And gearing up

Classes start Monday.

Today, driving in, Sirius XM served me up Brahms' "Academic Festival Overture" and my Pandora classical channel just played it so I guess the Universe is telling me it's time to go back to school.

I have my syllabi done and I just submitted the lab packet for my one class for copying.

This is going to be a challenging semester, not just for "outside" or "personal" reasons - I am teaching three different classes back to back (9-9:50 am, 10-10:50 am, 11-11:50 am) three days a week. I will have to force myself to read over the material for each day the afternoon before because I can't always count on those two hours before my first class (often there are urgent things to deal with).

I teach one lab for sure - will have to check to see if I got slotted into one of the intro-class labs, but I hope not. (No, looks like I didn't). I have a bit over 100 students total, though often a few people are in two classes of mine simultaneously.

The stack of three classes happened because our new guy (replacing someone who made a planned move into admin, early enough for us to do a search) and our temporary person (replacing someone else who got kicked upstairs, but too late for us to search) can't teach at the 10 am slot (it's the intro-majors class) but one of them could teach the 8 am Tuesday/Thursday slot I used to teach.

So oh well. It's not an ideal schedule but it rarely is, and I give much side-eye to people on other campuses who kvetch about having to teach "two whole courses" a semester (I teach four in the fall, three plus an extra lab in the spring).

(I will also note I'm expected to slot in 10 hours of office hours between 8 am and 4 pm during the week as well, and there tend to be regular meetings I must attend. Generally during my office hours I can grade or prep or even do on-campus type research, but still, all my colleagues on other campuses tell me 10 hours is a lot, and I remember when I was a student, the norm was 2 hours a week, and even then, you often couldn't find faculty in their offices during that time)

Our "official load" is 12 contact hours. At 16, we are supposed to be paid an overload. (I am typically at 14 in the fall; if I took on one more class I'd be overloaded. Though honestly? I'd rather not have extra pay; I'd rather have the open time and less wear and tear on me - four classes is a LOT to juggle, and five, especially if they were all different, would be very hard and probably my fragile organizational schemes would break down badly)

I will also have another thing on the schedule, at least for a short while: yes, I arranged for a grief counselor. My campus' EAP pays for three sessions; if more are needed, they will pay part of the cost. I honestly don't know at this point and am doing this mainly as insurance and because people are suggesting I should. I don't know if what I'm dealing with is fairly normal/typical (it has been less than three weeks) or what, and I figure at a minimum, the counselor can tell me "Yeah, this is what happens with lots of people, don't worry about what you're feeling, you just need more time" and then I can just be patient and figure that, like a bad cold or a sprained ankle, it will gradually get better but:

- my short-term memory has gone to crap which is bad. I have taken to making lists of what I need to do, in excruciating detail, so I don't forget stuff

- my appetite, which was good when my mom was cooking or I was cooking with her, has also gone to crap. Though that could be partly the heat. I am forcing myself to make what little I do eat be nutritious - dinner last night was canned mashed sweet potato and a bowl of raspberries and a piece of bread and cheese. And I could stand to lose a few pounds anyway. And it's not that I don't ENJOY food any more; it's just that I don't feel very hungry when meal time comes around, and preparing food seems like an effort.

- I find I've transferred my worry to my mom and I have randomly called her with questions I maybe could have resolved later or on my own but hearing her voice and knowing she seems to be doing okay is important to me. (I think she will be okay but I admit I worry about her all alone in that house after the last nearly-60 years of her life were spent with my dad, or with my dad and us kids in the house with her)

- Stuff randomly makes me weepy. I figured out that I could use Pandora on my iPhone (leeching off my home wifi, so I don't use my data) while I worked out, and I put what I named "The Free Design Radio" station I made on (mostly late 60s/early 70s bubblegum pop, but if you're familiar with The Free Design you probably figured that out)

And this came up:



And dangit, it made me cry, especially the lines about it being a bad world and a terrible world to live in ("but I don't want to die"). And yet.....I listened to it several times more.

And similarly, I find I have very little tolerance for what I perceive as human stupidity or venality right now. So most political news makes me just generally angry, and all the foolish things foolish humanity gets up to makes me sigh at the unnecessariness of some of the hurtful things people do to other people.

- And the heat seems worse. Yes, we're under either a heat advisory or a heat emergency right now but it just feels worse to me than it did in past years; I do two things, even indoor things, and I feel like I have to sit down for 10 minutes. And I can't get my house cool enough, even with the AC set on 74. And that also bugs me - the feeling that we're trapped in this seemingly forever, and it'll be a month or more before we see any relief.

- People from church have called and offered things like help with cleaning the house (which makes me worry that maybe my house WAS a terrible mess when Dana was over) or doing laundry or whatever and I feel like no, I should be able to do those things myself, those are simple things....and periodically I will have a short burst of energy and just do something (did some laundry this morning, and the other day I went through and pitched all the back issues of "Cooking Light" I had on the grounds that it's a defunct magazine and I really didn't use the recipes out of it anyway, and I have plans to do more sorting and pitching and maybe SERIOUSLY see if I can find someone nearby to donate all my back issues of "Knitters" or "Vogue Knitting" to - because most of the patterns I knit now are either from Interweave publications, or Simply Knitting, or books, or are from Ravelry, and I could seriously use the shelf space. And I also have to cull my books AGAIN. (I promised a few to Laura when I see her, I will have to write that down so I don't forget).

People are bringing food tonight, so at least that will help a little with the "ugh I don't think I can cook" feeling. And also, I have a doctor's checkup today, so after that I can maybe slack a little on worrying about calorie restriction for a little bit (though in this heat, I don't think that's such a problem). (but that also means when I get home from my doctor's appointment I should at least sweep the floors and pick up some of the random clutter and move it)

What I could really use help with, but it feels weird to ask, is that I have a dead microwave and a couple of dead lamps and a dead dehumidifier that have to be hauled to the dump and dumped (and I will have to pay extra for the dead dehumidifier because of Freon) and I would just like someone with a strong back and a pickup truck to help me with that but I don't know.

And yeah, at the appointment I'm going to ask my doctor: so, congestive heart failure. Am I at a greater risk because of heredity? And is there anything I should be doing aside from exercising and limiting sodium and eating my fruits and vegetables? (I hope not. I really hope not. I don't feel like I can take on some OTHER arduous life-practice right now, like upping the exercise or....I don't even know). I hope she also doesn't suggest a cardiologist; I've heard the one here in town is downright rude to people with a higher-than-"normal"-weight BMI, and tries to bully them into losing weight, and cannot deal with that right now or ever.

I'm also having worse hives again but I suspect those were "cholinergic" - caused by being overheated on the train (it got very warm in there the couple hours the power was off) and also caused by stress (no shortage of that on the train trip back). A bath last night in lukewarm water with Epsom salt and colloidal oatmeal seems to have helped some; at least they itch less now. (The only real cure is cooler weather)


I think my two biggest feelings right now are a combination of just feeling very tired - and not even "I need more sleep" tired, just TIRED - and an annoyance with human pettiness. I suppose that's actually pretty normal for this process.

Still, I wish the counselor would call back (She called after I'd left for the day and left a message; I called back and had to leave a message. So I guess we play phone tag for a few days. I wish things weren't so logistically hard)