Surprise day off

 Yesterday, and also today....

I went out bright and early and had my blood draw done. I still wasn't feeling super great (I figured out why this morning) but I did the typical thing for me and went and got a breakfast after (eggs, ham, and cinnamon french toast) at the Jimmy's Egg. 

I think of how some comedian once said they weren't SUPERstitious, just a little stitious, but yeah, I am a little stitious and the past couple years I did that my blood results all came back good (though of course, really, eating healthfully and exercising regularly and hopefully no genetic time-bombs going off will be the real influencer of that)

Then I went in to campus, planning to update the last couple slide decks and write my syllabi. I had had a good conversation with my chair the previous day about "how can I adjust that one class with take home stuff so that I can reduce the risk of people using LLMs to outsource their thinking to" and he agreed that my main idea - making the exams shorter but entirely in class, and just dealing with people who need extra time accommodations - was the best, and to still do homework but be even stricter about the "show all your intermediate steps"

It kind of stinks we have to do this - I hate playing cop - but last year I did get some assignments that seemed to have been fed to the computer (I do post them as Word documents; it seems easier than making copies and NOT having them online and then having people who missed class having to ask me for a copy, but maybe I change that too). And the thing is, as I've said before: yes, they are only cheating themselves BUT if they do manage to get a better job faster than someone who did it the "honest but long" way, that's unfair to the students who did things the right way, and it could reflect badly on the department if someone incompetent (because of not learning the skills) winds up in a job, it might hurt our future students getting hired. 

So anyway, I went in with big plans. Turned on my computer. Could not access campus e-mail (first thing I do in the morning). Checked connectivity

 

There was none. 

Restarted the computer, that did nothing. Then I got a text (this is new, they never did this formerly) alerting me that the internet was down all over campus. And then there was a message from the campus-alert app, with the ominous "employees are encouraged to go home for the day"

I guess that meant they didn't plan on getting it back yesterday. And in fact, late in the day, I got a message on the app again saying campus is closed today and apparently the internet isn't back up. I don't know why. I am HOPING it's something as simple as one of the construction people cut a cable that will have to be replaced, and not that it was some kind of denial of service attack, or maybe new "AI features" getting shoehorned into something (onedrive, all my homies hate onedrive) that broke things. 

I hope it's back for Monday; next week is the last totally open prep week I have. 

 Anyway, my gut troubles: now I'm pretty sure it was cumin (and possibly something else) in the fajitas I ate a the restaurant on Sunday after church (I also ate green pepper which sometimes sets me off). I have a food intolerance (luckily, it seems not to be the kind of allergy that can go anaphylactic) to cumin. I don't ALWAYS react, there seems to be a threshold amount, and also, when there's other allergens around I have problems and I think weed-pollen season just started. Finally today my guts feel better, and I don't have the weird doomy feeling that sometimes comes along with it (I can't tell if it's just the low level cramps and muscle fatigue, or if it also affects things like neurotransmitters)

But even though I wasn't feeling great yesterday, I decided to run errands. There's a lunch at church and I agreed to make a couple meatloaves (we are feeding one of the sports teams, so we need more food than ordinarily) and I wanted to go to Albertson's for supplies.

And I had a $15 voucher for Michael's, and it would have expired in a couple weeks, and I needed to get a skein of floss that coordinated with the "Cardigan for John" so I can sew the buttons on. 

(I finally got the stitches all picked up last night, and knit the first row of the bands)

And I found this:

Another anatomically-incorrect Halloween skeleton figure. I kind of love these because they're so silly; I have a few of them. So I bought it, too. (And I got a sketchbook and some pencils, as I had thought about before). 

And I ran to the yarn shop, because it's close to Albertson's, and it's nice to just stop in to a place like that (and I did get a skein of Texas-dyed sockyarn in a colorway called Thundercloud)

And then finally the shopping, and home. It was VERY hot, and I'm not going out today, because it's going to be even hotter. And I think going out in the heat made me feel *worse* with my cumin reaction. But you can't not run errands in the summer, and it's *always* hot in summer here.