In which I stay in my square

Be it known that I managed to accomplish nearly all of the tasks on my list yesterday– and the one that I didn’t get to, the beta read, is being worked on right now. Amazingly, this means that I not only posted to Patreon for the first time in a while but that I wrote fiction. I actually have some decent ideas rattling around right now, and I just need the wherewithal to actually get them set to screen.

I made it official today that I plan on returning to my current job and my current building next year, meaning that for the first time in a while I will hold the same teaching position for two years in succession. For most of the year I was planning on taking at least some time to look around for a new job this summer in a sort of relaxed, no-big-deal, no-panic sort of way, but at this point everything else in the world is so screwed up that I’m going to be happy to have something secure and not fuck around with it. It’s always possible that something is going to magically drop into my lap, but that’s going to be what it takes for me to not be back teaching 8th grade math again next year.

Speaking of teaching, I’m experimenting with office hours again, where I basically post a link to a Meet video chat on my Google Classroom and then sit in front of the computer for an hour to see if anyone comes to talk to me. So far in about three hours of sessions I’ve had one kid that popped in for maybe two minutes and two kids who were in the room just long enough for me to get the notification and then bailed. So … fuck it, I’m trying, right? We’ll see if today’s afternoon session goes any better; if nothing else, it’s forcing me to be in front of the computer, which means that I’m mostly listening to music, reading comic books, and getting work done. There are worse ways to spend my afternoons.

Is it a bad idea to admit that the election results in Wisconsin yesterday give me a little bit of hope for this fall? It’s a bad idea, isn’t it? I won’t say it.

2:11 PM, Tuesday April 14th: 584,073 confirmed cases and 24,485 Americans dead.