-departmental exam, so that will be fast for me. And my other two exams are Wednesday).

But oh, there are so many fun things I want to do and I just can't find the time. The worst part of being an adult is that you have the freedom, the ability, and (usually) the funds to do a lot of the fun things you want, but if you're at all a responsible person, you wind up snowed under with work and you CAN'T do those things. So as a kid, you spend all your time longing for adulthood when you'll have the freedom to do what you want, only to learn as an adult that you really DON'T...

Oh, the short write-up? There was much more limited information at the library than I anticipated, including conflicting dates for when the chapter might have been founded. THEN I found out after writing it that instead of a paragraph in the paper, we're getting a one-line photo caption. AND when I sent it off to a few people who have been longer members of the group than I, one criticized how it was written without giving any reason why or suggestions for improvement. Why do I even bother?