Wednesday afternoon things

* The alternative field site was not so bad after all. (It would have been quite good, had it not had the heck mowed out of it). There were a few forbs mixed in with the grass (I think it was mostly three-awn, which is kind of a crummy grass, but whatever). There were a number of things I had to guess at because they were so small from being mowed but we got it done.

I wonder....if a delegation of us from my department approached the management there, if we could persuade them to leave a portion, off towards the back, away from the boat ramp, unmowed. Because one big benefit of the site is that it's half the distance from campus of the one I normally use...

* One of the guys (sort of a woodsman type) found a persimmon tree with ripe persimmons on it and introduced one of the pre-meds to persimmons.. (He was nice: he gave her the ripest one he could find and warned her how nasty the unripe ones are).

* Hah, my identification is not so bad - I was calling something we found out there "Potentilla" and thought "I'm probably totally wrong on that" but no, it was probably Potentilla simplex. It's an invasive but then again the site is pretty disturbed. I guess I still have some of my good plant-ID mojo, even for stuff I've not seen for a while.

* At least the hardest part of the week is mostly done. I still have to juggle piano lesson AND getting back over for AAUW (I have to be there to unlock the building; we are meeting in my building because no one was willing to host it this month and my house is far too small and cluttered for me to)

* I just think I'm frustrated because I'm trying to do too much, and there's no way not to do some of it. Next semester, I am telling myself, will be better: I will only have three lecture classes and they will be existing preps, not new preps.

I also TOTALLY need to look at those paper reviews and stop building them up as something Very Bad in my head, and just apply myself and make the recommended changes. Next week I give no exams so maybe I can carve out some time to work on it then (No grading to do...). I might be able to carve out a little time tomorrow afternoon and Friday morning (I am introducing SPSS in stats, and that's pretty much a plug-and-play thing, and I give an exam in my other class). I think actually looking at it and seeing that it's not "this paper is horrible and why did you submit it, you terrible person" will be better.

I find I really struggle with sharing "imperfect work" with others. I often don't give my manuscripts to colleagues to read and I really should do that. And I feel bad when a paper comes back rejected or with harsh comments.

I don't know why this is. A colleague once commented that "a bad paper doesn't mean you're a bad person" but I really, really struggle with that. I guess too much of my vision of my self-worth is wrapped up in the perceived quality of what I do.

Ironically - I did a paper with a colleague earlier this fall, and when he gave me what he had written up to add some stuff to, my reaction was, "wow, he must really have expected me to whip this into shape; this is NOT GOOD at all." I would have been embarrassed for someone else to read something I wrote that was at that stage.

I don't know. I wish I could better believe that I have worth outside of what I can make or do, but that's hard for me to accept.

* I did get out to the wal-mart. Lab ran short (the fact that the travel time was only about 20 minutes total helped). So I have more milk now. (I wound up buying the fancy "Fairlife," I had it once before and it was okay, and the per-unit price was LESS than the Horizon Organic - and the only skimmed Horizon they have now is "enhanced D" and I am leery of it - I had to quit taking a D supplement because it seemed to upset my stomach).

I also picked up more eggs but wow, either someone vandalized the egg case* or else their stocking staff was SUPER careless (or they did it on purpose, as some kind of misguided** protest of working conditions)

(*Today is National Vegan Day and while I DOUBT someone would vandalize eggs - to make them harder to buy - as part of that, it did cross my mind)

(**Misguided, because all it does is annoy the customer - I had to go through eight cartons before finding one with all the eggs intact - and it doesn't come out and say "We are protesting poor working conditions" because it could also be "We are super careless" or "something bad happened on the truck").

No employees were around so I couldn't point it out to anyone.

It just feels like such a haul to go out there at the end of the day and I always kind of dread it. I did also buy a pack of 9-volt batteries to squirrel away for the colorimeters. I was shocked that name-brand ones (Duracell) were $7.50 for a two-pack. That's a lot, and considering I run through five or six in the course of a semester, that's gonna add up.

I also bought a skein of Bernat Simply Soft in a true white, because I still want to make a Surprise and the yarn I *had* for her body was actually eggshell, and it was plain old Red Heart, which I find hard on my hands. (My acrylics of choice these days are either Red Heart Soft or Vanna's Choice, but wal-mart carries neither of those)

* It's November. Soon I will plug in my fairy lights and begin thinking about Christmas.

I need it. I need pretty sweet soft things around me; this has been a fairly brutal year.

Commencement is the 16th, so I guess I travel later for Christmas this year (I have to buy my tickets; I hope there are still sleepers available at some point in that time frame. I held off because (a) my parents have so many appointments now I wanted to work around them so I wasn't stuck waiting at the train station for them and (b) I needed to wait until I got paid for last month because of depletion of my bank account...)

Yeah, went ahead and ordered; only one roomette was left on the best travel day for me.

* And yeah. I'm hanging in there. Telling myself I just need to make it through another month and a half and then maybe I get an easier semester next go-round.

I also think I need something akin to a "spa day." Maybe not a literal spa day, I don't do that way. But maybe just take a day this weekend and watch movies and sit in the recliner and not really DO anything. (If I can remember how to not do anything...)