a gripe dump

Sorry, guys. I just need to get it out. (And then I need to get out and mow the lawn and do some extensive trimming - gonna get the ladder out to get rid of some of the leggy leaders on the yaupon holly. And yes, I will be careful, and I am going to be out in the front yard so if I have a problem hopefully someone will see me, especially if the workers replacing the trim on that one house down the block show up today.

But anyway:

1. Ravelry had a big interface change. Apparently not all the necessary accessibility testing was done, some users report migraines and even seizures after viewing the animation. They did offer the "classic version" as a switch-back but I guess the opening animation is still there? (I stay permanently logged on at home so I don't have to go to the login screen, which is the problematic one. Then again, it's been a fair few years since I had a migraine triggered by strobey things). The bigger issue is the folks in charge seem to have been dismissive of people's concerns and....yeah. I realize I'm not working there but I feel like if there's a problematic animation....maybe that animation should be taken down, or converted to a still shot? Now another tranche* of people is talking about leaving and I feel like "yeah, great, so in the middle of a freaking pandemic maybe I lose one of my very, very few social outlets"

(*A word I learned this spring which I now wish I never had had reason to learn)

Also this is just a bad time to change ANYTHING. I get being excited about a new change but they could have waited. (Or maybe they couldn't - there are some rumors of a sale in the works and similar and I hope to God that's wrong because I have so many patterns in my library over there, and if the site gets wrecked after a sale** then what do I do? I tried downloading some yesterday but even with a plug-in to assist, it's incredibly long to download and save even 25 or so patterns - and I have 800-some, though most were free, I definitely want them and I want the ones I paid for but, meh, it doesn't seem worth my time now. Anyway, I still have the many books I've bought through the years, and the patterns I've already printed....)

(** I remember all my favorite craft magazines being sold to F and W, and now some of them are gone forever and the ones that remain had to find new publishers and while that's good for Piecework, where they ended up, and perhaps good for Interweave Knits, still - I hate having the good things of my life screwed with)

2. Lack of human contact is wearing on me, which is also why the Ravelry thing is extra-upsetting. It has been 3 1/2 months since I really hugged someone - I kind of patted Charlene's shoulder on Monday but that's not the same.

3. I feel generally useless. I am doing continuing ed reading, I prepped a few labs, I am thinking about going back in early July to do some research (IF I can even complete that - see next bullet point) but I feel useless. Doesn't help that one of my colleagues commented he had got a couple manuscripts done "because I can't travel right now"

But I can't bring myself to try to do research. I know, I know, people are going "people have found SIX WHOLE INVERTEBRATE SPECIES NEW TO SCIENCE IN THEIR BACKYARDS" but I am not a taxonomist, I don't really know that much and....yeah. I fully expect the next post-tenure review to be dire but who even KNOWS. We may wind up closed and me out of a job, the whole human race might even die off, so why bother? Why try to do research during a pandemic when it's doubly hard to do it?

4. Cases are on the rise here. The Texas governor, who pushed for a fast re-open, is now telling people "the safest place for you is at home" (I presume, though, there's no further support for people like waiters or shopclerks who are expected to be on the job while people "stay home")

So I don't even know about restarting research - what if we're chased off campus again mid-July?

I hate this; I hate uncertainty and this is uncertainty on steroids and I feel like no matter what I try to do, it will be wrong somehow - I will start research and then get chased off campus and all that time and effort will be a waste. Or it turns out there are problems down the line because I chose not to do research....either way you look at this, you lose.

Note: I do not get paid for the summer; I am not on contract. So anything I do now is 100% on my own time. And while I'm doing prep for the fall because I know it will be BAD if we have to pivot to online and I have nothing ready, still....I'm coming to resent the idea that if you're an academic, you work many more hours than what you're technically paid for because you're supposed to "love" your job.

I don't....really love my job any more. Oh, I still love the teaching and one of the reasons I am really, really holding out hope for either some kind of effective preventative, or test-and-trace that's really good, or eventually a vaccine, is that I want to get back into the classroom. But this....this right now? It suuuuuuuuuucks. Teaching online is not fun, it's stressful, and you don't get the small casual conversations you normally get, and that's what makes it worthwhile - all the conversations with online teaching is "I need this" or "this thing is broken" or "I don't understand" and there's never "hey I never thought about...." or "have you heard of ..." or "we're covering something similar in this other class...." and I feel like a robot doing online teaching, it's all very stimulus-and-response.

Even as I'm afraid that going back to campus in the fall will be too soon and people will get sick and it will also be awkward and kind of scary with the distancing and making and handwashing and everything - teaching online has its downsides too.

If I could do full time editing from home online I'd do that instead, really. That's the one thing that's felt remotely normal right now, doing the editing work (and not much of it at that) for the Native Plant Record. But textbooks don't hire people for that any more, and it's a very hard field to "casually" break in to.

I think what I miss is having tasks where I can see when they are done, and where they take a set amount of time - the reading, I could read for 8 hours a day and there'd still be more books and I also don't remember everything I read. And the lab-writing - well, they'll never be quite good enough. But being able to find the errors in a document and point them out and then hear a "thanks, I missed those" is incredibly helpful towards making me feel like I'm not just a waste of oxygen.

5. I am participating in a card-swap through ITFF. I've sent off all my cards, but my round 5 card - the one that was supposed to go out two weeks or so ago - is still missing (I never received one) and I am sad. I know it's a tiny petty thing but tiny petty things are all I have now.

it's not showing up in today's "Informed Daily Digest," so I know it's not coming today. Either it's lost in the maelstrom of missing mail, or the person never sent it.

these days, those tiny possible violations of "fairness" - where I do as I'm ought but others do not (or the Universe does not) - rankle even more. I know, I know, it's childish and petty but literally all I am getting in the mail now are bills and campaign flyers and charity begs.

Maybe I just quit the card swap if I don't get a round 5 card (we are now on 6, and if I don't get a 6 card either? I'm out.)

I'm also angry - and the card-swap thing is maybe proxy-anger for this - that I stayed carefully locked down since early March, and now lots of places re-opened too early, and like 2 weeks ago I was looking around at the case loads going doing and going "gee maybe by the end of the summer I might be able to consider going somewhere other than just the grocery store, the doctor's, or the home center when I need to do repairs on my house" aka go somewhere for fun but now, nope, I can't do that, because people went out too early and too incarefully and cases are going up fast around here.

6. When I got up this morning, I couldn't connect to the internet for like an hour. At first I thought it was my computer because my phone was showing WiFi but it turns out that was wrong - a call in to my ISP said "We are doing routine maintenance between midnight and six am and internet service might be limited during this time" but it wasn't until 7 am or after that I got it back.

This is going to be really bad if this happens during wfh or teaching from home - which seems increasingly likely (teaching from home, I mean)

7. Another petty thing: I've been watching the carpenter bees and now the bumblebees nectar-thieving (they bite a hole in the top of the flower and drink the nectar, and then later when butterflies show up there is none left for them) and it's making me low-level angry. They aren't doing their job to pollinate! They shouldn't be using these flowers if they don't fit - leave them for the honeybees and butterflies! I have hanging baskets of other flowers they can fit into!

I know, I know. But the idea of "nectar thievery" has always bugged me, somehow.


So anyway. I can tell I'm in a petty angry mood when I'm getting irritated at freaking bumblebees. But I'm sad and I'm tired and like I said I haven't had a nice, comfortable in-person conversation (that didn't have some PURPOSE like "how do we hold AAUW meetings in the fall" where I had to problem-solve) in MONTHS and it's getting to me.

I am also fearful I may be developing a pinched nerve on my left side, based on occasional symptoms I have.