Thursdays are hard

Thursdays are usually my longest teaching day, and that makes them Worst Day from that standpoint. (Also, I give an exam today and have to make time to grade it before AAUW meeting tonight).

I am not sure the cake I made for AAUW turned out. I didn't cook it quite as long as I planned because the edges looked like they were going to burn, but it's a very heavy cake and I'm apprehensive it will be uncooked in the center. If it didn't turn out, I guess I never make it again. And next time make something tried-and-true, because I feel a little bit of a failure. (If, when I cut it, it's just goopy inside, I'm going to just run to Pruett's and buy a couple of their pre-made cheesecakes, forget it.)

I really kind of needed the cake to turn out well. This has been a difficult week.

There are still no funeral plans. On the one hand: no closure yet. I just want to go to church and celebrate Steve's life and cry with the other people who cared about him and hug people and then go home and say "Okay, so that happened," and have the feeling it's time to move on. On the other hand: I assume this means I can keep my going-to-Whitesboro plans for Saturday; I don't think they'd give less than a 48-hour notice of the funeral.

Edited to add: I just found out. The funeral is on the 10th, which is next Saturday. So I keep my plans for this Saturday, and I can go to the funeral without having to arrange to cancel class. Thanks be to God for the little things; I was worrying about what I would do if the funeral were an afternoon when I had lab. (Also, a note was made, and I'm glad the church secretary did this: the last day of his life on earth, he was out serving: he helped with Meals on Wheels.)

We had 2" of rain yesterday. I like rain, but this is starting to get on my nerves. It's not like the nice gentle rain we sometimes get where you can run out in it and if it's just running out to your car, you don't get very wet, or for longer distances a raincoat or umbrella suffices: this is ADVANCED rain and you get soaked even if you have gear on (and get really soaked, if like I did on Tuesday, you forget your gear at home).

I'm already concerned that (a) there are going to be floods along the route the train takes for Spring Break, and I've already warned my parents that I will be cancelling my trip rather than riding a bus for 18 hours: I did that once, years ago, and I am too old for that now. If I spend another spring break here, FINE. I don't care. I mean, I feel bad not seeing my parents, but - buses are not good. And for further out: (b) Everything is going to flood and wash out any kind of a field season. Then again: deep in my heart of hearts, I admit: a summer totally off would not be so awful. Oh, I would worry about "how do I keep the number of publications up?" but I also admit a summer with (a) no teaching, (b) no frantic prepping of a new prep and (c) no dragging out into the field a couple days each week, or sitting in a humid lab counting or identifying or some other endless task - well, it would be kind of nice.

I might actually clean out my sewing room, and fix the place on the drywall (if I can, or maybe just get a guy in) where the roof leaked. And then paint it a pretty color and try to reorganize it. Or I just make a crapton of quilt tops on the grounds that NEXT summer it will be easier to clean if I've used up some of the fabric. Or maybe I learn something new, see if there's somewhere within not-to-awful driving distance that is doing a short-course in something I want to know, either something actually research or teaching related (I would love to learn more about entomology) or something just-fun (learn German better, in a more immersive setting, where I could maybe actually master when it's OK to invert the word order in a sentence and when it isn't). Or just sleep as long as I need to, exercise when I feel like it during the day, sew, play the piano, knit, work in my yard more, and just generally relax. I don't know. It's hard to know what a summer truly "off" would feel like, because I've worked pretty much every summer since I was in high school - either working at a job, or taking classes, or working on my thesis/dissertation, or teaching, or doing research and prepping a class....

One of the other things I have thought about this week: what would retirement look like for me? This thought got started by a million different things - Steve's death, for one thing, and the related thoughts about "you never have time to do the things you want to do when you find them" and my offhand comment to my colleague about going "Bye, Felicia!" to teaching if I hit retirement age and we are poised to go all online, and I buy a longarm quilting machine and spend the rest of my life finishing the tops I have accumulated/doing tops for other people/doing tops to donate to places like Project Linus. And also thinking about my dad, who was kind of a workaholic all his life, and when he finally did retire, after a few years, his arthritis got so bad he couldn't even travel any more, really, and how much that sucks for him, and how I don't want that to be me - not necessarily that I want to travel so much (traveling as a single woman, unless you do it as a tour, is far more complicated and scary than what I can easily cope with), but the idea of working until I'm nearly physically worn out and can't do what I want.

(Part of the reason I am so obsessive about working out, and especially in ways that are less damaging to the knees: I want to still be able to get around when I'm in my 70s)

So I don't know. I have a vague germ of an idea for a field project, but it would probably have to be done as a pilot study (and maybe be unpublishable, as a result) this summer, and also, it would require me sewing hundreds of decomposition bags out of bridal netting or some such. (UGH. I did that before with a seed germination study and it was a giant pain. But I don't think decomposition bags can be bought, or if they can, they're probably prohibitively expensive, and of course I'm too late to write a grant for this summer, if there even was a group that would give grant money for what I plan to do).

(Research is like quilting in a way - they say you can quilt by hand, by machine, or by checkbook [that is, pay a longarmer]. Research is "by hand" - make your own equipment yourself and do stuff the long old-school way. Or "by grant" - write a grant, get someone else to pay for what you need, maybe including the salary for a grad student to do the grunt work. Or "by checkbook" - you pay out of your own pocket for stuff. And I guess I'll be doing that anyway, buying the bridal netting or whatever it is I need, but at least it will be a smaller check than buying the finished bags would be.)

So I don't know: once again, you don't always get what you want in life. I think I want a summer off. But given the pressure of post-tenure reviews (and the fact that it sounds like SOME universities may be beginning to look at them as a way to shoehorn out faculty who don't go over-and-above, rather than just hold the feet of the "deadwood" to the fire), I feel like I need to find SOME kind of research to do this summer. Just still not sure if my "survey of number of detritivores on prairie vs. forest litter" idea is going to be that good or that interesting relative to the amount of work it will take on my part. Also not convinced summer is the best time to look at that, given that it's hot and dry and decomposition will be slowed by the dryness.