I’m not Sundaying— I swear I’m really not– but man, I feel like I really let the day get away from me today. I was feeling great at about 12:30– I had about 75% of my grading done for the weekend, although no actual planning yet, and I felt like that left me in really good shape to get everything else I needed to do done. Then, somehow, lunch took two fucking hours, and while I’m intellectually certain I had to be doing other things than eating a couple of veggie burgers and some chips between 12:30 and 2:30 I will be damned if I can remember what any of those things might have been.
My son has a D&D group every Sunday from 4:00 to 6:00. As he is not the most social kid on the planet (he is great around people– better than he thinks he is, really– but in general would always prefer to be at home playing games, which I can hardly fault him for) I like to encourage anything that gets him out of the house and interacting with other human beings. That said, the absolutely lovely people who host this gaggle of sixth-graders several weekends a month live a million miles away, and it’s three hours out of every Sunday for my wife and I as well since returning home between dropping him off and picking him back up is stupid. Anyway, by the time I got out of the shower (that’s correct, I ate lunch before showering) it was time to go, and then I had to finish the grading and the planning, and oh right I owe the Internet a blog post, and now it’s 8:04 and I cannot shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten something important that I had planned to do today.
I mean, the lawn didn’t get mowed, but I didn’t want to mow the lawn, so whatever.
Oh, and I lost half an hour to trying to buy a Roblox gift card with the generic Visa gift card that he got for his birthday this weekend, and that type of fuckery generally makes me want to punch things.
The good news is that there’s no reason– he said— why this shouldn’t be a relatively easy week at work, and last week was dandy. The early in the year exhaustion ought to be starting to abate this week too. So for the most part, things are looking up, at least until I realize I forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever it was. Looking forward to that.
I’ve been in this crabby, sluggish mood all day, and the steak and mashed potatoes my wife just made for dinner has helped with the crabby a little but but definitely has not helped with the sluggishness. I’ve spent most of the day reading, which is generally good, and I’m enjoying the book I’m reading, but … just … blech.
It’s Sunday, if it wasn’t perfectly clear.
In addition to reading, I’ve dedicated some time to job applications. I’ve done … maybe a dozen since the snow days started? I’m mostly doing moonshot type of jobs right now, putting ludicrously high amounts of money as my expected salary just to see if I get it, that sort of thing. I also started a trick today with several of the applications: most of these places will reject you before a human being ever looks at your resume if their software doesn’t find the keywords it’s looking for, so I’ve been taking the entire job description, condensing it to one-point text, turning it white, and sticking it at the end of my resume. The algorithm will find whatever words it’s looking for, but if the resume is printed it won’t be there for humans to see. We’ll see if I feel like it made any difference; if I get more emails from people for this round that might have had something to do with it.
(Does anybody out there do hiring? How important are cover letters? How much individual legwork should I be putting into each of these applications?)
Anyway, I’m going to put together tomorrow’s assignments for my kids– at this point I’m pretty sure there’s going to be school tomorrow– and then I’m going to go finish that book. No recording today, I think. How was y’all’s weekends?
…never give them two posts on a Saturday. It inevitably leads to a Sunday in which I’m either too busy or too stressed out to write anything. Today was “too busy,” I think; I actually got a fair amount of stuff done around the house, so that was good, but none of it involved, like, words.
Go give somebody a hug; I’ve got to go over my kid’s homework with him.
I’m Sundaying hard today– there’s lots to do, but it’s not getting done as efficiently as it should be because I’m too busy stressing about the fact that I have to go back to work tomorrow. I have a four-day weekend and a Wednesday out-of-building training in October, so I’m trying my damnedest to get through September without deliberately taking a day off after missing a couple in August. That said, I’m really jonesing for a mental health day right now. My student observer starts this week, so I need the kids focused and ready when he comes in; no days off for me this week unless something really stupid happens.
Now if I could just accomplish something. I have, like, a whole list right here, and my wife’s already been out to accomplish shit and been back again, so I have some catching up to do. I guess I’ll cross “write a blog post” off the list and go vacuum something.
I mowed the lawn this morning, for the first time in … um … a while, after looking at it the other day and realizing that it really was starting to look like the house had maybe been abandoned. My lawn right now is a weird mix of 1) dead, yellow grass, because it hasn’t been raining much; 2) weeds, up to two feet tall in one specific place, because apparently weeds don’t require nutrients to grow, and 3) the occasional patch that apparently gets a better mix of sun and shade and needed cutting but wasn’t necessarily looking completely out of control. But there are definitely patches where nothing has grown in weeks, meaning that about half the time it was super obvious where I’d mown and where I hadn’t and the other half I was basically trying to find the tracks the mower had left in the dead grass.
9 years and counting in this house, and I still hate my lawn.
And then Dad came over, and he and the boy went swimming, and we had pizza for dinner, and now I’m trying my best to not remember that I actually have a small amount of grading and lesson planning to get done tonight, because this is officially the first Sunday of the school year and Sunday is Grading Day again. There’s nothing that will take too long– one advantage of e-learning is that I can justify doing everything electronically and mostly multiple choice, so the computer can do the grading for me and I just have to record it– but I’m still vaguely resentful of the entire process.
Oh, and I got manipulated into volunteering (that’s a thing) to be team leader this year, which comes with more responsibility and zero additional pay, so that’s an extra meeting this week. I think I can dodge some professional development for it, though, which is probably a net positive.
I’m still probably gonna go play video games after I finish this.
I realized a couple of days ago that I could read the titles on my bookshelves while sitting in my recliner in the living room. While yesterday specifically was definitely rough, I’m definitely officially healing up now, and I haven’t had much cause to complain about my vision at all for at least a week or so. The surgery was a month and three days ago, and I had a one-month follow-up last week and the same doctor who was concerned about my eyes being too dry last time proclaimed me “much better” and “healing perfectly” this time. My understanding is that nearsightedness takes a little longer to heal than farsightedness does, so I expect more improvement over the next few weeks, but honestly if it were to stabilize right around where it is I think I’d be pretty damn happy. Seriously, if you’ve ever considered this and you have the money I’d jump at it; if you’re local enough to use the same folks I did, let me know, as they sent me a couple of $500 off coupons that don’t have expiration dates on them.
I’ve been pretty good this year about keeping on top of my grading, but the last couple of weeks I’ve fallen off the horse a bit. I worked through about five inches of assignments today but that’s probably only about a week’s worth; there’s still another week waiting for me, and I’m going to have to suck it up and get some grading done during the week this week.
In lieu of actual Sunday content, please view this entertaining video:
…and not even much of one, I’ll admit, but these two songs have been getting a hell of a lot of play lately so let’s all enjoy them together. I took my wife out for Chinese tonight and then went and bought books rather than worrying about blogging, so this is what you get. 🙂
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