week effectively over

I was thinking this morning that today was Friday. It isn't, but I suppose I can be forgiven that because

a. This week has felt about 84 years long
b. I don't have any classes tomorrow (just a meeting with my independent-study student)

My grading is even done: I gave two exams today (one was a v. small class though). Got the first one mostly graded before the second class, and got the second one graded while waiting on a meeting. So I am, right now, at Grading Zero. (That won't last)

My plan for tomorrow now - seeing as final exams are all written - is to try to finish entering the last bits of data for this ongoing project.

Tonight was the last meeting for the spring of a group I belong to. We met at a long-time local steakhouse for our traditional meal out as the last spring meeting. I was apprehensive about this as one of the other officers told me that ANOTHER officer had submitted a letter of resignation for her post, and of course, because I am me, I spun this up into:

"Either

1. She has been diagnosed with a terrible disease and can't keep doing it. or
2. Her husband has been diagnosed etc., etc. or
3. They are having to move away....

and a distant, last possibility, but given some of the friend relationships I had as a kid, I still think of it, even though it's unfair to her for me to think it - "Someone said something that set her off/offended her and she's dropping this without telling us what it was that was so bad"

(Yes, I had experience as a kid with people setting silly "rules" and if you didn't follow those uncommunicated "rules," they would reject you)

Anyway, it was none of those things. She's just overwhelmed and needs to drop a responsibility. And she couldn't be there not because she was upset with us; she was visiting family.

(In fact, she submitted her next-years dues, so she is still a member, and she also said in the letter that another member read aloud - and this is SO her, this is SO her voice: "I am not angry or upset with any of you all.")

So I'm relieved about that. Once again, something I'm dreading and spinning up into a bigger thing that it is was really secretly coloring my mood and making it harder for me to be cheerful.

But at any rate - for now, I'm out from under a lot of things.

It's supposed to storm tomorrow so probably I won't have a chance to do more yardwork but at least I feel like I can see forward to a time when I have time to do what I want to do.

I was remarking to someone today that if feels like a lot of the time now I feel like I'm "managing content" instead of teaching/preparing to teach/doing research/reading stuff in my field: the whole thing about trying to make BlackBoard do what I wanted to do yesterday and not succeeding. And yeah, that's one complaint I have about what higher ed has become: there's so much tech, so much stuff that now needs to be done *immediately*....expectations have really changed. We are asked to do more, and faster, than professors did 20 years ago. (And sometimes students expect even more: a couple semesters ago someone asked me, "You know the stuff you say in class? Could you just, like, type it up and hand it out to us?" and I was kind of like "That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works")

And so a lot of the time, I do feel like I'm "managing" more than teaching, and that makes me tired. (Part of this is that on my campus, we don't always have the support staff larger places do. Just as I am forced to be a self-rescuing princess, I am also forced to be my own support staff).

At any rate. I finished "The Case of the Late Pig" a couple nights ago (a Campion mystery and the "pig" in question was someone who *resembled* a pig, not a literal pig). I needed to figure out something that would be diverting to read without being "sad" or stressful. ("The Case of the Late Pig" worked, despite being a murder mystery, because (a) the "victims" were despicable people the world was better off without and (b) it's unrealistic enough to be entertaining (Campion wound up in (what I assume was) simulated Mortal Peril - acting as if he'd been dosed with chloral hydrate to catch the killer; Lugg actually DID wind up in Mortal Peril but was saved at the last minute).

I decided I needed a more "challenging" book, heh. So I pulled the big hardback copy of "The Three Musketeers" (referred to as a Special Translation That Doesn't Leave Out The Naughtier Jokes) and started it. I didn't get very far because I was tired, but either it's not as great a translation as I had thought, or it takes a while to get into it, or I've gotten a bit stupider, because I'm finding it a little hard to follow. (I'm only up to the part where D'Artagnan's horse is being mocked). Maybe I just have to get back into denser prose....I don't know.