Looking ahead

I’m tired, but I think I’m finally ready for the new semester.

Last fall was rough. Rather than go into all the details, I’ll sum up the low points:

1. Thanks to ineptitude on the part of some folks in Santa Fe, I didn’t find out what classes I would be teaching until a week before school started — whereupon I learned I would have seven preps, including two I’d never taught before.
2. Remote learning was a virtual hellscape of buggy software, lost passwords, and tech access issues that persisted much farther into the semester than they should have.
3. We returned to in-person learning for about a month, from early October to early November, before somebody in our building caught COVID-19 and managed to share it with me. I realize how fortunate I was to have only a “mild” case, but it was still unpleasant, and the brain fog and fatigue lingered long enough to make the last month of my first semester of grad school unnecessarily difficult. I still managed to pull out a 4.0 GPA, but it was a near thing, and it wouldn’t have been if I’d been healthy.
4. Being sick and exhausted and busy with grad school meant I didn’t keep up with housework the way I normally would.

By the time I got to the end of the semester, I was exhausted and frustrated and overwhelmed. Last week, I took the bull by the horns and did myself three favors: I cleaned, decluttered, and reorganized my kitchen and office during a three-day period beginning Christmas Eve; I got on the FlyLady website and started re-establishing the habits that I’d learned there 20 years ago and hadn’t needed in several years; and I started a new bullet journal using a cheap dot-grid journal I found at the dollar store last fall but hadn’t had time to set up.

Tonight, I have a shiny sink, a set of lesson plans (and most of the ancillary materials) ready to go in Google Classroom — which I spent several hours taking self-paced classes to learn over break — and a glass of sangria in hand. This is the calm before the storm of another semester, but the point here is that it’s calm, if only for a few more hours. That’s something I haven’t experienced in a while, and I’ll savor it while I can.

Emily

I’m tired.

I have now made it through my first week of grad school.

Two of my classes met this week; the third will start Monday night. I loathe the textbook for my research-methods class, but I like the professor, who has been very sweet and patient as I ease back into academia after a 23-year hiatus, so there’s that. Sadly, the textbook is a compendium of essays by writers who are, to borrow a phrase from my late eighth-grade lit teacher, “inebriated by [their] own verbosity.”

I’m fluent in several dialects of bullshit, including Late-20th-Century Professoric, High Mansplainish, and Old and Middle Educatorese, but this is the first time I’ve encountered Linguistics Philosopherian, which is basically self-important word salad. I finally figured out that the trick was to take notes on the essays first, then go back through my notebook and take notes on my notes. That second layer of note-taking yielded enough comprehensible material to use as the basis for my reading-response assignment; from there, I just had to translate the notes into Modern Professoric to crank out a decent paper. It’s only worth 20 points, and I managed to work in references to Keith Richards and the Infinite Monkey Theorem, so it’s fine, probably.

Thus far, I’m enjoying my Brit-lit class. The professor’s teaching style reminds me of my own, and the class is a mix of grad students and undergrads, so I basically sat around shooting the bull about King Arthur with a bunch of bright kids. The writing assignment for this week just involved reading something and then getting on the class discussion board and posting a 250-word response to the professor’s question. I was the first one to respond, so I’m not sure whether I hit the tone he was looking for, but hopefully he’ll let me know if I screwed it up so I can try again before Wednesday.

I have a couple of short stories to read before my fiction-writing class meets Monday, but I am otherwise finished with my homework, which is good, because I need to do some serious lesson planning this weekend, and Ramona could use a long walk and a romp around the park.

Emily

Scaling back

Late Saturday night, I realized I’d spent nearly 10 straight hours doing blog-related stuff and STILL didn’t have a whole week’s worth of posts filed, and I ended up so tired and frustrated, it literally made me sick. It occurred to me that I’ve taken something I started for fun and made it stressful. That’s really screwed-up.

My New Year’s resolution was to do less, live more, and hopefully spend less time battling the stress-related health problems that plagued me for most of 2016. To that end, I’m making some changes around here:

Vegetarian Friday. When I started this feature in 2014, my goal was to try one new vegetarian recipe every week for a year in an effort to incorporate more plant-based meals into our diet. Posting them was a way to keep myself honest. Three years later, a good 80 percent of the meals I cook are vegetarian, probably a fourth are vegan, and I’ve learned a lot about staging food photos. The most important thing I’ve learned is that I don’t like staging food photos. I see no point in doing something I don’t like if I’m not being paid for it, especially if other people are better at it. With that in mind, if you enjoyed Vegetarian Friday, I would encourage you to visit Oh She Glows and Minimalist Baker. If I dream up something really exceptional, I’ll still share it like I always have, but it’s probably not going to be a weekly occurrence.

Eco-Saturday. I’m not getting rid of this, but I’m changing it. Like Vegetarian Friday, Eco-Saturday was supposed to run for a year. Three years later, I’ve gone about as far as I can where I am, so I’m going to focus more on reviews, recommendations, links, and daydreams about things I’d like to do someday. If there’s anything you’d like me to cover, feel free to suggest it in the comments.

Make-It Monday and Tiny Tuesday. You’ll get one or the other each week, but probably not both, because they overlap a lot, and separating them out is starting to feel forced.

I hope that doesn’t disappoint anybody too terribly. At this point, trying to do too much is easily my worst habit, and I’m trying very hard to break it. Bear with me; down time is still an alien concept for me, and self-care isn’t really one of my strengths.

Emily

No recipe today.

I don’t have a Vegetarian Friday recipe for you this week, because frankly, I’ve felt like crap since Tuesday and didn’t eat much for a couple of days. Remember a few weeks ago, when my Eco-Saturday entry was about making your own TV dinners? Weeks like this are why I do it. I fed Ron one of those prefabbed meals on Wednesday because my stomach was touchy from staying up too late and my head was congested from too many tears and I just didn’t feel like cooking anything, much less eating it. I was grateful to have that tray of capellini ready to go; it kept Ron from having to go out for lunch, which would have cost us a day of our debt-retirement effort. (Related: We are now $809 from paying off that dead Subaru so we can get it out of our driveway and move on with our lives.)

We had toasted ravioli yesterday, which came out of a bag in the freezer. The ravioli wasn’t vegetarian, but the convenience of having it on hand reminded me that I haven’t done an entry on stocking the pantry and freezer for tough days. If I don’t come up with a good new recipe between now and next Friday, I might work up a list and some instructions for you. When I was vegging full-time, the hardest part was planning far enough ahead to keep from falling off the wagon when my schedule got hectic. Now that I’ve been cooking most of my meals at home for a year and a half, I could probably make the transition without a major effort. Maybe I will one day.

I need to write something about the loss of Leonard Cohen — which was a sucker-punch I didn’t need after leaning on “Anthem” and “Hallelujah” for two days while I tried to digest Tuesday’s election results and figure out the best way forward — and I’m working up a piece about Hillary Clinton and her influence on my life, but first I’m going to treat myself to an afternoon in Makanda, because I need it.

Emily

Sunday self-care: In the long run

I started this weekly feature on self-care partly as a means of keeping myself honest, because frankly, I’m great at taking care of other people but lousy at extending the same courtesy to myself. Self-neglect rarely ends well.

One of my most valuable self-care tools is long-distance running. I don’t run as often, as regularly or as sensibly as I should. But I run when I can find the time and energy, and I’m always glad I did. Even if I’ve gone too long between runs and lost some of my training base, the mental and spiritual benefits are enough to make up for whatever physical discomfort I have to deal with along the way.

Props to Chief Blair at Cape PD, who recommended the LaCroix Trail to me.

I’m terribly prone to seasonal depression, and when the days get ridiculously short, an hour or two of fresh air, sunlight and endorphins can make all the difference in how I feel.

In addition to doing nice things for my brain chemistry, long runs give me some much-needed time to think, pray or just “be still and know.”

Yesterday was gorgeous, so I treated myself to an ill-advised 10-mile round trip out to Abbey Road Christian Church to walk the labyrinth.

The labyrinth. One of my favorite places in town.

Love this pergola next to the labyrinth.

Rudbeckia growing around the perimeter of the labyrinth.

I say “ill-advised” because I’d planned a walk and ended up turning it into a run on the spur of the moment. The problem with that lies in preparation: A walk that long is fine, but if you’re going to run more than five miles, you really need to take along a couple of packets of carb gel and a quart or so of water. I’d made no such preparations (that self-care thing again), and about seven miles into my impromptu jog, my calves and hamstrings started telling me about it.

I was about a mile from home when I looked up and saw salvation in the form of an IHOP. I limped in and ordered a meal specifically intended to replace the nutrients I’d lost on my run: orange juice (potassium, quick carbs), whole-wheat pancakes (complex carbs, a little protein), bacon (protein, salt) and several glasses of water.

Eating solely for nourishment was a singular experience that made me rethink what and why I eat, and it made me genuinely grateful for the meal in front of me, which I desperately needed to soothe my sore legs and fuel that last mile home.

When I was still a practicing Christian Scientist, I was particularly fond of this quote:

Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.
— Mary Baker Eddy

The labyrinth of my life has taken me on a little different spiritual path the last few years, but that truth remains with me, and running has a way of reinforcing it.

Yesterday, that reinforcement came in the form of a well-timed stack of pancakes that met a pressing need beautifully.

I’ll take it.

Emily

I’m tired.

I haven’t had a chance to spend much time online lately, because I’ve been busy redoing my office. After the past three weeks, I kind of feel like Lillian looks in that picture above.

The drywall in here was as disastrous as the mess in the bedroom, so I had to retape and mud the corners and repaint the whole room.

Because textured paint covers a multitude of sins, I decided to sponge-paint the office. I chose two shades of light blue to open up the space a little bit and give it a sort of airy feeling. I’d planned to do sort of a random pattern, but clouds started appearing as I worked, so I just let them happen.

Before I put the room back together, I cleaned Ron’s desk (which he cluttered up again within 12 hours, because Y-chromosome), steamed the carpet, rearranged the furniture, and discovered the two smaller dogs’ crates would fit neatly under a folding work table I’ve been keeping in the basement, giving me a much-needed work surface without costing me any floor space.

After all the rearranging, Song got a little confused about which crate was his and inexplicably decided to wedge himself into Riggy’s crate — prompting Lillian to go into Song’s crate, while Riggy went into Lillian’s. (When I texted the picture of Song to my sister, her immediate response was a Talking Heads line: “This is not my beautiful house!”)

I used the newly freed-up space to sort my old photo prints from my 35mm days. In the span of three days, I threw away more than 1,600 duplicate and/or inferior-quality prints and rounded up close to 100 more to give to various people I thought might enjoy them. A collection that once took up eight photo storage boxes now fits in three — two of prints and one of negatives. When I finished sorting photos, I went through my newspaper clips and knocked that collection down to half its former size.

While I was on a roll, I picked up some small baskets from the dollar store and reorganized the medicine cabinet so we could find things easily. I wish I’d taken a “before” picture. It was a jumble.

To reward myself for a job well done, I went to Target and bought myself a little combination bulletin board/chalkboard to hang next to my desk. I really like it.

Here’s another thing that got cleaned recently:

Poor Walter. He grooms himself pretty well, but that long coat is a dirt magnet, and it had gotten so dingy, the vet even commented on it last time he went for a checkup, so we gave him a bath and a good brushing. He didn’t like it much, but everybody survived.

I. Am. Exhausted.

What a weekend. I wrapped up another revision of the novel (which I now refer to as The Project That Will Not Die) late Saturday night, spent a big chunk of Sunday working on a preservation project, tweaked the novel a bit more Sunday night, caught up with an old friend in Makanda and picked up xylitol for the last step in my cider project today, and finished transcribing the last interview for Zaphod’s dissertation tonight.

I kind of want to finish that last step in the cider project now, but I think I’ll settle for watching the first Weeping Angels episode of Doctor Who with Ron, who is not a Whovian but has decided “Blink” sounds interesting enough to warrant his attention.

Hope you had a good weekend, wherever you are.

Emily

Trying to catch up.

Sorry I haven’t posted in ages. Things have been nuts at work, with big deadlines last week and an execution that was scheduled for this week but was stayed twice, necessitating two trips to Bonne Terre and a lot of strange hours in a high-security environment that made me tired and nervous, partly because it involved trying to work from a remote site while separated from a lot of the tools and resources I’m used to having at my disposal, and partly because I was really dreading the thought of watching a man die, regardless of what he did to put himself in that position.

In between, I had a perfectly marvelous, much-needed three-day weekend that included a massage; beekeeping; a trip to the hardware store; a trip to a 95-year-old feed store; the purchase of a lawn gnome and a fabulously creepy statue that’s weirdly evocative of the infamous Weeping Angels; a little time on both Route 66 and Highway 61; and a Judy Collins concert in a 325-seat theater a couple of blocks off 66 in Edwardsville, Ill. (We were in the second row, and yes, it was wonderful: Tiny venue full of Baby Boomers who knew all the songs and sang along at every opportunity. It felt less like a concert and more like an old friend had thrown a party and brought out her guitar to break the ice — which is exactly the sort of vibe a folk concert ought to have.)

The weekend was great, but it wasn’t quite enough to overcome the stress of last week’s deadlines and the stress, late nights, erratic meals, and general failure to take care of myself over the past couple of days, so I woke up this morning with a fever, muscle spasms in my legs and a level of exhaustion that kept me in bed until about an hour ago.

Twelve hours of sleep, several bottles of water and a lot of electrolytes later, I’m doing much better and am optimistic if I go back to bed soon and get a decent night’s rest, I’ll be able to hit the ground running tomorrow.

Emily

Busy, busy, busy

I owe you an Eco-Saturday. Sorry ’bout that; I promise I’ll make it up to you with a double helping this week. The last couple of weeks have been crazy. I worked 12 consecutive days (including 85 hours in one seven-day stretch), visited my family, replaced my cellphone (if we’re close and I haven’t given you my new number, email me, and I’ll update you), and then came down with a nasty 24-hour bug that flattened me Sunday night and forced me to spend Monday in bed. I hate getting sick, but it was probably the only way I was going to get the rest I desperately needed after the last couple of weeks, so I’m not going to grumble too much.

I had some good intentions about picking up groceries tonight, but I was still a little shaky when I woke up this morning, and after covering a meeting and filing two stories today, I was pretty well tapped out, so I just cleaned out the refrigerator, loaded the dishwasher and made myself a batch of butternut squash soup out of some steam-in-bag squash I found in the freezer. It turned out well and will probably be this week’s Vegan Friday offering.

I am pretty sure I am going to spend the rest of my evening curled up on the couch, listening to Joni Mitchell on vinyl. Unless I give up and crash early, which is looking increasingly likely.

Hope you’re having a good evening, wherever you are.

Emily

Inventory

So … my week has included a tornado, three 12-hour days, an arrest in a case I’ve been covering since April (which happened on what was supposed to be my day off, of course), a homicide, a counterfeiting case, an election, a mad scramble to beat the competition to a story they shouldn’t have known anything about in the first place, and a city council meeting.

Y’all know how much I love my job, but if you live in Southeast Missouri or deep Southern Illinois, and your weekend agenda involves official corruption, blowing something up or killing somebody, I’mma need you to pencil that in for Sunday, because until then, here is a complete list of everything I care about that does not directly involve coffee, Birkenstocks or Joni Mitchell:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

That about covers it.

Have a good weekend, and if you’re a criminal, please take some time off. I’m sure you work as hard as I do, and we could both use a break.

Emily