So, a decision

One of my advanced biostats students couldn't make it in - adverse weather on her long commute. I e-mailed the other and floated the idea of "come in for a few minutes if you have questions but if you want let's push the discussion of this paper off for a week" and she agreed.

So I now have that time back, and what's more, I essentially have (except for reviewing the material) the prep done for next week

(meaning: I get my weekend back now. So I am going to Lulu and Hazel's "party sale," and seriously planning on dropping off the next quilt at Home a la Mode on Saturday)

But now: do I run my one errand and then go home early, or do I stay here and do some of the needling little things I need to do this week (evaluate some scholarship letters, submit early alert reports, prep my lab for tomorrow early....) or do I take this time as a 'gimme' and relax?

I am surprisingly bad at this now. 20-something me would have gone home without a second thought, but 50-something me goes either "but it Looks Bad for you to leave too early*" or "but you will regret not doing this extra work later on"

(*nevermind that many days, the two people whose cars are left in the lot when I leave for the day are mine and the department chair's, and I'm always the first one in)

But then again: if I do the work now, "later on" there may be more; I have several friends in academia who note that academic work expands to fill the time you give it. And in a more cosmic sense? There may not be a "later on" when you say "Well, I can relax later on" because we never know what might happen in this life.

I suppose I could compromise and do the early alert reports so they're done, and then go home....but I dislike how I've bought into the "always be grinding" mindset of late and I keep trying to pinpoint when it first happened to me - maybe after the budget cuts of 2016, when I began to worry my job was less-secure than I thought (never mind that if we get RIFfed it will probably be on the basis of seniority, and at this point I am not the HIGHEST seniority person but am also not the lowest) and that it won't necessarily come down to how "good" we are in terms of being a little swot.

though I also admit sometimes if the loneliness I sometimes feel after an extended period at home alone is what drives me to stay in my office longer than I need to...

Though on further introspection....could this be a reaction to the resurgence of grief I've felt in recent days? I don't know why it came back, but it did. I don't know if it's the gray, endlessly-rainy late-winter weather, or some weird mental cycle thing, or what, but I've been remembering vividly some of the things from around the time of my dad's death and feeling sad and uncomfortable again. Not unfunctionally so, just, sort of....a low-level funk that I'd like to get out of. Remembering that phone call that Friday afternoon that led to me racing to get up there. And remembering the second trip to the funeral home where they asked my mom about "what to do about what he was wearing" and my mom being unable to answer and looking at me, and in that moment, if I hadn't been a grownup before, I darn well became one, because I took a deep breath and told them to go ahead and cremate him in what he had been wearing (though mainly? Because I didn't want to have to go back there to pick up the clothes, and then wonder what we'd do with them). And remembering some of the things he used to say, and, oh, just everything. And it's hard. It's harder because I wasn't expecting it to still be this hard.

So maybe I keep pushing over at work because it's a way of  "medicating" myself, that if I'm worrying about complete-blocked ANOVA designs and Latin Squares, I'm not thinking about the stuff that happened last year? I don't know. (Though part of it is fear of being underprepared for this class and wanting to do well by the students, though I doubt that given such short notice as I was on it, anyone would blame me for it being less than perfect).