feeling cautiously optimistic

Things seem to be settling down a little. At last night's board meeting, it turns out we have someone willing to fill the pulpit (at least MOST Sundays) throughout the summer and hopefully by the end of the summer we will have a regular interim, or even, dare I hope? a plan for a new full-time person. The only downside of our current arrangement - and the person filling the pulpit was very clear about this - is that some of the day-to-day ministerial duties are not getting filled (e.g., visiting people ) because he is employed full time elsewhere.

(An aside: those duties are why, despite my occasional thoughts that "maybe doing something like becoming a chaplain would be a good retirement activity for me," I would not be as likely to. As I've said before: I'm good with the God stuff, I can pray, I can teach, I can even preach a sermon. But the day-to-day people stuff, especially the conflict-resolution stuff ministers often get called in to work on: well, I want to run the other way from people who are arguing when it's an argument where there isn't a clear wrong side that can be convinced by evidence)

So it looks like we've won a few more months of something like stability. And maybe "a few months of stability" is the best we can hope for in this life. (We are told to pray "give us *this day* our *daily* bread," not "give us bread for the rest of our lives" or even "give us bread for the rest of this year," as much as I would like either one of those to be the case).

Also, there has been no more hinting of further cuts on campus so I am being optimistic that the cuts we've made, plus the early retirements coming up in the fall, are going to be enough. (And as I said: I'd tolerate a 10% or so pay cut if it came to that. And I'd rather just be told up front, "because of exigencies we are cutting your salary" and I could make my peace with that better than this polite fiction of furlough days, which upsets my rule-following instincts, because one rule of my life is "do grading as soon as you possibly can" but the rule of furlough days is supposedly "no grading because that's paid work."). But I am hoping no news is good news or at least neutral news.

I still don't know about summer; I have three in one class and zero in the other but often summer enrollment is slow and it's still early. The worst-case scenario is that I don't QUITE get 10 in each class and wind up teaching full time for adjunct pay. I told my chair I'd do it - the three in my one class apparently NEEEEEEEEED it to graduate, but I also told her that (a) I would not be happy about it and (b) this is probably the last summer I teach if it comes to that.

(A slightly better case scenario: a few people sign up for my one class, no one for my other class, and I teach just one class for adjunct pay but have more time to work on research and stuff. Best case scenario: each class tops out at exactly 10 and I get what the full summer pay is for this year [lower than last year but still])

It helps that my paper is really-truly and officially out (I had a link yesterday) and I printed out a copy of the .pdf and hung it up on the "faculty activity" bulletin board in my hall. (And yeah: I'm kinda proud of this little paper, even though going into it I didn't think there was enough to make a paper of the data, it actually turned out pretty well).  And having done my talk. I'm now back to prepping what I hope will be my summer research and preparing to shop the proposal around to a few of the smaller organizations I belong to (they don't have official grants program but at least one representative of one hinted they might bankroll me to the tune of a couple hundred dollars, especially if I come and speak to them some time about the research). And I'm almost done with that - just need to beef up my references a little but I have the plan of "how to do this" even down to "this is how I want to analyze the data." (Really, you should have that plan in place before designing the experiment. Thinking about the question first and then "what proof will it take to adequately answer it" should inform experimental design - I've seen too many cases where someone collected a mess of data and then wanted to try to shoehorn it into some statistical design, and it didn't work)

I also had a student come up to me after my talk and ask if I was doing more research in that area. Well, I hadn't planned any right away, but I also have a question and a simple experimental design in mind (comparison of mite populations in a couple forests vs. grasslands) that he could do, so if he does come and talk to me about summer research I can quickly put something together. If he doesn't? I can hang on to the idea and do it next year. Or do it with another student.

I'm also hopeful Opu-wise that things are better: I'm back to eating my normal diet again with no issues. I also started taking a probiotic that was recommended to me. (It's expensive, and you have to special-order it and then refrigerate it - it comes in a chilled packages). If it works to keep my stomach happy it will be worth every penny. If it doesn't work, I can just quit taking it when the 2-month supply runs out. It's entirely possible the issue though was the bad aftereffects of a virus, which were temporarily masked by the PPI (which is why I got better and then got worse again after stopping the PPI). It's also possible, I suppose, that I had a small duodenal ulcer (that was where some of the worst pain was) that has since healed up on its own - they sometimes do.

There really is nothing for your sense of gratitude like feeling better after you had been feeling bad. Life seems totally new now that I'm not coping with random abdominal cramps. I feel better able to get stuff done and more capable of managing. (I DO plan to clean up my bedroom well and look into getting a new light/ceiling fan put in; for one thing, when it gets really hot out it will be nice to have the fan)

Also, being back to working on the hexi quilt top makes me happy - every patch sewn in feels like a little achievement and it's fun to see the top grow. And it's fun to dig around in my scrap boxes and pull out oddments of fabric that I just have tiny pieces of - too small for most things but too big to just throw away - and be able to use them up. And it's just happy colors - red and yellow and turquoise and pink and lots of the novelty prints that I love so much. I was actually thinking yesterday afternoon, "I'll be a little sad when this is done and I don't have it to work on any more" but of course I could start another paper-pieced or hand-sewn quilt top. Or I could go back to more hand-quilting. (Even if I do track down another longarmer, this one is definitely getting handquilted, both because it's handsewn and I'm afraid some of the seams might not survive the extreme stretching that can happen on a longarm machine, but also because I think a quilt with that much laborious handwork should also be hand quilted)

I should photograph the top some time. It's grown a good bit since the last photo.

I also realized this morning that it's just under a month now before I get to go see my parents. I confess, I'm already thinking about what projects to take....this might be the trip where I work up the Moomin toy from the magazine a friend in the UK bought for me and sent to me (Hi, Bee, if you're reading this!). And maybe I bring the hexie quilt....my mom said, "I found a bag of scrap fabric that I think was yours and that you left here" so there may be some good stuff in it I can use.