* Taking tomorrow off from working; I need to do extensive brush trimming so I can stack it at the curb for Saturday pickup, and I probably also should run out early and see if Mart of Wal sells ground chicken (if they do not, I can use turkey) and get a couple other ingredients; there is a potluck Sunday and I decided to make the "Chicken Parmesan Meatballs" from the newest issue of Cook's Country - often times people don't do main dishes (more expensive and often more work) and it's also good to have a main dish I know is not overspiced/does not contain celery, for me.
* I finally get e-mail confirmation the manuscript I sent in (electronically) back in June has been received. It's likely the editor is a volunteer editor, though, and his time must go to other things as well, so I'm not mad, just relieved it didn't get lost.
Now I'm hoping it will be accepted, even if with major revisions, if it's rejected I just toss the research because this is literally the only journal that would want it.
* Been a little melancholy today; the various griefs I've had over the past few years have come back and are like starlings sitting on telephone wires around me. It was magnified by when the mail came: Informed Delivery told me "there is one mail item we don't have an image of" and often that's a magazine (though I was HOPING it was the Doki Doki crate). No, it was a big packet containing Jo's will to prove to me, i guess, that I am a beneficiary - it lists the two items (and their location in her house, I suppose so the executor has no questions) that I am to inherit. And it looks like I just sit tight and they'll get back to me about how I receive them; the only instructions were "call us if you wish to refuse these items because we need to send a form." I'm wondering if there's some way I could officially designate my mom to receive them, and then I pick them up from her at Christmas (if the will is even probated by then and the distributions made), I'd rather not trust them to the USPS at this point.
* Also melancholy as I have been making my fall syllabi and there is still so much to consider - and in some ways it's harder now: mask mandate has been lifted, so masks are optional. So I don't know if I (fully vaccinated and will be ~10 feet from the students most of the time) mask or not. I know that some people would advise me to but I admit talking for a couple hours a day in our sometimes-80%-humidity rooms is physically challenging and I *did* notice the effects of the mask last fall and in the late spring when it was warm in the rooms. Also the possibility that there could be someone who chooses to mask and takes flak for it and I will have to step in and tell the flak-giver to cut it out or leave class, and as I've said before,conflict, even conflict where I am coming down on the side of "don't be a jerk to other people" makes me want to throw up.
I am offering the option of "if you have some condition that causes you to be immunocompromised you can go through our Student Support office and I will broadcast the class for you" but I also want to be able to tell the merely-lazy who want to stay home on the couch and watch rather than really participate 'no this is not for you' and I KNOW I will have at least one person wanting to do that, so I'm going to treat it as a "you have to have an official accommodation" thing.
Though secretly I am really hoping there is NO ONE in the "has an accommodation" boat because the whole 'remember the webcam, take the extra time to plug it in and sign in to Zoom and be sure it's working and everything" is a giant drag and I really want to be done with it.
One thing I have learned? Being kind and accommodating to others often means a lot of "invisible" labor for you - I doubt 1 out of 25 of my students realized how much extra time all the broadcasting and recording took and the extra worry it caused me ("what if the internet crashes?" - we did have a couple days when it was pretty unstable)
But it's just....everything is a bit harder now, and it's a lot, and I'm tired and sad and old and wish I wasn't dealing with this, and kind of needing a source of comfort but not really finding one.
Addendum, about my worries over "should I wear a mask or not:
* I should go back to updating lecture material; I did a good bit of that for my ecology class and it made me happy because I'm adding in some connections between things that hopefully will help people remember stuff.
* I did also realize that going back to in-person exams (which I am doing, there was too much ease-of-online-cheating in the online ones, even if the answers people googled were nonsensical and earned them 0 points) also means I can start carrying projects to knit on while I invigilate - mostly this was how I did the stockinette portions of sweaters
*Also in other places I hang out people are being either a little fighty or are finding really dumb and horrible things other people are saying and reposting them and I'm just....well, like I said I'm tired and sad and my tolerance for that nonsense is low, so I've noped out of those spaces for a while
* It's also just really humid here, and typical July hot (not death hot like the Pacific Northwest was, but unpleasant enough) and so going anywhere feels like an extra effort and I have less energy than I normally do. If it weren't so hot and/or there weren't a pandemic on I'd consider taking a day this weekend and going antiquing, but the combination of everything makes me feel deeply meh, and also the fact that I'd have to drive a considerable distance to do that. (As I said before: we keep hearing about the northward creep of the Metroplex, but so far I have seen no improvements in terms of shopping or other things to do).
*It's possible that a bit of my melancholy is I'm working through an arrangement-for-piano of The Beatles' "In My Life" - which is a song I've always liked but I also recognize that it does make me a little melancholy. (It was what the campus chorale sang at the graduation the December after my dad's death - which was the last graduation I really attended until the outdoor, distanced one this spring)
* But I'm also working on another MacDowell piece; I would like to eventually have several of these in my repertoire (I use "To a Wild Rose" as a warm up piece some times). It's this one:
I play it more slowly than he does, and I don't quite have the part right before the last bit (where the initial motif repeats) down yet, but I'm getting there. It makes me happy that I got the rhythm and dynamics mostly "right" (based on his performance) without ever having heard the piece (I just looked it up today, when I was struggling with that part - my old teacher once told me not to look things up on YouTube, I presume because I'd be mimicking what the pianist there played rather than my own interpretation, but sometimes you just get baffled by something and have a hard time "hearing" it in your head).
I do have to use a sort of chord inversion in a couple places because like so many of these sort-of-Romantic-era pieces, it seems to be written for someone with a larger handspan than I have, or, there's an alternate fingering (e.g., using the thumb and index finger of your right hand to play some of the upper left-hand notes) that I've not quite figured out or can't quite do.
I'm not sure which one would be next once I've mastered this one: there are some pieces that I don't think will work with my limited handspan and there are others I just look at and groan and go 'that's too many notes'
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