Swamped

I came home Thursday afternoon from teaching, ate a quick lunch (even though I'm still somewhat suffering from acid reflux/heartburn issues) and crashed. I slept so hard and so deeply that when I awoke around 9PM and it was dark, I didn't remember what day it was, what time of day it was, or what I'd been doing before I went to sleep or needed to do once I got up. I was in, ahem, panic mode. Then it slowly came back to me. Today is Thursday, right? I think? Yeah. It's Thursday. I taught this morning. I collected my students' Proposals and Annotated Bibliographies, and came home and went to bed. 

I'm not making this up; these were my actual thought processes. I was disoriented and jarred. I've been so stressed out and worn down that -- even though comps are behind me now and done with, and have been for two weeks -- I can't fully recover and get my body and mental state back to completely normal. Thus, whenever I sleep I generally don't have a problem falling asleep, but it's a problem with staying asleep and not waking up in a panic or a jumble and thinking I am automatically shirking responsibilities somehow. Over the past three months I wired my brain to immediately start processing things when I wake up on school days, or even on days I'm off, when I had pressing things to do (such as reading/studying hundreds of pages a day for comps). Now, even after all of that stuff is mostly over, I still wake up in a panic sometimes -- oh gods, what time is it, what day is it, did I oversleep? Should I be teaching right now? Why am I not studying? Etc. And it does take a minute or three to completely orient myself and allow my memory to come back -- but by that time, I'm fully awake and can't sleep again. That, dear reader, is stress, and the after-effects of the stress I was under for a long, long time. Now, mind you, I am still under stress, but it is nowhere near the amount I was under leading up to comps. I still have daily tasks that are time-consuming; I still have to grade student papers, I still have to pay bills, do laundry and take care of errands/shopping, and make sure I can stay on top of everything so that I don't fall behind.

Through all of this of course, while I do sleep, I've been sleeping shittily. I'll sleep for five or six hours at a time at most, regardless of how tired I am, before waking up in the aforementioned fashion above. It is this and the constant bombardment by my allergies that is making me incredibly tired and fairly antisocial most of the time. I feel sluggish and not all "with it" a fair amount of the time I'm awake, and I know my allergies are a big part of it. Thursday was April 18, and when I went to teach my class at 9:30 AM, it was snowing. Yes, snowing.


Go home, Winter. You're drunk.

Tonight, in the overnight hours, it's 57, which is a more reasonable, expected low temperature for Kansas two-thirds of the way through April. However, this means nothing -- even though it's supposed to be relatively warm tomorrow and Monday (50s, 60s-ish), Tuesday it's supposed to be 39 for a high, below freezing at night, and it's supposed to rain/sleet/snow all day.

Tuesday is April 23. WTF.

Again, can we get an actual spring, please? I don't remember any year I've been alive where it's been snowing into late April and where I haven't been wearing shorts and flip-flops everywhere for weeks by this time. None of this makes any damned sense. I don't remember any April on record where we've been under freeze warnings at night in the two weeks or so leading up to the end of the semester. It's tornado season, and while we'll occasionally get a good, strong thunderstorm for a little while, maybe with just a bit of hail, it's too cold for tornadoes to happen. For those, you actually need some warm air.

Not that I want tornadoes, mind you, I'm just saying.

The drain is still backing up into my basement on occasion, and it is doing it now sometimes even when I shower (which isn't a good thing, of course). There is no real rhyme or reason to it -- sometimes it'll be just fine, others it'll back up and overflow under my washer. Tomorrow or Monday I plan to go out and do a little shopping for some Drano or something of that nature (I have to get stamps anyway), and the next time I shower, I plan to pour a bottle or two of it down the drain when I let the shower drain out, also pouring another bottle down the downstairs drain to see if it helps. What I do know is that until recently, the shower never made it back up, only the washer, so if there's something lodged in there or there's a clog somewhere in the line, it's somewhere out past where the shower drain meets up with the washer drain. Again, I couldn't tell you what it is, as if it were an actual big clog somewhere in the works, it would be draining slowly (or not at all) all the time, and not just occasionally. As I've run several large loads of laundry a day sometimes in addition to taking a shower and/or running the dishwasher with no issues, I honestly cannot tell you what the hell is down there or out there. Maybe a few bottles of Drano will clear out whatever it is -- it's either that or call my landlord and tell him to get someone to snake all the pipes in the house (or the main drainage line), which would not only be expensive for him but probably, overall, unnecessary. I've been reading up on a lot of home-remedies for clogs; some of them are as simple as pouring baking soda and vinegar down your drain or emptying a two-liter of Coca-Cola down it, as it's acidic enough on its own to break through most stuff, in addition to the carbonation. There's little else I can do for the moment, and as long as it doesn't get really bad, if it requires the full work-up it may have to wait until after graduation before I can really have the time to do anything about it like call the landlord or get the pipes snaked to see what the problem is. Until then I sort of have to keep an eye on things and only use water/do laundry when absolutely necessary, lest I make any problems worse.

Daisy is having a hard week at work -- she's management at her job, and it's her duty to work what's called "tickets," which is a short way of saying that she's doing work that she hasn't necessarily been properly trained how to do, and is really the responsibility of people she's supposed to be managing. However, when they're swamped, she has little choice in the matter and must help out in whatever way she can. Well, this week they're really swamped, which means that when she's at work in the overnight hours -- when we'd usually be able to chat via Facebook occasionally -- she's been very silent because she's busting her ass all night long on her shift. Of course, as you know, the nights she's at work are the nights when I'm off from school, so we maybe get to Skype, briefly, an hour per night -- maybe two if she gets up early enough -- before she must leave for work, whether either of us like it or not. As much as we both generally dislike this, we know it's necessary; she's working to pay her bills as much as I am working to pay mine, and when she's at work I usually have pretty pressing matters to take care of as well. For example, last night I was grading all of my students' aforementioned Proposals and Annotated Bibliographies in preparation for their final paper, which will come in on the last day of class in a little over two weeks. Tonight I did the dishes and ran a load of laundry (which, of course, I had to keep stopping over and over so that it didn't overflow the downstairs drain).

Update: I think I have found the drain problem. There is a clog, somewhere, in the downstairs part of the main line.

Where this clog is, I don't know. And I know that it's only a partial clog, as evidenced by the fact that the household drains will run empty and the drain under the washer will as well.

Here's what I do know, and what I found out tonight -- there's a secondary overflow drain in the downstairs bathroom (read: cat room) closet, which I didn't know about before. I found this out when, as a test, I flushed the toilet upstairs and drained the sink of its dirty dishwater at the same time, which caused said drain to gurgle and overflow all over the bathroom floor -- requiring me, once more, to use every towel I had to clean up the mess (and basically scrub the floor of the cat room clean). I also know that all of the upstairs drains, including the tub and sinks, drain out very quickly and perfectly fine, not slowly at all, so the clog is somewhere between that bottom, previously unknown drain, and where the water exits the house into the waste system. Bingo. Now I know exactly where to pour the foaming pipe snakes once I get them -- one down the drain under the washer, and if that doesn't fix it, another down that previously unknown drain (and repeat ad nauseum). The overflow drain under the washer must connect up with that secondary drain, as otherwise it wouldn't have overflowed it, and the one under the washer overflows first. And, as it is (apparently) not going to go away on its own this time, I have a new mission for tomorrow. I'd do it tonight; go out and get the stuff now, deal with it now, etc, but I don't plan to run any more water tonight and it's three in the morning -- I'm tired. And, before I tackle it, I'd like to let any remaining water in the system drain out first. Whenever I awaken tomorrow, regardless of when that may be, I'll be going to Walmart and/or Dillons to stock up on drain-clearing supplies of all sorts, and we'll see who wins this battle.

I've got two more days off, plumbing system -- time for you to submit to your master.

Shopping list: at least four bottles of foaming pipe snake, two 2L bottles of Coca-Cola, a gallon of vinegar, the biggest box of baking soda I can find, a gallon of bleach, and about four or five more thick towels. Your move.

Anyway.

I have still yet to receive my comps results; the MFA director said that we should get an official letter on or around April 22; well, the 22nd is Monday, and I'm not on campus on Monday. The department is certainly taking its sweet time on that, as was told to us they may, but it's still damned peculiar. There is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, apparently, that we may not be privy to as simple students and GTAs. What I do know is that it's never taken this long before to receive comps results back -- and, as previously mentioned, it's not just me but all of us who took them. The MAs, including Parker, took their own comps (or at least the first question of theirs, since the MAs can split theirs up) on Friday -- and I absolutely expected to have our results back before the MAs took theirs. Hell, I was expecting, really, to have my results back almost two weeks ago now, but then again I should have learned by this point to lower my expectations on almost everything in life.

My next two or three weeks are going to be crazy busy, both at home and at school. Aside from the plumbing stuff, I do have to spend an inordinate amount of time grading papers, as next week I get workshop copies during conferences and the week after that I will be grading final papers before the exit exam -- which of course, I will also have to grade. While I was able to vacuum the house on Friday, I still have to clean the kitchen and scrub down the upstairs bathroom (the latter of which I've been putting off mainly because of the drainage issues), and once I do figure out the drains I have another load of sopping wet towels to wash now as well in the washing machine, something that'll just have to wait -- as much as I hate to leave dirty, wet towels in the washer due to possible mold/mildew forming on or in them -- until a day or two from now, if not longer. I can't really avoid that. Not to mention that I need to find a day/time to go over to the bookstore on campus and get my cap and gown in order to walk in the graduation ceremony, print and mail out (once I get stamps and my comps results) my graduation announcements, and take care of all sorts of other myriad issues that can, and probably will, pop up between now and May 17th. Daisy mentioned that she's going to get an oil change in her car soon, which reminded me that I need one in the Monte Carlo pretty soon as well, if I'm not already overdue for one. I also need to look for jobs and to rebuild/revise my CV so that I can start applying to different places. And, to top everything else off, once it gets warm enough and stays that way, I need to start mowing the grass again, as it's growing well (but every three days it drops below freezing and/or snows).

See, despite the amount of "free time" I supposedly have, there's a lot of things that need to be done which continually fill that time. No wonder I haven't been sleeping well or sleeping for long stretches of time -- all of this stuff is continually running through my mind, and I have to section off hours and days to deal with it all. The plumbing issue is just the first and most important of that stuff right now, and the one that I have to take care of so that I'm not continually freaking out about it.