The Last Weekend of Brandon

Countdown to Spring Semester: three days

The final schedule has been released to all of us for the spring. As expected, none of my classes changed times or locations, and I now have access to all three on Banner and Blackboard. I have nine students in my 102 class, four of which I had in my 101 course last semester (and who I knew would be in my 102 this semester anyway) and I currently have eleven students registered for my 011, none of which I've had before, and eight in my 210. That's a grand total of twenty-eight students spread over three different classes. This in itself, of course, is remarkable -- I haven't had so few total students in about three years, not since spring 2011 when I had 14 students in one class and 11 in the other. I've created printable rosters for my first day of attendance for all three classes,  and I've already emailed all of my 102 students with pertinent information for Tuesday's class, letting them know about the books and approximate prices and the like.

Daisy slept until noon or so yesterday, when a squabble between the cats (fairly frequent in this household, actually) woke her up. I had been up since around 9:30 or so, and I made her breakfast and helped her gather/pack up her things before she left for home. She got back to Omaha with plenty of time to spare before she had to go to work last night -- where, apparently, she dealt with difficult and frustrated people all night long due to a host of technical issues she and her team had to work on for the duration of her shift.

Thursday was a fairly lazy day for us; it was warm, but there were high winds -- whipping winds, even, much like today -- which made it cold outside when we went to the Dollar Tree in the afternoon. Between our shopping trip to Walmart and the Dollar Tree trip, I have replenished my stock of food and supplies in the house for the foreseeable future..for the most part, anyway. In doing so I put about another $200 or so on my Discover card, but again -- as I've mentioned many times -- that cannot be avoided right now, as all of my actual money must be used to pay bills for the rest of the month. Two of those bills I paid today, actually, just to get them out of the way. I'm dreading the Discover card bill when it comes, obviously, but eh. Unless it arrives today, it won't be due until after I get paid again anyhow. I'm more concerned about the electric bill for the month, which won't arrive until sometime next week (it always comes around the 23rd or 24th, sometimes a little later).

Anyway. We made Boca burgers and a massive "veggie bake" with all sorts of vegetables, vegan Daiya cheese, and cumin. I probably ate 3/4 of it -- had a second as well as a third helping -- and there's still some left in the fridge to eat tonight or tomorrow. We also tried to watch a movie -- she picked The Butterfly Effect -- but half an hour in it became too violent and disturbing for her to watch, so I stopped it and put it away. Daisy, as you may know, can't really stomach that sort of stuff, and as I hadn't seen the movie myself in about, oh, eight years or so, I forgot how disturbing it really is. Once I cleaned up the kitchen, ran the dishwasher, and put all of the food away, we turned on the electric blanket (it got really cold last night very quickly) and went to bed.

This weekend is what I call "The Last Weekend of Brandon" because, really, it's the last weekend of fully, completely free downtime I'll have until...well, after the wedding, more than likely. Probably at least until after the wedding. Yes, I'll have some weekends where I won't have a lot to do, but they won't be true downtime/free time. Therefore, this is my last totally responsibility-free weekend for the foreseeable future that I will be both unmarried and unoccupied by work or work-related things.

And what am I doing? Why, the same thing I do every weekend, Pinky -- sit here and drink coffee in my bathrobe with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth.

I am, ironically, remarkably unprepared for the upcoming semester. I mean, usually by the weekend beforehand I have my outfits all laid out and pretty, ready to go. I usually have my satchel stocked with the books and handouts I'll need for the first day of classes so when I get up, I can grab them and go. Aside from the basic lesson plans themselves, I don't really have much else done. I've been teaching for so long at this point (entering my fifth year of it now; 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and now 2014) that most of it is like second nature. As you know, I take pride in my teaching, and I'm at ease in a classroom when many are not. Because of that I do tend to have this natural ability to "wing it" even when I don't have a lot to go on, or when lesson plans fall through. This doesn't happen a lot, mind you, but when it does I can (and will) have a "tuck and roll" backup plan I put into action.

I should spend at least some of my weekend taking care of the odds-and-ends stuff around the house that I won't really get a lot of time to do once classes start back up. I need to clean off my fan and change the furnace filters, for example -- things I've needed to do for weeks. I need to put away my laundry and clean the cat room/litter box, even though the garbage/recycling pickup will be delayed a day this week because of MLK Day. I need to shave. I need to clean my coffeemaker. Stuff like that. Little things that don't have anything to do with school, but will be things I won't have a lot of time for and/or will slip my mind once I get back to the daily grind of teaching, coming home, eating, and sleeping.

As you may know, my sleep schedule when I return to teaching for any given semester becomes a complete wreck. I've been trying to regulate it at least somewhat over the course of the past few days so that I can get into a good cycle of sleeping at night, fairly early, and getting up in the morning fairly early, but my apparent inability to stay on that pattern is what really messes with me. I almost always have insomnia during the semester at least one or two nights a week, which is why last semester I had to resort to using sleeping pills semi-frequently in order to force myself to get some real rest when I needed it and not when I wanted it -- when I wanted it, it was almost always between 1 and 4PM. I can't tell you how difficult that can sometimes be for me, especially when I'm stuck awake all night (or most of the night) when I know I have to be on campus for twelve hours straight, or more, the next day, with no opportunity to sleep before then. I credit the dollar-aisle-at-Walmart sleeping pills for helping me get through the semester without passing out during my long days of teaching/grading, and even some days I still took a nap in my office on West campus. I apparently need much more sleep than I will ever be able to get, even in my downtime, and I don't know why.

"Are you sure you want to have kids, then?" Daisy always asks me when I bring up the fact that I'm almost constantly tired to some degree or another. "Because that means getting up in the middle of the night for feedings when they cry, changing diapers, calming them down when they have nightmares at 3AM, etc."

"Yes, I'm sure," I always reply. "As for feedings, you're the one with the boobs."

"What if I pump? Will you get up in the middle of the night and give the kid a bottle?"

"Well yes, obviously. There's a good chance I'll be awake anyway."

This is true. Of course, we don't know what our financial/job/living situation will be when we have children, but if everyone else can figure out children, I don't know why we can't. We're both really intelligent people.

Anyway.

Because they've been shorthanded (one of the sister offices for the company had to reassign a bunch of employees, or something) Daisy has been getting a lot of hours at work, and many of them are overtime hours -- this means she's pulling in a substantially larger paycheck now, for the time being, than she was before. It's not glamorous work, of course, but it is good, good money for what she does, even if it means she works an extra day every week. She doesn't really mind it that much -- the financial upside is more important than the irritating downside. I feel the same way about teaching as an adjunct professor. I've been told many times (and it is, to a great extent, true) that adjuncting is little more than slave labor with no real benefits and long hours. And it is -- I don't get any automatic benefits, no sick days or vacation days (my "vacation days" are the time off between semesters, and I don't get paid for them) and I don't get paid a lot. But, I get experience to add to my CV. I get paid enough, when the paychecks roll in every two weeks, to cover my bills and my expenses, as long as said bills and expenses aren't extravagant. No, I'm not driving a new car or living in a massive mansion with a big-screen TV, but I get by just fine on teaching three classes a semester, and while it may not be completely ideal, it is for the most part at least comfortable. Yeah, I have debts. Yeah, I'll have to spend a few months paying down my credit cards again. But at least I don't have to sell my belongings (ahem, anymore) to be able to keep the lights on and feed myself and the cats. Yes, Daisy makes more than me in her job -- something like 4x more than me -- but that doesn't bother me. I know that I won't always be an adjunct professor, and when the time is right and the opportunity presents itself, I know I'll move up to something better, with a thick and glorious CV/resume to show for it. Daisy feels the same way about her current position as well, and depending on our financial and living situation after the wedding, she may be leaving her job before I leave mine.

As mentioned before, it's really windy today -- they've clocked wind gusts at 51mph here in Newton. It is, however, 55 degrees outside, and I've turned off the furnace and opened the windows to air out the house a bit while it's warm and the wind is blowing. It is cloudy, however, and this irritates the cats because the sun on the floor of my Man Cave keeps disappearing, making them shift their positions around the room almost constantly to be able to lay in it. I've had, as alluded to above, a relatively lazy day -- I've done little more than recharge/reload my mp3 player and drink coffee for the past three hours. Oh, I made my office hours sign for my door on the main campus as well. I forgot about that. I don't technically have to hold "set" office hours as a professor; only the GTAs have to do that, but I do it as a courtesy during the times I'll be on main campus simply because the department wants to know when and how often we'll all be in our offices. Nobody came to my main campus office hours once last semester, though I did have many students come to the "informal" hours I held on West campus in the corner office they stuck me in. I was only in my office twice a week last semester, on Monday/Wednesday mornings, for only a few hours at a time. This semester I'll only be on main campus once a week, on Tuesday afternoons.

On that note, I'm going to get off here now and take care of some of that "around the house" stuff. I got new toilet bowl cleaner/scrubber when I was out at the Dollar Tree, so that's the first task on my agenda. Then I'll probably shower, shave, and eat at some point. I'll update you, of course, on anything new that comes up.