And that's done

I totaled up and posted the grades for my classes this morning.

It felt weirdly hollow. I had kind of delayed on it, partly because I wanted to give people the maximum chance to get in late work (I said midday Saturday and would have accepted up to first thing this morning, but the last late work I received was late in the afternoon Friday) but partly because....well, with this semester ended for me, it feels like I have one less reason for "being."

What I probably need to do now is set myself timers and try to read continuing-ed type stuff (I have a couple books on probability, and some stuff on ecology and on environmental policy) so I don't feel so much at loose ends.

The hard thing with this is that all the markers, all of them, of "this semester has ended and the summer has begun." In normal years, I would calculate and submit my grades as soon as I had the final exams graded, because the expectation was that all the other work would be in well before that. And I'd finish up with it on Friday before graduation at the latest; it always felt right to me to have grades in before graduation even though it wasn't *required*. (And a source of some levity at graduation when someone "walks" that my colleagues and I know well will be repeating at least one class before they earn their degrees....)

Graduation would have been Saturday. Of course we didn't have one - well, there was a virtual one and I looked up a few of our graduates but couldn't bring myself to write any messages, it made me too sad. This week some time I would have been traveling up to visit my mom, possibly after taking a day to go shopping/antiquing in Sherman or Whitesboro.

And of course, this year, none of that is happening.

Right now, I'm fighting with the new advisement software (planned to be rolled out this spring, and I guess they couldn't undo that, even though faculty are having to learn *remotely* and on their own how to use it) but once that's done - once I've advised this student - I don't really have anything left today.

(Annnnnd the system crashed. So we won't be doing that today. And I just turned off my campus e-mail for a bit to get a bit of peace because people have been e-mailing me WHY ISN'T MY GRADE HIGHER e-mails when I explained on the class webpage how I calculated the grade and several of the complainants are earning As which....whyyyyy? Why are you complaining? I was kind of obsessed about my grades but if I earned a B or an A I was just happy with it, and I never accused a teacher of miscalculating them to try to up my grades)

I am tired, again. I had a vivid dream of taking a quilt in to the quilt shop in Denison to be quilted and when I woke up I was sad that it wasn't really happening, and it won't happen for a long time yet.

What I really need is some way of feeling....like I accomplished something this semester. I don't feel like I did.