Heating

Fall semester: day forty-three

With "Fall Break" now over, we are now over the hump and are more than halfway through the semester. The semester itself generally consists of about eighty days, including any breaks and finals week. Depending on the year and the way the days fall, some semesters have a few less, some a few more. I'm not exactly sure how the university organizes the calendar.

As for my own break? It was...quiet. Really quiet.

When I have time off that's free-and-clear, I tend to use that time. Or, at the very least, I tend to appreciate it more. This is the first true "time off" I've had where responsibilities and other pressing issues weren't weighing me down since early August. It was time I was able to sleep -- I averaged nine or ten hours a night, including last night. It was time I was able to cook. It was time I was able to take care of the chores around the house, and do a little shopping here and there. It was time I desperately needed to be able to decompress, because the next several days are not going to be pleasant ones.

My week is cut in half, obviously, due to the break; I'm starting on a Wednesday instead of a Monday. This does, however, make everything a bit more difficult for me overall. I am collecting papers today in my 011 class, and tomorrow in my 101 class. This isn't a huge issue, but it will ensure that this weekend is going to be a long one as I'll have to grade through all of those. Tomorrow, of course, I teach my first 210 night class on West campus, and won't be getting home until close to 11PM. I've already burned through one instruction day I could've had in there because of all of the final/midterm exam issues those students had, so when we arrive in there tomorrow night it's like jumping out of a moving car and hitting the ground running. There's an assignment due in that class at every meeting for the next three classes in a row after tomorrow. Because I'll have to go to bed early tonight in order to be able to get enough sleep to stay awake until 11PM tomorrow night, possibly later (I need to go to Walmart on my way home tomorrow night if possible, since I'll be tired/hungry and out of several things I need), I won't be able to start grading through those 011 papers until at least Friday. My 101's papers I should be able to get through most of tomorrow between my classes, even if it means I'm sitting there alone in the lobby on West campus grading them one after another. It'll let me fill some of that time I need to fill. And, generally, my 101s are pretty bright students; I doubt I'll have to mark their papers up like crazy, or anything.

My weekend is a little more nebulous; I'll be spending a big chunk of it grading those 011 papers and preparing lessons/reading chapters to cover for my 210 students. There's not really a lot I can do personally to be able to avoid that. Work has to be done. My time with Daisy is already taking a hit from my "new" schedule; two of the days she's off every week, I'm stuck on campus out-of-contact with her for more than twelve hours at a time, and when I get home I will almost immediately have to go to bed. Tuesdays are going to suck -- getting home at around 11PM only to have to get back up at 5AM the next morning to go back to main campus. Thursday nights, at least, if I have energy left at the end of the week, I'll be able to stay awake to talk to her for a while.

As you know, I've done schedules like this before. My body gets used to them after a few weeks. Luckily, a few weeks seem to be all that's really left in the semester. A good chunk of November isn't even spent in class due to Thanksgiving, and then once we come back, it's December and the last week of classes.

This morning is the coldest morning of the fall thus far; right now, at 6AM, it's 39 degrees and feels like it. We've not set any low temperature records or anything, but it's not exactly the warmest weather outside. Upon getting up, I had to turn on the furnace for the first time this year. It did not take long to warm up the house, which is good. It never does. My house tends to stay pretty warm in the winter as long as I set the thermostat to a reasonable temperature (usually about 64 or so). After a long, hot shower this morning I was able to feel like somewhat less of a human popsicle.

The "storms" that were supposed to roll through and be "severe" on Monday, of course, didn't happen. We got some good, soaking rain for about two or three hours, and that's it. The rain was just enough to prevent me from being able to mow the grass either Monday or yesterday; if it's not raining and not forty degrees this weekend, I need to mow it one last time then just to get it done with and out of the way. Add that to my list of "other shit to do," I suppose.

All of my bills are paid except for my Citi Card bill, which isn't due for almost three weeks. I can pay it now, of course, but I haven't yet. Most of my paycheck from Friday went into paying the bills I already had then, including paying off my other credit card, and getting some groceries and supplies via Walmart and Amazon. As I've probably mentioned before, I need to pay off my Citi Card completely by the end of November at the latest, as I put my car insurance on it. My car insurance comes due in December, and putting that on there takes up more than half the card's available balance.

Daisy asked me a few nights ago about how much I would be able to take care of some things for the wedding, knowing my financial situation and need to live paycheck-to-paycheck most of the time. I told her that I still have a Discover card I've never used, and it has a $2500 limit. It's been my "emergency" card, in case something big-time-bad happens to the car or something along those lines, but if I can use it and pay it off slowly, we've got that as a bit of a cushion in case we find ourselves in a jam, or in case she needs me to cover something somewhat expensive. As you may know, we're trying to pay for everything involving the actual wedding ourselves, and were trying to keep it all as inexpensive as possible. We don't want to be a burden on anyone else, and we're simple people anyhow. We're not going to run ourselves into extreme debt with the wedding; we'd prefer, since both of us have student loans to pay back, that we don't run ourselves into debt at all.

My eye is much better, or at least it seems better. After two weeks, my vision is slowly starting to return to what I would call "almost normal." Almost. Yes, it's still blurry, but every few days it seems to be a little less so. I think, anyway. My fall allergies mess with it a lot, and when I'm tired I find it hard to keep it focused and comfortable without aching (both my eyes ache now when I'm tired, since the good one compensates for the blurry one when I need to rest), but I think it's slowly getting better. It may take a month or three to return to complete normalcy. My mother reiterated that I should go to a doctor, but again, there's really nothing an eye doctor can do but tell me to let it heal, or to try to force me to wear the patch when I can't do so and still be able to go about my life and my job. It just has to heal up. If it's not going to heal any more than it has, oh well -- so my left eye will be a little blurry for the rest of my life. Again, short of, well, future LASIK or something like that, I can't do anything about it. My life doesn't just screech to a halt; I have to live with it.

Because it's cold this morning, I've broken out my first button-up, long-sleeved "dressy-ish" shirt this semester (purchased at Walmart, on clearance, for $1), which I've coupled with a pair of Haggar slacks I purchased for a quarter at the Goodwill in Omaha over the summer. I'm breaking out the wool peacoat for the first time this fall as well. I'm sure I more than likely won't need it after, say, 11AM, but as it's really effing cold right now, I certainly need it now. This is the dressiest I've looked all semester, but it's not like I can help that, really -- all of my winter clothes, save for my hoodies and some of my cargo pants, are "dressy." They just are. I could probably wear a tie with this shirt if I wanted to, but...me? In a tie? Who are you kidding?

So that's what's going on in my life right now. Back to the grind today, back to a few days of sleep deprivation and, as my friend Jae always called it, "coffee abuse."