The Grind

Spring semester: day thirty

Apparently the "official" snow totals are out for the area, now that the storm has rolled through and has finished. Wichita got 3.1 inches officially, which I find hard to believe as it snowed down there a lot longer than it snowed up here today/tonight, and Newton officially has 5. Which is less than I have in my driveway/yard, so something's screwy there. It's melting off a bit now in the sun, and the melting trend should continue for the rest of the week as it's only going to get warmer -- but it was still -1 this morning when I went to bed.


The university did not close. I was surprised by this, of course, since everywhere else shut down for the day. The temperature, even now, is fighting to be up into the teens for the day, and that's probably just due to the sun alone.

I sent an email out to my students last night telling them that if they did have to go out today, whether the university was open or not, if they shot me an email telling me what the road conditions were around the area (and if those road conditions were actually accurate, not them making it up to see if I'd cancel class) I'd give them five bonus points towards the grade of their papers that will be due tomorrow. It would be nice to get some sort of information on the roads instead of me just venturing out into the tundra with no warning and no clue what they're like tomorrow morning. My furnace is fighting to keep the temperature in the house even in the fifties, let alone anything warmer. It's probably in the low 50s downstairs, and that's with the furnace constantly running. It's either that or completely freeze in here.

It has been this cold, or worse, here in Kansas once or twice before since I've been living here; in my first two semesters at the university there were days where the high temperature was around 1 or 2, though those days weren't accompanied by a snowstorm the day/night before, and weren't accompanied by every school district in most of the state closing down for the day. And those days weren't in March, they were in December and January. Go on, tell me more about how climate change isn't happening. I'm all ears.

My sleep schedule is out of whack again; I won't really be able to right it until I go to bed Tuesday night after I get home, and only partially then. I've been sleeping at odd intervals for strange numbers of hours ever since I got home from classes on Thursday, and can never seem to get enough rest. I'll sleep for six or seven hours, be awake for eight or ten more, and then go back to sleep for another eight or nine. Repeat, on a cycle, for four and a half days. Never do I feel as if I am fully rested, and usually only wake up because I have to pee. True story.

This morning before I went to sleep, I watched my neighbor in the house next door to mine get stuck in the driveway at least four times trying to get out. He did, eventually, get out -- but that's how nasty the streets are here...in a nutshell, anyway. The guy with the tractor has since plowed out the sides of the streets for the mailman to be able to get in and out, but I doubt he'll plow out the driveways. I don't necessarily think I'll have any problem getting the car out in the morning. One of my students did respond to my request for road conditions, and told me that as of early this afternoon, highways are clear and dry, most main streets are cleared off, and the ones that remain slushy are "melting fast." That's a plus, at least. I know my neighborhood is going to be a nightmare to get out of in the morning, but at least I don't have to worry about possibly dying when I go to/from my classes tomorrow. No more than usual, I mean.

I have a 1PM appointment tomorrow with the benefits people in HR to talk about the insurance stuff. I really don't know what I'm going to tell them, honestly.

Hey, I work here now, yes, but I'm not paid enough for you people to take huge chunks out of my checks every month and still be able to pay my bills...and I don't know if I'm going to return in the fall yet or not, because that depends on budgeting information and funds that are completely out of my control, and information I won't have until later this month at least, so...

Et cetera. I'm sure you get the idea. Whether they will or not remains to be seen.

I have to focus, obviously, on the stuff at hand in front of me. Titan was, for most purposes, a dud of a storm here -- lots of hype and not a lot of payoff. The same isn't true back home in West Virginia, but here, I was expecting more with all of the forecasts and fear-mongering they were doling out, and was sort of expecting the university to be closed today and possibly tomorrow as well. Since none of that happened, it's just back to normal, back to the grind tomorrow, whether I like it or not.

No, I didn't do my taxes this weekend. This is, of course, a failure on my part. I cannot summon the willpower to sit down and work on them, and my anxiety about doing them is as bad as it ever was, even though I know it's not particularly difficult work to do. It's all mental -- it's something that I don't want to do but am forced to do, and something that I don't trust anyone else to do, so I'm even more forced into it. I don't like being forced into things. This also means I've basically screwed myself on time constraints for the rest of the week -- if I want to do them this week it means I'll have to do a lot of my grading and lesson planning in off-hours and strange days/times where I wouldn't normally be doing them. That also means that tomorrow is going to be even longer than usual, as I not only collect my 102 students' papers in the morning, but I have my HR appointment in the afternoon. I'll teach that morning class, collect those papers, go to main campus, go to said appointment, and then go back up to my office to grade those papers the rest of the day. I won't have a lot of free time to do much else. Then I'll teach my night class, collect their journals and rewrites (giving me even more to grade), come home, and exhaustedly pass out.

Shit, I'm tired even thinking about that, and it's not even four in the afternoon.

This morning I ordered the next two seasons of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia so that I'll have something to watch when I have meals here at home, alone with the cats. It was the highlight of my day. In the next hour or so, I need to make something to eat, ready my stuff for tomorrow, and see if Daisy is awake yet before going back to bed in order to sleep enough to slog through my day tomorrow. Ugh.