Tuesday morning random

* I got the binding sewn on the smallish pink quilt, but it's been so grey out here that photographing stuff is not happening. (Also, yesterday was a very busy day; I got home around 3:30 but had to do my day's limited piano practice and a bit of reading for teaching and I had Bell Choir).

I also spent some time on the weekend and made a few more rows (and sewed them on*) for the Tabula Recta/Vigniere Cipher quilt. This takes a long time as there are 26 rows of 26 squares each. I am slightly more than half done at this point.

(*Because I need to keep things very well organized, and I am NOT organized right now, I am sewing each row on to the growing quilt as I complete it. It *might* be more efficient to sew up all the rows first but doing it this way means I am less likely to make a mistake and get things out of order, and the very specific order is the feature of this quilt)

26 x 26 is 676 so that's why the quilt is taking me so long to do.

* I should perhaps briefly put that aside and get the bindings made up for the other two quilts I have back from the quilters. Binding is my least favorite part so it takes me a long time sometimes to get around to it.

* I do think some of my distress is the feeling of "not completing things." I have lots of in-progress projects but none are very close to being finished, and I need the success of feeling I've finished something to keep myself going.

It's very hard not to get mired in the one-inch picture frame of "now" and see the lack of progress. I think that's the other thing that freaks me out about research and the like: I think "I need to start a new project" and then I try to tot up when I gather the data, when I do the field work, when I do the background readings, and it just makes me so tired and also worried because some days I literally have less than an hour of daylight time I'm not involved with other things, and it takes 20 minutes to drive to the field site...

* Met with a student this morning originally to do her "grad check" and based on the number of credit hours she had left and how her schedule fell out, it culminated with me offering to do research hours with her this summer and....yeah. I guess that was a good thing to offer, she seems like a pretty solid and responsible person and also the Gods of The Post-Tenure Review look very favorably on us getting students engaged with research (and you always gotta be closing, even if I just received a mostly-favorable one for the past three years, 2023 will be here too soon).

And anyway. I have a project in mind and having an assistant will be the motivation I need to actually do it this summer. She works full time and I told her I would not be at all adverse to going out on Saturday mornings to do the fieldwork and she seemed happy with that and you know? Yeah. In the summer when I don't teach, and I need to run errands in Sherman? Do them on a Tuesday or Wednesday when it's NOT everyone and their brother out at the stores. Leave Saturday for fieldwork.

I also suggested Directed Readings and I could have read the soil ecology book a student of mine is doing now, since our project will be involving soil ecology.

* Other than that, a busy week. Plans now are to take the book I need to read home with me and read tonight - found out that there's a debate on instead of NCIS so I don't feel so bad about skipping evening TV. (I feel no real need to watch the debates, at least not until we come to the actual two candidates, one of whom will be the current incumbent)

I need to get on to the work for next week's biostats stuff because if I CAN get it prepped in time, I can take Saturday to celebrate my birthday, sort of. (I never do all that much)

* Today is Shrove Tuesday but I don't know that I'm doing anything. No good donut places locally to get a paczki (and nowhere locally does "official" paczki; I don't think we have many people of Polish heritage here at all). And not sure about pancakes. IHOP does a promotion today but frankly? most restaurant pancakes are not that good, not unless you're at a little mom and pop diner where they actually make the batter from flour and eggs and milk and butter and sometimes sugar, instead of using an industrial mix, which most chain places do. I can make better pancakes at home in about 15 minutes than your average restaurant can and well, yeah, a big part of eating at a restaurant is not having to cook or do dishes, still.

Also, my restaurant meal this go-round is going to be my birthday dinner; I am seriously considering doing another round of take-out from the good local barbecue place, all the more because you can now order online and in great detail (like: you can tell them if you want white gravy, brown gravy, butter, or nothing on mashed potatoes if you get them). And you don't have to talk to another human to do it and YES sometimes that is a thing with me, especially after a long day of teaching.

though I will admit it does make me slightly sad that the vast majority of years, my birthday falls during Lent (this year, it is the day after Ash Wednesday). I remember once when I was in school, back in the era when we did "school treats" and  one year my mom baked chocolate cupcakes and I remember how one kid in my class went ON AND ON about how they had given up chocolate for Lent and how I should have known (!) and that it wasn't fair.

And you know? I felt bad and guilty about that the rest of the day, and that is a very "me" thing. I realize now as an adult, that that kid was making MY birthday all about them, and that the polite thing to do is to politely decline but not make a big deal about it and also that I am way too good about feeling guilty for other people's "stuff" when they try to unreasonably guilt-trip me. Like, I spend too much energy worrying about (a) what other people will think and (b) modifying my wants to suit other people and (c) sometimes in a way making myself as small as possible so I don't "take up too much room" and even sometimes when I do that I get accused of taking up too much room.

I don't know. I suspect a lot of women (or for that matter, a lot of "weird kids") get told they "take up too much room" and some of them try to make themselves smaller until they find they've largely edited themselves out of people's lives. (And of course, some people go the opposite direction and wind up going as Big and as Extra as they possibly could, on the grounds of "Well, if they say I take up too much room, darn right I'm going to take up too much room" and I admit I kind of grudgingly admire that attitude even if (a) I could never do it myself and (b) it is kind of .... annoying.... to share space for long with someone who is that Extra.)

* Also have had the realization of recent that I respond more strongly to the risk of "shame" (In the sense of modifying my behavior to avoid it) than many people do. I suspect that some people are just hard-wired to be that way, and maybe others get that reinforced at a young age by parental or peer behavior. (My parents, God bless them, were kind of the "you want to avoid doing things that bring shame on you" type of person, and I know that affected me. And my peers, well, being someone who came from a family that was poorer/more-frugal/less given to conspicuous consumption than the norm, and who cried easily and so was fun to tease, and who was frankly kind of a weird little kid, and who also had some minor health issues - well, they found a lot of things to shame me about, even though those things really weren't things it was valid to be shamed for. And I did internalize a lot of that and I see it now with the horror I feel with having to share the student comments I get on evaluations with my colleagues in PTR ('they'll see the horrible things the students wrote about me') and similar. And that's also probably a factor behind my doing everything I possibly can do to avoid crying in public....)

* Still doubt I'm doing anything for Lent this year. My disrespectful/joke answer to that right now is "I'm still mad at God so why do you want me to do something for Lent" and I get that that's not really it but yeah, last year felt unnecessarily hard in far too many ways and I am still not sure what I was supposed to learn from it but I am still unhappy about it.

I also feel kind of....unable....to take on anything more at this point. Just still feeling kind of overwhelmed.

* I still haven't decided whether to do cake. Part of me wants to bake a cake, but part of me is going "but when will you have the time" because tonight is going to be mostly work, and tomorrow night I will be tired and will probably be doing catch-up work, and Thursday....well, that's my birthday so there won't be time at that point unless I make it for the weekend.

this is, I admit, one of the times where I very much feel my aloneness and realize that if I lived closer to an amicable family member (like my mom), I'd get cake if I asked for it. Or if I had a loving partner, they'd arrange for there to be cake. Or even close by friends who weren't overly busy already with their own lives.

My choice comes down to: bake a cake yourself, settle for substandard grocery store cake, or go without cake and frankly at this point I'm leaning towards the third option. (I don't know. Pruett's probably makes decent cake and I contemplated ordering myself one when I was in there last time but then I went all over funny and decided it looked too pathetic to order one's own birthday cake, and I chickened out of doing it. And the ready-available cakes at wal-mart are terrible, and the frozen cakes on offer are not very good).

This spring semester just isn't a good semester. Having four days a week where I'm involved on campus until 4 pm or darn close to it just wipes out my desire to do much once I get home. I remember years in the past when I baked myself cakes....I wonder if that time will ever come again or if that's another good thing of my life that's gone forever.

* Though, yeah, the barbecue place does sell desserts and maybe they'll have a nice cake on Thursday (not carrot cake. I cannot eat carrot cake because of the carrots. And not peanut-butter anything. I'm not 100% convinced I'm allergic but I don't want to risk it, especially not when I'm all alone at home).

The other option would be to get something Saturday when and if I go out.

But yeah, that's one of the complications of living in a small town that's distant from many other such towns; if your town lacks a good source for something, you cannot get that thing on the spur of the moment (or at all, if it's some kind of fresh-food thing that cannot be mail-ordered).