Fun fun fun

I wanted to write a post about how I'm trying to learn to have fun but it's complicated and I don't think I'm very good at it--having fun or writing about fun. It's much easier to write about work. It just takes lists!

Z started full time school this week. Very stressful. Also, the university's budget was cut by 13%. Egg or I may or may not have a job next week. And I have agent troubles. So maybe work is fun. At least it distracts from the anxiety.

Work has included yesterday and today:

• Take Z to first day of all day school.
  
• Meet teachers and find out where to put her lunchbox, blanket, pillow and water bottle.
  
• Worry she'll cry when I leave. Just a nervous glance and then she turned to ask her teacher what to play.
  
• Meeting about budget. 2 hours. Really?
• Talk with Mary Anne about Food Book. (thanks Mary Anne!)
• Make a plan to implement Mary Anne's suggestions.
• Pace a little about book. Ask Egg to read a section.
  
• Make BLT's for me and Egg.
• Read Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (3 hours) and Thomas and Beulah (1 hour) for Independent Study I'm teaching.
• Find criticism to support both books as allegory. A stretch? Possibly.
• Rememorize Pound's Erat Hora as it applies to Convex Mirror
  
• Write chapter synopses for food book.
• Pick Z up from her all day school.
• Much cuddling with Z required.
  
• Leave to meet with Independent Study Grad Students.
• Eat fondue with said students while discussing Self-portrait and backwards falling language, modernism, post-modernism, margins and seams with students.
• Come home, play dogs with Z.
• Watch old The Closer to keep up with Lisa B.
• Change bedsheets because I love new sheets and the news was impossible to watch because apparently we can't watch one channel and record another on our DVR (I thought that was the point of our DVR).
• Read Shouts and Murmurs (mice and wine) and begin Atul Gawande's plan for National Healthcare (New Yorker Jan 26).
• Sleep on clean bedsheets.
• Wake up at 7:45 because Z now has to be to school by 9 which is early for we people. She sleeps until 8:30 usually.
• Take Z to all day school.
• Come home--run through snowy forest.
• Work on Teach-In Day presentation for Thursday.
• Make lunch of smoked turkey leg, sliced fennel, and spring mix.
• Talk to long-lost friend for 1.5 hours. Yay!
• End up late for advising hours in advising center.
• Forget book for teaching. Panic. Call Egg to see if he'll bring me book. He will but....
• Student from upcoming class comes in to advising center.
• Get student to lend me book so I can make copies for class.
• Talk to said student for 1 hour about creative writing versus rhet comp, the 7 points of physical fitness--strength, flexibility (and 5 other points I didn't quite catch), robots, linguistics and epigenetics.
• Talk to student who is late to apply for graduation but I do highly powerful advising by signing off on science credits and dropping her 2nd major and 2 minors.
  
• Talk to new grad student about degree progress and course distribution.
• Get another email about budget. Freak out on phone with Egg.
• Write a prompt for class that starts in 15 minutes.
• Discuss two poems in class. Accidentally give a lesson on semiotics and the gnostic gospels (I do apologize, fine students).
• Get in an heated discussion with one student about why she shouldn't use so many abstractions as love, beauty, loss, hurt, miss, forever in a poem. I may have lost the fight but will win the war. I told her to write a poem against me/my arguments. I presume it will turn out particularly concrete and specific.
• Run Top Chef--this time, whichever group argued best for the poem won.
• Talk with another student about abstractions.
• Help Z peel potatoes for dinner.
• Fry up said potatoes which will underpin Egg's all-day cooked green chile sauce.
• Play puzzle with Z.
• Wonder why I have so few emails today.
• Read books with Z.
• Sing her to sleep.
• Check email again.
• Blog.
  
• Watch, in perfect synchronicity with yesterday, The Closer--though this one is new.

See. Lists. Fun and worky.