My oxygen mask

I give an exam tomorrow. Saturday morning my student and I set up the fall run of the experiment.

Normally, I would take Friday afternoon and push to grade the exam but you know what? I think I'm going to hold it back - if I get home early enough on Saturday and am not too wiped out, I can do it then.

Because it's been about a month since I've been to Sherman, I'm getting a little low on food items I cannot obtain locally, and *I cannot take another Saturday morning of looking at the un-restocked Wal-Mart shelves*

So, tomorrow afternoon, after I walk out of the exam, I think I am going to Sherman. The biggest plan is to get to the natural-foods store and the Kroger, but I *might* also get a barbecue lunch out and I *might* also either duck into the JoAnn's to see if they have the new issues of magazines I buy off the newsstand, and just generally be somewhere that isn't here and that has more things relevant to my interest than what the shops here do. (I might also run quickly into the Ulta - which is practically next door - and see if there's any small, nice, indulgent thing I need. It's been a hard week.)

I feel *slightly* guilty about that but then again, I have one person who is leaving for a sports thing and will have to take the exam first thing Monday, so I perhaps couldn't hand them back Monday any way.

And maybe I do need to back off a tiny bit from my "have stuff graded for the next meeting of the class" practice - some weeks it about kills me to do that, or I wind up not attending to other things (I have not scrubbed my kitchen floor in....well, I don't want to admit)

Next week I DO get a bit of a breather - it's mid-fall break and while I have Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday classes (the local kids are, I think, out all week*)

(*I boggle at how many days schoolkids get off now. We'd get some of the Federal holidays, and maybe one teacher in-service day in the fall and one in the spring, but we didn't get a week at Thanksgiving or a mid-fall break or some Fridays off....and of course my industrious mother would look ahead at the calendar and plan our doctor and dental checkups for the days-off, so not only did I not get to enjoy my day out of school, but I never got to get excused to go to the doctor.)

I have plans Friday for a meet up with Laura which I need SO BADLY. You have no idea. You have no idea how I need to have someone to talk to about stuff that is not work or church business or something where I have responsibility. And I need SO BADLY to just go to nice stores and look at nice yarn and books and frou-frou things and indulge myself a little bit. This semester has been a heck of a hard slog, mainly because of the new prep. (I will say the class seems to be going better than I thought it might, and so far no one seems to have figured out I really don't know much about this stuff....)

But I also have Thursday and Friday and while I WILL need to have exams prepped for the following week, if I make that my Tuesday-afternoon push, I could take Friday and Saturday (and Sunday after church) off. My tentative plan is a deep-cleaning of the house (oh dear Lord it needs it) on Thursday and then spend Saturday either sewing or knitting.

But even a week feels long to wait, so I think I'm going to Sherman tomorrow. The upside is if I buy carefully, I won't have to do much of a grocery run while on my break. (I am kind of growing to dislike grocery shopping and see it as a necessary evil. I might feel differently if there were a super-nice store* less than a half-hour's drive away, but there is not)

(*No word yet on when Pruett's is going to remodel, but even there they don't seem to carry everything I need)