Days are busy

Not a whole lot to talk about. Certainly not much knitting.

Yesterday I had my checkup with my doctor at her new place. I do have to get bloodwork done, and they want to do a thyroid panel too - nothing seems wrong but she felt it was time to check it. So I have that scheduled for next month during spring break.

So I have a month to make my diet nice and clean, I guess. (It doesn't help that because Valentine's Day, everyone is talking about hearth health and portion control and I guess the new thing is for news programs to try to ruin holidays by making them all about making us feel guilt for being alive? Or at least for getting hungry some times?)

I'm strangely achy this morning. Change in the weather? Sitting in too cold of an office yesterday hunched over my desk? Taking one day off exercise because it was after 5 pm when I got home and I had worked out the previous two days?

And yeah - I went back after the checkup yesterday afternoon, even though I really wanted to just go home, and worked on the science olympiad stuff. It's mostly done, except for picking out some photographs of species for the identification part. I confess to having felt a bit of resentment about this yesterday afternoon - this is all 100% additional work, meaning we have to make time for our OTHER work at other times....I'm not getting that manuscript done and am starting to worry. (And I have an exam for my own classes to write for next week. And Saturday I will have zero time for that).  And yeah, I know everyone does this kind of thing some times, but....I don't know. Part of it is the person who is running this is someone who is doing way too many jobs so information comes out slow and late, and as a control freak, this makes me twitch, because I feel like "How can I do a good job on this if I don't have enough information" and I found myself thinking one day "I don't want to pull an all-nighter one night before this just because I wasn't able to get stuff done any in advance...." I still feel like I don't have enough information for what I'm doing, but I suppose that means if I do a "bad' job (according to the people who really have power in this), I don't get asked to do it next year.

I'm telling myself that I can have the 25th to do what I want, but that still seems awfully far off, and who knows? Maybe something ELSE comes up that's urgent, and I push doing anything for my birthday off for another week or more.

I wonder - am I just less tough than everyone who came before me? I regularly feel like I'm flailing and one step away from totally failing, but I think of my dad when he was in the workforce and how he always seemed so on top of things. (Granted, he had my mom to do the grocery shopping and cooking and laundry and all - she mostly did not work outside the home when my brother and I were growing up). Has my generation just come out a lot weaker and more prone to complain? I think of things like the people who worked 18 hour days in the defense factories during World War II, and how you see so few written records of them complaining or worrying or anything...I wish I were better at just gritting my teeth, sucking it up, and trying not to worry about how I am going to manage getting everything done.

***

It's cold in my office - it was just around 60 degrees when I came in and is barely warmer now. I'm wearing my coat (the mid-weight dressy raincoat) over my long-sleeved knit dress and sweater. And I have a hat on. For a while I had fingerless gloves but then it warmed up a little and it was also hard to type with them on.

I also have a tickle in my throat which I really REALLY really hope is just allergies and not the terrible cold that is making the rounds here (I have known a number of people who had it, and they either wound up flat on their backs for a couple days, or, in the cases of people who were older/had underlying health issues, they wound up having to take steroids to clear their chests). I can't afford to be sick. (Though then again: spending several days lying on the sofa watching old movies and knitting or napping does sound like it might have its charms).

I felt sufficiently sorry for myself this morning that I broke my "yarn fast" - part of it was I found I had about a $10 credit at Loopy Ewe (you earn points that get converted to credits....when you hit 250 points you get $25 but if you have points lying around at the end of the year they just pro-rate them). So I bought a skein of Mrs. Crosby in  a peacock color, and a skein of a newer line they carry, called Fresh From The Cauldron, in a colorway called Groot. "Groot" is tans and greens in case you didn't guess otherwise, and yes I bought it because of the name. I may make a cowl out of it instead of socks; I still have some feeling of the sympathetic magic of wearing things made out of "good named" colorways, and maybe Groot will be protective in some way.

I still have plans to go to Quixotic Fibers for my birthday and just allow myself to buy whatever catches my fancy (whether or not I have plans for it) but this will tide me over a bit and will serve as a preventative salve to my feelings if something happens and I CAN'T go.