I always have what I call "Sunday chores" to do; they entail everything around the house that I haven't had time to do over the week beforehand and didn't want to do over the weekend while I was sleeping more than being awake. They also include the things I have to do every week, such as whatever laundry I have, cleaning the cat box, readying and taking the trash down to the road, etc.
It's not that I'm tired. I'm not. What it is, more than anything else, is bored. And I know that this concept probably makes you laugh, especially as I've written here many times that I'm so busy and stressed that I can barely sleep. Well, I am. During the week, that is. By the time Saturday and Sunday roll around, unless I've collected a ton of assignments and/or have a lot of reading to do for my students' classes (to prepare lesson plans and the like), I am just...here. Alone, with the cats. If there aren't any interesting football games on -- right now, there aren't, as my teams either played earlier this week or are playing tonight -- and I don't have anything to do that's incredibly pressing, I just sit here. Daisy sleeps all day on the weekends because she works on those nights, and I just sit here, fully rested from a few good nights' worth of sleep, but simultaneously bored and restless because there's not something occupying my time. And, for the record, nothing sounds interesting or engaging. That's a big part of it, too. Could I mindlessly zone out and watch football that I don't care about? Yeah, I suppose. Would it cure the boredom or restlessness? No.
I suppose I should be feeling thankful and should be reveling in this sort of freedom now before I will no longer have it on the weekends after this one. On Friday, I assembled the weekly lesson plans for my 210 class, and found that even though there's no final exam, due to its accelerated nature, I'm basically collecting a complex paper (or other assignment) from them every Tuesday night. Every Tuesday night, with the exception of Thanksgiving week, from October 17 through the beginning of December. There will be no week during these times -- from now forward, really -- where I don't have a stack of papers to grade or edit hanging over my head. I've tried to plot out the dates for the rest of the semester as best as possible right now, and this is how they (tentatively) look:
September 24 (T): 101 paper 1 due.
September 25 (W): 011 paper 1 due.
October 16 (W): 011 paper 2 due.
October 17 (R): 101 paper 2 due, 210 paper 1 due
October 22 (T): 210 paper 2 due.
October 29 (T): 210 paper 3 due.
October 30 (W): 011 paper 3 due.
November 5 (T): 210 paper 4 due.
November 12 (T): 101 paper 3 due, 210 paper 5 due.
November 18 (M): 011 paper 4 due.
November 19 (T): 210 paper 6 due.
December 2 (M): 011 paper 5 due.
December 3 (T): Oral Presentations in 210.
December 5 (R): 101 paper 4 due, Oral Presentations in 210 conclude.
For those of you keeping count, that's fifteen papers and an entire week of oral presentations I'll be dealing with, and none of this (obviously) counts weekends that workshop copies come in for these classes, or times when I'll collect the journals for grading, or quizzes that I'll administer (some of which will be long) and spend time grading through as well, or time spent reading and lesson planning for these kids. No, this is simply the list of paper due dates. Note the (lucky) gaps I have in time at the beginning of October (midterms, and coincidentally, my anniversary with Daisy) and through Thanksgiving week, when I've canceled my classes...and compare that with how frequently papers are coming in on all the other dates. It's a blessing of sorts that I'll be stuck on West campus all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays with nothing to do, because otherwise, trying to grade all of these at home, in stacks one after another, would kill me. Some of those days, some of those weekends, are going to be terrible. If I think I never get any sleep now? Hoo boy, give it a few weeks. Then we'll see how frazzled I am. I may as well purchase the IV bag and hook for coffee right now.
Speaking of purchasing things...unless my mother dropped it in there yesterday after I checked my account yesterday morning upon waking up, my paycheck is not yet in the bank. I don't know if this means that it hasn't arrived yet (which is unlikely, since I sent it six days ago) or if she hasn't dropped it in there, or if it's just taking the weekend to deposit it. I don't know because, uncharacteristically, I haven't heard anything from my parents since Thursday (I think). Just a bit strange, that's all. What it really boils down to is that I'm going to end up getting paid twice this week, and what's in my bank account now will basically triple by next weekend once both checks are in there. That's good; I have to pay the rent sometime this week, put gas in the car on Tuesday, and will need to go do some basic grocery shopping probably after class one afternoon (or, if I again become an insomniac of some sort, in the middle of the night one night). There are several things I need to order from Amazon, as well -- for example, I give the cats two different types of urinary tract health cat food (mixed and blended evenly) and they're out of one of the two kinds. It's cheaper to order it on Amazon than it is to buy it in Walmart, as wild as that sounds. I need to order several ounces of peppermint oil, as well. Why, you ask? Because spraying it around doors and windows is a huge deterrent to spiders -- they hate it. It's also something that won't hurt the cats, as other sprays and the like would. With today being the first day of fall, and with temperatures plummeting at night to the point where I'll probably need to start using blankets on the bed downstairs again soon, spiders will start coming into the house like crazy again. They always do around this time of year. June and October -- get out of the heat / come in from the cold. Etc. I don't want to make any of these purchases until I am a little more financially comfortable, even if they are only $10-15 each. I'm neurotic that way.
I emptied the last of my bottle of Marvel Mystery Oil into the car this afternoon, and added another quart of oil for good measure. Do I think it really needs both? No, probably not, at least not all of it right now. But it's preventative, I suppose. I put more coolant into the tank as well, even though it was only a little low, simply because I already had the hood up, and again, preventative measures. I need to be able to keep that car running as healthily as possible, even if I'm only putting highway miles on it. The car still drives a lot every week, and while it's good on gas mileage for its age and wear/tear, keeping all of its vital parts in the best shape I can will only help it stay alive. More of those fluids (coolant, oil, Marvel Mystery Oil, fuel system cleaner, etc) are all on my shopping list for when I have the money to get them, as well.
Because I'm collecting papers from my students this week, it's a pretty quiet week overall. Yes, I'll be grading through all of those papers, but my actual lesson plans are fairly minimal. Tomorrow in my 011 class, it's "in-class conference/peer review" day, which means students bring in their drafts to trade with their peers and edit each others' papers, and I sit at the front of the class and do the same for anyone who wants me to look theirs over and focus on no more than three issues. This means one of two things: 1) everyone will be there and there will be a long line for me to look over papers one after another until the class ends, or 2) nobody will show up because they're not done with their drafts and/or don't care. Judging from the number of absences I've had in that class over the past two weeks or so, it could go either way, though I'm expecting more of the latter than the former. The final copies of those papers come in on Wednesday, and we cover a chapter in the book before the next unit starts. In my 101 class, papers come in on Tuesday and we begin the next unit then, with about four handouts and minimal class discussion, and I cover the first new reading assignment and have an in-class quiz on Thursday. Pretty rote, pretty basic stuff. Nothing that's going to cause me to have a lot of work to do but the actual grading...and even that should go fairly quickly for their first papers, anyway.
I've been told in the past that grading goes much more smoothly and pleasantly with alcohol involved. Hahah, no, no it doesn't. Not for me. Aside from a bottle of champagne Parker gave me upon my graduation, I have no alcohol in the house anyway. I drank the last of the beer I'd had since last Thanksgiving very slowly over the course of the summer, and I'd like to save the bottle of champagne for when Daisy comes down, to celebrate our anniversary.
Daisy and I have been slowly, sloooooowly working on our wedding planning. In the past few weeks, I've made a semi-finalized guest/invite list, we've settled on our traditional "first dance" song (something that frustrated us both to no end) and we've been putting together the playlist for the iPod-like-device we'll use for the music at the reception. We're trying to figure out the logistics for a lot of different little things, such as when guests/family from out of town will arrive and what they will be fed, when we're planning the rehearsal dinner/after-wedding brunch/etc, how we're going to cater the event (since Daisy has decreed that all food at the reception will be vegan no matter what), and so on.
"How do you want to go about the post-wedding brunch the next day?" she asked me.
"Say what?"
"The post-wedding brunch, where close friends and family come and eat and we open up all of our wedding gifts."
"...what?"
I'd never heard of this. I've never been to a post-wedding brunch before, and didn't know they existed. Furthermore, at every wedding I have ever been to, the bride and groom have opened their gifts in front of everyone during the reception -- or gifts in the form of cash in envelopes, not physical gifts, were what was given. Some weddings had a mixture of both, but I will say that every wedding I've been to has had some sort of gift-opening procedure during the reception. Every one of them.
"If people are getting gifts for us," I said, "which, as you know, I really don't think is necessary anyhow, if we open them at the reception and personally thank the gifters, it saves us from needing to write thank-you notes. I thought that's why people did that."
Daisy had no clue what I was talking about; she seemed mystified that this sort of thing does actually happen, and happens pretty frequently.
"No," she said, "it's customary to either open gifts in private or at a post-wedding brunch the next day. Really, it is. Look at this."
She then sent me this photo, screencapped with her phone from some website:
I also think it's hilarious that the word "honeymoon" is mentioned.
"I mean, it doesn't matter to me at all either way," I added, "but if we're not going to open them at the reception in front of everyone, I'd much rather just do it in private on our own."
I say this because, despite the fact that we do have a wedding registry on Amazon with some things on it that would be nice to have, I would much, much rather just have people give us envelopes of cash instead. Receiving an appliance for the kitchen, while nice, doesn't pay the bills or let us recoup some of the exorbitant costs of everything we'll need to make the wedding happen in the first place. Besides, if we get gifts and decide to open them in private on our own, the next week after our wedding is like a second Christmas for the year.
I also say this because I'm an evil, evil person, and if we're not opening gifts in front of everyone at the reception I'd rather just do it at home in private, since my goal in doing it at the reception would be to make everyone envious and jealous. Yeah. These are the thoughts going through my head.
"I'll do the thank-you notes if you want," Daisy told me. "You won't have to worry about that."
"Good," I said, "because there will be so many people there who I don't know at all and have never met before, and I won't be able to keep track of all of them or what they give us, if anything."
This is true; as mentioned before, Daisy easily has 3X, if not more, people coming to the wedding on her side than I have on mine. My guest list will be about fifteen or so friends from the department or around the area, my Raiding Party (five more people), and my parents. That's it. No, seriously. I have roughly forty people who will show up, if that many. She has close to eighty that she's inviting, whether they show up or not.
I'm planning to send out the "save the date" notes in my Christmas cards this year; I'll have two different versions of it, actually -- one with "formal invitation to follow" written at the bottom and the other without that little line. The one with the invitation line will be sent to everyone on my cards list who will actually be invited personally to the wedding, whether they show up or not, and yes, a formal invitation will eventually follow to them. The one without that line will be sent to everyone who I know, even if I wanted them to be there, will never in a million years fly to Omaha for the wedding, and the included announcement is basically an announcement that will tell them "Oh, Brandon's getting married? Better send him some money." That's the one that will go out to most of my family and family friends who in no way, shape, or form would be interested in coming to, and/or would not be physically able to attend, the wedding. It's pretty similar to my graduation announcement in that respect. This way, nobody gets left out, everybody knows about the wedding, and we only have to make and send invitations to the people who will actually bother to attend -- thus saving us money. I'll give Daisy the PDF files for each of the announcements, and she'll be able to do the same with her own Christmas cards this year if she so chooses. I found this to be a pretty ingenious idea, and Daisy thought it was a good idea to do it with the Christmas cards as well.
So, I've got all of this going for me, at least. On that note, I shall eat, watch a bit of the Steelers game, and go to bed.
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