Monday, November 30, 2020

Monday afternoon things

 * First day of us being "all virtual" (this is, most likely, just these two weeks: it seems people are hot to come back in-person in January and I REALLY hope that case counts are down by then). 

It's been okay-ish. I did a review for one class, the other one didn't meet because they're completing their final projects (due Wednesday). I wrote the fourth final and set three of them to deploy (the gen-ed class, I still need to figure out how to enforce Respondus. I am not in love with that idea and in my other classes tried to do essay-heavy and very specific questions so more cheat-proof tests, but they want us to use the lockdown browser for Gen Eds, and they get a higher level of campus wide scrutiny than other classes, so okay I guess).

* I am taking the rest of the afternoon off. I do have research I could work on but I have lots of office hours tomorrow and nothing I will need to grade will be in yet so I could shift to that then. Maybe my plan for these few weeks is to set myself the goal of working a couple hours (maybe 4-5 Pomodoros) a day on the current research stuff (analyzing data and starting to write it up) and also doing some more reading towards Advanced Biostats this spring, and maybe just knock off early in the afternoon and go home and play piano or knit. It's been a hard semester and maybe I need to take it a little easy for like a month or so? And then maybe I'll have the energy to go back hammer and tongs in the spring? I hope. 

Or also, I could just take some time each day at home and read, too. I have no shortage of research/teaching related stuff I could be reading. 

* Tomorrow starts "calendar Advent" (real Advent started yesterday). I have four (! FOUR! Ah ha ha ha) Advent calendars this year: the nice stained-glass style one my friend Purlewe sent me last year, which has the traditional little doors with bible verses behind them:


And I have a traditional British-style chocolate one (little doors each with a tiny choc behind them) that is Hello Kitty patterned. And I have the big yarn one that a mystery friend sent me, and I have my Schleich "Pony Club" one....so every day I can open doors or unwrap.

I will have to decide if I want to do it in the morning, before coming over here, or wait until the end of the day. 

* I have the body and three of the four limbs for the wombat done. As I said, I want to finish it this week - I am concerned about the mails slowing down (also, apparently, some shipping services are going to be transporting vaccine? Which is a good thing, I would happily wait until January to receive my Christmas presents if it meant people could be vaccinated all that much faster). 

I think "next up" may be finishing the couple of on-the-needles socks, and I want to do the sloth out of the book I got the wombat pattern from - I bought chenille yarn for that. 

Yesterday afternoon instead of watching tv I put Christmas music on and that helped spur me to make wombat legs and also I think it was better for my mood. 

Though also the news that the vaccine is on the move (heh, like "Aslan is on the move" from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). I also felt very much this morning like the quick reference to V-E day in "It's a Wonderful Life" - that George Bailey (who was 4-F because of his bad ear, remember) "wept and prayed" when he heard the news and that really kind of sums up how I feel - yes, on the first news of good reports I danced, but now it's more a weeping-and-praying feeling - weeping that it's been so hard and so many people have lost loved ones and doctors and nurses have been through such trauma, but also praying that case counts can somehow stay down, and not too many more people die, before the vaccines can be deployed. And also praying that they are the literal miracle they seem to be, that we may be looking at the pandemic in the rear-view mirror this time next year.

* I should watch "It's a Wonderful Life" at some point. Amazon Prime streams it for free to Prime members, so I could watch it whenever I want. It really is in my top five favorite movies, and not just of Christmas movies, either. I like it in large part because it is acynical: no, no one is really as good as George Bailey but sometimes I want art/entertainment that shows me a better world or people being better than real world people. And redemption stories resonate with me, as do stories of self-sacrifice.

I thought about watching it yesterday afternoon but as I was already slightly in Sunday Afternoon Doldrums (some of you probably know what I mean), I thought a movie that usually makes me cry at least a little wasn't the best pick. Maybe some early-evening sometime soon. (As I remember, it's a fairly long movie, and even though everyone remembers Clarence, he doesn't show up 'til more than halfway through)

* I should also make a note of the TCM schedule of Christmas movies, seeing as I will be HERE and will not be out doing anything, and just watch as many as are on during my waking hours - I want to at least see one of the older versions of Little Women, and The Bishop's Wife and maybe even It Happened On Fifth Avenue, which is such an offbeat and small movie and almost anti-capitalist in its own way but is still oddly interesting (and it doesn't even have any "big stars" in it)

There's a whole database of Christmas movies (all times are Eastern, I'll have to remember that, living in Central zone as I do). This is what the Internet is particularly good for, I think: information at your fingertips that might be hard to compile otherwise (especially in a pandemic where maybe going out to the local library is not a great idea).

And yes, I love Christmas movies, even the really silly formulaic Hallmark-romance ones. 

* I have candied peel and glaceed cherries and even currants on the way to me, thanks to nuts.com. And my mom refreshed my memory on how to make her mother's light fruitcake recipe - that may be Saturday's activity if I get all my grading done. It takes most of a day, because it can take an hour and a half (!) for the fruitcake to bake, and it takes a while to mix everything up. 

Fruitcake will likely be the only big baking I do this season. I may need to make cookies or something for Friday - there is a funeral with reception (the husband of the church secretary; he had gone into hospice last weekend and died on Monday). But since I have no one to share cookies with (and no freezer space), I probably won't do any cookie baking. I do have my many, many malted-milk biscuits and I also found a bag of tiny Walker's shortbread stars (they are wonderful because they are so tiny) at the Walgreens' so I will make do with those. Though in truth: I will miss cookie-baking and candy-making this year; I used to do it all the time when I went to my parents' for Christmas, it was something to do and my mother's kitchen is better-appointed than mine, and there were ALWAYS people to share with - friends of the family, and way back when I was in grad school there, I would take plates in to my department to share. 

I suppose if I could figure out some VERY small batch things (especially eggless things; I could probably make mint meltaways) I could do one or two batches just to be able to do it. The problem is though the whole scaling thing; most cookies that take an egg make several dozen and it's hard to divide an egg in half. (You can do it, but it's hard, and sometimes the results are unsatisfactory)


* I also confess to a bit more Etsy shopping. But then again? Seems to be supporting small businesspeople, so yay? I ordered a grab bag of sock yarn from a yarn dyer and will keep it closed up and under the tree until Christmas, and then open it and see what colors I got. And I ordered two sort-of-1970s-feeling tree ornaments - Raggedy Ann and Andy from "Happy Little Charms" which is a shop I've ordered from before. 

(And I might do more. My mom sent me "stocking money" and I am considering it "free to spend on myself if I want" money, though I might also donate part of it somewhere tomorrow). 

I dunno. I just like the vintage-stuff sellers on Etsy; it seems smaller and friendlier than eBay does, and I have a couple shops I've bought regularly from and feel I can trust.

I also ordered myself a Christmas Stuffed Animal. Because even though I've bought a lot this year, it's nice to have a new one to open Christmas morning - this one is a Squishable Snow Dragon, and the bonus is, they will donate one to a child in need for every one purchased. And also, I'm going to keep this in the box until Christmas morning - maybe if I find some bows somewhere in the house (or if I happen to be out somewhere with inexpensive bags of bows) I stick a bow on the mailers to put them under the tree so they look a little festive?

* I also really do want to do an "unfinished project blow-out" during break - I have three pairs of socks on the needles, and a vest, and a cardigan, and I have the endless afghan, and I know I have other things, and I also have a bunch of wound-off yarn ready to go for hats/cowls/socks and it would be nice just to do a LOT of knitting and have some new finished things. Maybe I spend more time listening to music and less time flipping tv channels or scrolling social media, and I just knit? (I wish I could knit more complex things and read, but I can't. I suppose: audiobooks and I do have a set of extracts from Pepys' diaries on CD that I got super cheap somewhere a few years back, and I could listen to those.)

1 comment:

Roger Owen Green said...

There are A LOT of movies and series on Amazon Prime. I have seen zero of them. MAYBE this month.