Hello out there. I am still here but feeling somewhat bedraggled. It's been dreary dreary DREARY here during a time of year that always gets me down anyway. Yesterday I was looking at online classifieds and saw a job advertised in New Zealand. Wouldn't it be nice to see things peeking up out of the soil in October, instead of slimy leaves and squashed squirrels everywhere?
I don't know what it is about this town, but we always seem to have a plague of dead squirrels in the fall. The first year that we lived here, I kept waiting for a newspaper article about it. "Brain infection afflicts area squirrels, causing them to fall from trees," or something. I want to tell them, "Guys, you are squirrels. Not lemmings. You are not supposed to be plunging to your deaths here." Except (a) they're dead and (b) they're not English-speaking squirrels even before their untimely demises. So that's probably a non-starter.
Huh, I started this post with no intention of writing about dead squirrels and look at that. Give a woman a blog and there's no telling where she'll go with it.
Remember the student who challenged every single grading decision on her midterm? After a fruitless email exchange I asked the professor to review it. She re-graded it without looking at my comments -- and came up with exactly the same score. To the half-point, which is closer than I expected for an essay exam. This prompts the small and petty person inside me to say "I told you so" and "so next time don't hassle me like that" but my inner big and charitable person is sitting on my inner small and petty person so she will be quiet. Wait, is it uncharitable for my inner charitable person to sit on someone else to shut her up?
Actually, that's sort of a serious question. Did you see the column Elizabeth Foss wrote on patience? She urges us to be patient with ourselves. I have so much trouble with that. I tend to confuse "patient with myself" and "slothful." Or maybe I am just afraid that being patient with myself would prompt me to plunge headlong into sloth, like a person who thinks she's a squirrel who thinks it's a lemming. Does anybody else worry about that (probably minus the four-legged comparisons)?
Yesterday I felt like I got some flak about not wanting to work full-time next year. Today I got some flak about not wanting to homeschool next year. ("If you like to teach, why aren't you teaching your own children?") I am feeling uncertain and gloomy. If you have any encouragement or good knock-knock jokes for me, I'd be grateful.
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