Well, one thing

 Finished my post-tenure review report (the ones we must do yearly) and sent it in. This was the first year with the new online teaching evaluations. I didn't advertise them well enough I guess; only one class each semester had enough people fill them out for the system to calculate statistics or even really show me anything but wow is it so much easier. 

I don't have to do any calculations; I don't have to sit and analyze the numbers and agonize over them. And there are "formative" things which I am trying not to think of as "this is ways in which you suck" but it kinda is. 

But my evaluations were pretty good. And for my soils class, they were the best I've ever gotten in that class, so I don't know, go figure. Maybe people were just happy to have a somewhat-normal in-person class? That was the one where I did the staggered labs (a group A and a group B and we more or less did two labs per meeting and each group only met every other week - maybe I keep that this spring if I have a class bigger than 10 or 12.)

I also received a very kind comment which, while not "formative" in the sense of helping me figure out how to be better*, it was encouraging:

 

"She is a great teacher that really wants her students to succeed. I truly enjoyed her class and having her as a professor. I would definitely take more classes with her!" 

So yeah. I guess I needed that today. 

It's just, it's so hard, because so many of the familiar, nice, day-to-day things have kind of been suspended of late, and there's also just a lot of sad stuff that's happened, so sometimes life DOES feel a bit of a slog.