Sleep Fails and Sweet Treats

Fall semester: day twenty-seven

I really did want to stay awake this afternoon when I got home from work/school, really I did. I tried hard to do so. I drank coffee. I ate. I did some things around the house. Still, by 4PM or so, I was falling asleep at my desk. Because of this, I went to the trusty air mattress I have in the spare room (a mattress I've been napping/sleeping on more and more often during the week, now that I've gotten used to it and can be comfortable on it) and summarily passed out.

I slept my fill, as they say. When I awoke, it was very dark. This was a good thing. I was no longer tired at all, so I'd assumed that it was around midnight, 1, 2, something around there. So, after laying there for a little while to see if I was able to go back to sleep (I wasn't), I got up and went out into the kitchen.

...where I learned that it wasn't the middle of the night, it was 9:30PM. I had slept for a little more than five hours. Total. Sleep fail.

Mind you, this is about the amount of sleep I get any other given school night, so I guess it balances out. I just got it at a different time tonight. It'll probably mess with me in a minor way, as I have a different school schedule tomorrow and probably won't get to go back to bed until I get home tomorrow night -- roughly 23 hours from now.

My Wednesdays are weird, folks. I don't have my first class until 1:30, then have office hours, then have my second class from 7:05-9:45PM. Normally, this means I don't have to get up early or leave the house early if I don't want to, and I've been arriving on campus between 10 and 11:30 on most Wednesdays. The only problem with that is the fact that it's nigh-impossible to find a parking spot when I get there at those times, and I'll often drive around the lots for 20 minutes or more, wasting gas while doing so, before I can find one to slip into -- at which point my car has been creeping slowly around the parking lot for so long that the engine tries to stall out on me (because of the spark plugs) as I pull into a spot. No fun.

Because of this, I've decided that most of the time now I'm just going to get up at 5 on Wednesdays as well and go in at my "normal time," even though I don't teach and don't have class until 1:30, to not only get in there and get a parking spot early, but to get stuff done around the office that I normally would be unable to do at home (making copies, reading without being distracted by the TV or computer, etc). It'll also help me branch out a bit in the "socialization" department, as I don't really get to see a lot of my friends when I'm just on campus for class. The only exception to this will be those Wednesday mornings when I really do need that extra few hours of sleep I'd get by sleeping in until 8 or 9, but as I barely sleep as it is, I don't necessarily see this as a cause for concern. It's worth it to me to go in early to get a prime parking spot and to get stuff done around the office; a little more sleep deprivation I can deal with. After all, I do have coffee, and I really only work a three-day week.

Today in my classes was interesting; I detailed the new workshop overhaul that I'll have to do in there, as the original plan my supervisor and I had isn't really feasible for classes of my size (15 and 18, respectively, when the original workshop plans were for 8-12 students per class, max). The kids seemed to respond well to it; almost all of them got a free pass of points for this past week's workshop as well (barring those who didn't give me a draft and/or were absent, of course). My classes are becoming more cohesive, more organized, and have been pretty on-the-ball with most things. I'm proud of that, seeing as I've never taught the Science/Engineering 102 class before and am basically winging it as I go along based on lesson plans, readings, and notes that my supervisor used last semester when she herself taught the class (for the first, and only other, time it's been offered). I collect their first big papers of the semester on Thursday, and start Unit 2 that day as well. It moves fast; I've got a little more than two months to teach and assign them two more papers, collect and grade them, and prepare them for the final exam. There's a lot of work to do in those two months, but thankfully it's all pretty well-structured with some wiggle room for extraneous stuff like a library instruction day, a conference week, etc. I'm having fun, too -- it's classes like these which remind me why I love teaching.

The rest of my day was interesting enough, as well -- I worked the EGSA book sale tables in the student union after I finished teaching my classes this afternoon. I was originally only supposed to work from 12-1, but for the 1PM hour the only person who was there was Rae, and I didn't want to leave her there all alone, so I stayed an extra hour until 2PM to help and to offer some companionship. It wasn't as if I had anything else to do (well, I did, but nothing pressing that couldn't wait an hour, of course). As Rae is one of my friends in the department I am quite grateful to have in my life on a daily basis -- and one of a small number, to be sure -- I also would have felt extremely guilty had I not stayed to help. I'm glad I did. I always have the most engrossing, amusing conversations with her.

After our relief arrived at 2PM, I hopped into the Monte Carlo and rocketed back to Newton, stopping at Walmart on the way home to pick up "treats" for our Poetry Workshop class.

I'm not sure I've ever explained the concept of "treats" in that class fully here in this blog. It was a weekly tradition started by our esteemed former professor (a professor who now has a very tastefully-rendered title of "Professor Poet Extraordinaire" engraved under his nametag on his office door) for our workshop classes, which were customarily held during the evening hours. Since classes would run from 7:05-9:45, none of us would usually be home for "dinner" with our respective "families" (and for some/most of us, of course, I use both of those terms loosely), he started the tradition of, every week, someone volunteering to bring in food/dinner/treats for everyone to eat. Everyone in class did it at least once, including him, and the food would range from home-cooked meals to chips and salsa, delivered pizzas or subs, or cookies/baked goods. It always varied week to week.

Now that we have a new poetry professor, yet still have the same class time, our new professor decided we should continue that tradition, and throughout the semester we've all been bringing foods/treats as per the usual -- though this time around we have a schedule to follow, and we picked our "date" for treats on the first day of class by signing a sheet and making a note of it in our individual day planners. This week it's my turn, so I needed to stop on the way home this afternoon to pick something up.

Truthfully, I had no clue what I was going to bring. I don't generally plan this stuff out ahead of time, and all the other times I was responsible for treats in the past, I had the former girlfriend around to offer suggestions and ideas. Now, barring that, I was left on my own to figure something out. So, when I walked into Walmart this afternoon, I had but three possible ideas of things to bring/do:


1. Get a simple veggie or cheese/crackers tray and call it done, despite the fact that I eat like a rabbit already when I'm at home, so a veggie tray would be somewhat unappetizing to me, and Rae brought a cheese/crackers tray in a few weeks ago.

2. Buy a cake mix for a buck and bake a cake.

3. Get a few packages of cookies/crackers and some sodas for everyone.


I was almost sold on the cake idea until I realized that would entail purchasing eggs and/or milk and oil as well, none of which I keep on hand in the house. I keep cooking oil in the house, but it's usually corn or peanut oil to fry things in, I never eat eggs (so I never have any), and I usually have only a 1/2 or 1/4 gallon of milk in the house if any at all. I also didn't want to mess with baking a cake, to be honest, because if something went wrong, well, I'd have to go back out and get a replacement set of treats.

I dismissed the veggie tray/crackers and cheese tray idea outright when I saw that Walmart wanted $10 for a cheese and crackers tray, and $12 for a veggie tray big enough to feed the entire class.

So, I was left with the cookies/crackers/soda idea, and was pretty much settled on that, when I noticed something that was altogether unexpected...it's fall now. What does Walmart put on sale very early every fall? Halloween candy. A ton of it. I walked into a huuuuge display of massive bags of Halloween candy, some of them $6-8 each just because they were so large.

And so, it was settled. I got two big bags of Halloween candy -- one containing three bags' worth of fun-size 3 Musketeers, Snickers, and Milky Way bars, and the other containing a huge mix of things from Sugar Daddy pops to Blow Pops and everything in between. Each bag was $6, but I didn't care because the leftovers will go into my snack drawer in the office, and will last forever. To top it off, in case some people didn't want candy, I also bought two big bags of pretzels, and two 2L bottles of soda -- Coke and Mountain Dew. I figured that would cover everyone. Nobody else ever brings any sort of drinks, and drinks are sort of needed if pretzels are involved.

So, satisfied, I purchased these things and came home.

When it comes to the Monte Carlo, it's strange; now I couldn't tell that there's anything wrong with it at all. I filled it with gas this morning at 6:30ish, dumping my last bottle of fuel injector/carb cleaner into it (as I hadn't given it any in a month or more), and as always, it drove admirably to school and back today. I checked the coolant tank when I got home, and it hadn't used any more/burned any off. I've put 75 miles on it since I last filled the coolant tank, and it hasn't burned anything off since, so now I don't know if it's actually got any major problems or not. It's left me scratching my head, frankly. Obviously, I'm still going to get it looked at/worked on, especially for the spark plugs, but as it hasn't burned off any more coolant for the past several trips to Wichita and back, my mind is at least a little more at ease about it. After all, it does run and drive quite normally, so...I'm not sure there's much else I can do for the moment. Maybe it's just really happy when it has a full tank of gas, I don't know.

The next 48 hours will be long ones for me, obviously; I have three classes to attend and one more to teach, as well as collect those aforementioned student papers, hold office hours, and do a lot of reading -- some of which I will accomplish this morning in my office when I go in there early. My weekend is shaping up to be another long one filled with work as well, as I've mentioned here numerous times. Sleep deprivation and no real free time is a bitch, folks. I'd be reading now if I knew that it wouldn't put me back to sleep -- sleep which I could use, but isn't really important in the grand scheme of things. The rest of the night will probably be spent doing laundry, taking a shower, and drinking coffee while I take care of odds-and-ends around the house before I get dressed and return to Wichita for the day. Unless I fall asleep in the office for a power nap, I don't expect to get any more rest until I return home tomorrow night, and even then I'll only be able to sleep for a short six hours at most before I have to be up and at it again for Thursday.

I'm fairly sure most of you don't envy my life, or my sleep schedule, but it's what I have to endure in order to continue and complete my education. At least during the fall and spring semesters, anyway.

I've given a fair amount of thought to what I'm going to do next summer for money; yes, I know, it's nine months or so away, but I still have to plan for things. Paychecks only last until the end of May, and by then I'm likely to be running out of cash again, just like I was this past summer. I'm more than likely going to volunteer to teach summer sessions, as the former girlfriend did last summer, as I may have no other real options for work unless I want to work in retail again (which, of course, I don't). Summer sessions, at least, pay rather well. It's an opportunity to make about $2k over the summer. There's also a much stronger possibility that this summer I will be working with my supervisor/the Director/another fellow student to construct a Science/Engineering 102 workbook, which should pay well, but as always that depends on the funding the department is able to allot to us for that sort of thing. No funding equals no pay/no job doing that, something I realized the hard way this past summer.

If I don't end up doing either one of those things, I could probably survive on what I will have made/saved, but that is something I'd rather not think about or do if I could avoid it, as it would mean that I'd probably run myself down to the last bit of money I have to my name. Keep in mind that if I don't work a summer job of some sort, I wouldn't be spending the gas money to drive the car a lot, though, and all I would really need would be enough money to pay for rent, food, and bills. Those are considerable expenses, but nothing totally insurmountable if I am unable to find work or work with the school in some capacity. Regardless of what else I do over the summer, I will be at least prepping one or two more books to publish and sell, and readying for my third, final year of graduate school (which means reading/studying for comps and working on my thesis as much as possible).

I also fully expect to still be single, so that doesn't even enter into the equation.

Anyway, on that note, I'm off to take care of the rest of the stuff I need to do in the middle of the night before returning to campus in the morning. Yaaaaay.