Perpetual catch-up

So not quite a week since the last post - sigh. Preparations for Christmas are underway all over the place, except of course with my courses; this makes things tricky. I have reading to do, more work to do (what would a weekend be without a paper to procrastinate?), and the mild freak-out that comes with the end of the semester. This means that those of you who normally receive Christmas cards from me, um, haven't, but I swear, I'll get to it.

Today, just as the light was fading in the evening sky, youngest helped me with the evergreen garland and lights and wreath and stuff that I put up every year on the front of the house. This requires a ladder, multiple extension cords, string, scissors, and at least three smacks in face (or head!) with any one of the following: 1) the evergreen material itself, 2) snow caked onto the evergreen because I left it outside for yesterday's blizzard, and/or 3) the lights, extension cord, or any other electrically-related item. It's up, it's all plugged in, and it looks rather sweet if I do say so myself.

Let's see, what else ... it's felt like a really long week; it's hard to remember as far back as Monday. Monday! Holy crap! Okay, Monday was the second midterm for bio, and it was, er, challenging. I felt better about how I did than on the last one, unlike every other person I've spoken to from the class, which is either good or so bad it doesn't bear thinking about. There's been a lot of rumbling about how tricky a question on drosophilia genetics was, and I vaguely recall the question but not it being remotely tricky (um, genotype for parentals when they give you phenotype, three traits, and whether or not the traits are dominant or recessive, and also given that the parents are homozygous? WTF, people? how is this tricky? Am I out of my mind?!?!). Cue the sinking feeling in the stomach.

I am nearly finished with the delicate repair of my laptop. But not quite. This involved several successive runs of Disk Doctor, the discovery of a couple of tree errors that couldn't be fixed, and then the recovery of the entire volume onto an external drive, virus check & fix & everything on said external drive, and now...I'm just waiting to steel myself for the big Wipe Everything Off Completely and Re-Install the OS.

I have completely f****d up logistics for this weekend. I really, really thought I'd made sure to purchase tickets to our annual winter outing to the theatre to NOT conflict with my neighborhood party; WRONG. I blew it. I also seem to have forgotten to do a lot of stuff.

I'm skirting how I'm doing emotionally, you'll notice. Long to do lists, la la la, oh btw Town Hall is suddenly uninhabitable, I may have to work on some semi-emergency funding crap (see?). How I'm feeling is weirdly okay. You all continue to amaze me. There are great heaps of kindness and generosity of heart and life and time and patience that everybody plops on my foolish head. I'm noticing the (mutually) attractive guys in bio lecture, talking to people generally - still flirting online, too - none of which I would have imagined myself to have the capacity to deal with even six months ago. Met a particularly cute guy (yes, yes, brainy, too, of course) online who's been keeping me more distracted than usual most of the week, who happens to have excellent taste in music & pointed me to this singer:

Sufjan Stevens. New to me; quite lovely, don't you think?

I notice that as I answer the computer's weird questions intended to figure out what I'm like, I have trouble. I keep having to stop, and ask myself, wait is that what *I* really like to do, or is that the compromise S. & I had that became one of the habits of our marriage? (e.g., Hey, wait a minute! I like to go dancing! I forgot!) In all the fussing around with what I want to DO WITH MYSELF, I have conveniently avoiding doing much thinking at all about what my heart wants, likes, or needs. Or the opposite of any of those.

So it continues to be an odd journey. Especially grateful to the men in my life who've been helpful in ways they probably don't understand. Have a good weekend, all.