Hey folks, guess what day it is?
That's right, it's...
Wait, you mean...this isn't the meaning of today? Shit. Oh well. I'm an atheist anyway.
Ahem.
My internet at home has been really buggy as of late again, what with the dropped connection issue and the like that seems to pop up every two or three months and stick around for a while. It seems, however, that recently it's been worse. Now, almost anytime I try to do something bandwidth-intensive (such as play a game on Facebook, download my podcasts for the day, or even Skype with Daisy) it will almost always drop my connection at least once, if not multiple times. It's dropped it three times already while I've been working on this post, and I'm not even really doing anything but running a game on Facebook in the background. Calling Cox (my internet provider) won't do anything -- they'll just tell me "oh, it's because you need to buy our new modem since we upgraded the lines last year!" No, that's bullshit, because my modem works perfectly fine, quickly and reliably, about 90% of the time with no issues -- it's just whenever I want to use it for a high-bandwidth application that they drop my connection. And that's total bullshit, especially as I pay $63 per month for unlimited, second-to-the-highest-tier speed and access. And I don't even use it for constant high-bandwidth applications such as Netflix or Xbox Live or anything like that -- I get podcasts, I play Facebook games, I Skype, and I blog and check my emails. Really, that's it. I do nothing else with it.
My allergies have been really bad as of late -- in the mornings when I wake up now, my eye (the one I stabbed with a pineapple) is incredibly irritated for about the first half hour I'm awake, getting all itchy/watery/painful until I wake up fully and it gets used to being open and being used. The eye itself healed fully months ago, at least to the best of my knowledge, but my allergies seriously irritate it to the point where I can't see out of it that well, my vision blurs for a few hours, and it just waters and itches like crazy when I first get up. It's possible there's a little scarring or something there that still needs to heal up that exacerbates it, but it's becoming a real pain in the ass when all I want to do is wake up and go about my day without it bothering me, as I have for the past six months now.
Tomorrow is my oldest half-sister's birthday; she'll be 23. Monday was my middle half-sister's birthday, and she turned 21. For both of them, it's their first birthday after the death of our other sister last fall, and I'm sure it weighs heavily on them. I've really not had any contact with them since then, or really anyone else on that side of the family save for an aunt or cousin or two. As you may recall, I reached out to them and told them I was here to talk to and wanted to talk to them about anything and everything if they wanted to, but never got any response from them. I want to be there for them, obviously, but I don't want to butt into their lives or bother them, so I've since left them alone. It's not my place, and I've been so far removed from that side of the family since both of my surviving sisters were toddlers that I don't expect them to consider me a priority. I'd love to invite them to my wedding, but they wouldn't know anyone and it would be incredibly awkward even if they did come, so I've basically remained silent on everything. I can't and won't do anything else that may possibly make things awkward or weird.
Overall, however, this week I'm in a happy place. Well, happy enough, anyway. So far, it's been a pretty good week. I feel mostly at peace with myself and my surroundings for once. This afternoon, I will receive seasons 3 and 4 of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in the mail, tonight and tomorrow morning I shall teach my remaining classes for the week, and this weekend I'll be grading and (hopefully) doing my taxes/paying my bills. I'm in a good place right now. I have enough money to live on, I have food in the fridge, the snow/ice is melting, and I feel calm and centered. Why do I feel calm and centered? I don't know, exactly, but it's a good feeling.
Yesterday was an interesting, albeit busy, day. I taught my morning class, then went to main campus (where I had to reschedule my HR appointment due to the tornado drill in the afternoon), dealt with the tornado drill by cramming myself into one of the downstairs lecture halls with a few friends from the department, and then went to the HR benefits meeting.
The HR benefits meeting was, basically, a sit-down, half an hour long slideshow presentation with the guy in charge of explaining to me insurance and insurance plans the university offered (three different ones, with a choice of three different providers per plan, all with different rate scales/pricing/etc). It was interesting, but mostly boring -- what it boiled down to is that I can get health/life insurance coverage for about $30 taken out of each of my paychecks, since I make so little. I have to let him know via email which one I want over the course of the next few days, and then he'll send me the paperwork, I'll e-sign it, and it'll start.
As for the summer coverage and coming back for the fall? I explained my situation to him, and of course, he understood that -- especially as an adjunct -- I don't ever know if I'm going to be able to teach the next semester or not, as it is up to open sections and availability, but I especially don't know what's going on as I still have to wait on the good word from the director on my status for this summer and fall (and if that will change or improve based on the budgets). Betting on the side of caution, it's more likely that this will be my last semester teaching at the university here than it's likely that I'll be asked to stay on in a different, higher capacity, so once I pick my plan I'm going to tell them not to bother messing with the summer coverage, as it would cost me double over the next two months and I'd probably not end up using it anyhow -- apparently my term ends on May 11, according to the insurance guy. Hey, whatever can be done can be done, and what can't, can't.
After the HR meeting I stopped at the bookstore and bought a t-shirt supporting the men's basketball team, and returned to my office, where I then graded all of my 102 students' first papers for hours on end until I was finished. That left me with about a half hour or so before I went to teach my night 011 class, so I basically vegetated and just...lounged about during that time. I needed it. I'd been proverbially running all day long at that point, and had been incredibly busy from the moment I'd left the house, with various tasks to do and manage.
Once I got to my night class, it was fairly short -- we covered a reading out of the book, and I collected their journals. The rest of the class was in-class conferences for their papers that will be due next week. Of my nineteen students, only twelve showed up. Of those twelve, only about six of them had drafts for me/their peers to look over, and the rest just left when we began conferences.
As an aside, I don't require my 011 students to conference with me on their drafts -- that's up to them. They don't lose points or anything if they don't, mainly because the conference day is set up to help them if they need it. Usually those who conference with me do better on their papers, and I enact what I call the "early turn-in rule" -- which means that if they do conference with me, and if I look their paper over and it's a passing paper as-is, I'll tell them what I'd give it then and there, and they have the opportunity to either have me record that score then or take it home to improve it between then and the due date. This benefits not only me (as it's fewer papers for me to grade overall) but benefits the students who actually understand the assignment and can write well already. There are several of those in any 011 class I teach, usually. Obviously, if the weaker writers don't do drafts and don't bring in papers for me to look over -- and just leave when the conferences begin, as is their right to do if they so choose -- that's on them. Everybody gets the same opportunities to conference with me in class. If they don't use those opportunities, oh well. I've laid out the rules and regulations of everything very clearly, so it's not my fault if they don't follow them and don't pay attention to them.
I actually had a discussion about that yesterday with the Director's wife, who runs the remedial and ESL programs at the university. I have at least a few students who failed the class automatically last night by not showing up for the fourth time -- the English department's attendance policy is quite clear in that anyone who misses more than 20% of class days will automatically fail a class. For a class that's one night a week, they can miss up to and including three days, but if they miss four they automatically fail (as four days is not only a month worth of missed classes, but it's 25% of the semester). One of the students who had missed three days showed up last night, late, didn't say a word, and left when the conferences started. Wow, that's helpful, buddy. I can't really help this fact; I also can't go to these students' dorm rooms and drag them to class or force them to do the work for the class. Again, I go back to my old adage of welcome to college, where you actually have to show up and do the work to pass a course.
Anyway. So that class was really short last night -- I'm guessing maybe forty minutes, as I only had a third of them who'd actually done what I'd asked them to. I did get several rewrites, and I have a stack of journals to grade through (again, only about half the class, roughly, turned in journals), so at least half the class gets it and is doing what I ask them to. After the class was over, I took the shuttle bus back to the parking lot where my car was, and drove home without incident -- where I ate a dinner of Boca burgers and steamed broccoli, Skyped with Daisy for a while, and went to bed well before midnight. I got up around 9:30 this morning.
Today I have to do a few student-related tasks before my class this evening, but nothing major. The Weather Channel says we're supposed to get rain/snow showers this afternoon and evening, but so far it's just mostly cloudy and it isn't doing anything. There's some snow showers up to the northwest of me, but whether they'll persist long enough to have it do anything here remains to be seen. It's 34 degrees outside here, and was almost 40 yesterday, so most of the stuff on the roads did and has melted off -- yesterday morning's drive was a hairy one to get out of my neighborhood, but after that, all roads I drove on were completely clear and dry. Upon my return home last night, the neighborhood streets (except for the ones right around my house) were mostly clear, even. That's a good thing, yes. However, if it does rain/snow mix tonight for my drive to and from West campus for my 210 class, it'll be interesting and possibly nerve-wracking depending on how nasty it gets and how quickly that nastiness piles up. Those students turn in their PSA assignments tonight and I get them started on their Resumes/Cover Letters.
I did have to get gas yesterday morning in the cold, and as expected, it was $3.45 a gallon. That's higher than it's been here in a long time, which really sucks. Because of my travel cycles, I almost always have to get gas on Tuesday mornings now. I generally put about 180 miles on the car every week, and I always fill up between 200 and 215 on my trip meter (I don't like to push it, even though I know I could get 350-400 miles on a full tank of gas in that behemoth I drive around). I could, if I wished, stop to get it on Thursday afternoon (as I return home from teaching) instead, or go out to get it over the weekend, but generally those are the busy times for the gas station and I'm lucky if I can get a spot in one of the terminals without driving around the station five times waiting for someone to pull out. Thursday afternoons, if I need to, are also now the times where I'll generally stop at Walmart on the way home to get groceries for the week, and after I do that I usually just want to come back home and be done with interacting with society for my days off. I'll probably stop there tomorrow on my way home as well, just so that I don't have to go back out this weekend for anything.
So yes, that was my day yesterday, and today I'll be taking care of the above aforementioned things as well -- I also have to get a shower, shave, and clean the cat box at some point this afternoon. Nothing else is really going on, so I expect the rest of my week to be calm, quiet, and centered.
Knock on wood, anyway.
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