Thank goodness it’s Friday. For the first time in weeks, I am getting back on my regular schedule and working from home today. I’ll have to work at the museum the next two Fridays, but then I should be back to my regular schedule of working from home one day a week. At least today, I can get the rest I need after being so busy these last two weeks and can work at my own pace. Besides, I also have some comp time that I’ll take today.
This evening, I’ll unwind by having dinner with a friend. We are going to a restaurant that was damaged during the floods but is now up and running again. Not only do we want to support the restaurant, we’ve also both been craving some fried pickles as an appetizer. I’ll probably also get a French Dip sandwich for dinner. I’m also looking forward to one of their chocolate martinis or one of their other alcoholic beverages.
After a week and a half of teaching classes almost all day each day, I am exhausted. I taught three history classes yesterday morning and four English classes in the afternoon. I got about a 20 minute break for lunch. Last night, I’d have done almost anything for a foot massage. I’d been on my feet nearly the whole time. I always feel that I need to be standing to teach, and there is part of the lesson when I have to walk around guiding the students through the assignment they are given. I have my regular class this morning and one last make-up session for the series of classes I’ve been teaching. After today, the majority of my teaching for a few weeks will only be my regular class. Thank goodness, I am working from home tomorrow.
First off, I had an appointment with my neurologist at the Headache Clinic yesterday. She’s moving away and is leaving the clinic, and I’d been trying to get in to see her before she leaves. She’s not sure who will replace her, but she said they found a doctor they want to hire who was very nice. However, she said she doesn’t know if they can convince him to take the job. She said they’ve more than once thought they found a great candidate only for them to be snatched up by someone else. We also talked about me restarting Botox treatments, so I will get to see her one more time before she leaves. Hopefully, the combination of the Qulipta that I’m currently taking and the Botox will help. The Botox helped before but when I developed trigeminal neuralgia (TN), it wasn’t as effective. Now that the TN is largely in remission, we are hoping the Botox will help again.
Second, today is my last day of marathon classes. I have classes every hour from 9 am to 4 pm. Since last Tuesday, I have taught more than two dozen classes. Those classes include my regular semester long class that meets on Tuesday and Thursday but also numerous English classes each day. The English class is the same class over and over, but I still have to prepare lectures for my regular class. Today, I’m addition to four English classes, I also have three history classes. It’s been an exhausting week and a half.
Finally, actually I don’t have a third thing. Everything else seems to be going fairly well. I haven’t had the time to keep up with emails and messages, but hopefully I can do that Friday while I’m working from home.
I’ll probably be in a similar position when I get home this evening. It’s been an exhausting week, but it’s gone pretty well. I’m going to take tomorrow to recover before the Vermont Pride Parade on Sunday. A good friend and I are going to have brunch in Burlington and then watch the parade. If it’s not raining (like it did last year), we might go to the Pride Festival after the parade. I’d love to go to the Burly Bears event after the festival, but I’m not sure I’ll have that much energy. We’ll see. It only depends on what my friend also wants to do.
I was not particularly happy to get out of bed this morning. I had trouble falling asleep last night, and I don’t feel like I got enough sleep. Today is going to be a pretty busy day, but at least I have a three-day weekend to recover and refresh which I’ll need because the next two weeks will be very busy week.
I also want to say that I hope all of my readers who were in the path of Hurricane Idalia are ok. Hurricanes can be rough even for those do not live right on the coast where it makes landfall.
Thank goodness it’s Friday, and if you’re in the United States, I hope you’ll enjoy Labor Day weekend. Does anyone have any special plans? I don’t have any plans, but I plan to just relax.
I woke up around 2:30 this morning and could not go back to sleep, so I finally got out of bed sometime around 3:30 am. I was up for a bit and decided not to eat breakfast just yet and wait until later in the morning to do so. I tried to find something to watch, but nothing was interesting me. Eventually around 4:30 I turned on the local news. Finally around 5:00 am, I fell back to sleep on the couch. I woke up just enough to turn off the TV. I woke up just before 6:00 am, wrote this, and now I’m going back to bed. Thank goodness this is a work from home day.
Some days I wake up and ask myself, “Can’t I just stay in bed? Do I actually have to deal with people today?” Of course, the answer is that no matter much I may want the answers to be different, the answers are almost always “No, you can’t” and “Yes, you do.”
So, I drag myself out of bed and feed Isabella who had provided the answers for the earlier questions, but for slightly different reasons. She answers the first question with, “Meow meow MEOW,” which translates to, “Feed me NOW!” She answers the second question with “Meow meow meow…” which translates to, “You have to go to work so I can go back to sleep and you can earn the money to be able to feed me.”
Yes, I’m being silly, but some days that happens when it’s too early in the morning.
I’m so happy it’s Friday. It wasn’t that it’s been a particularly difficult week, because it hasn’t. However, I’m looking forward to dinner with a friend tonight. Sometimes, it’s just nice to put on a nice outfit and go out. Plus, we are going to one of my favorite restaurants, Waterworks. It’s always been my opinion that Vermont doesn’t have many outstanding restaurants, but this one is nice. Waterworks is in an old textile mill overlooking the Winooski River. Not only does it have a great view but also a great atmosphere. I can’t wait.
Do you ever have an unsettling dream, not necessarily a bad dream, but not a good one either, and you wake up and can’t fall back to sleep because you can’t get the dream out of your head? I woke up sometime between 2:00 am and 2:30 am, and for once it wasn’t because of Isabella. This time is was one of those unsettling dreams. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t shut my brain back off and return to sleep. I was awake for over an hour before I felt like I might be able to fall asleep again. Luckily, I did fall back to sleep, but waking up with my alarm (and Isabella) at 5:00 am was pretty difficult and I still feel really groggy. It looks like it might be a long day at work. I’d actually call in sick and go back to bed if it wasn’t that for much of today, I’ll be the only person at the museum.
So, you might be wondering what this dream was. I dreamed that I was sitting in church when the minister began to quote the Bible verses that are used to condemn gay people and then rant about the evils of homosexuality. In the dream, I stood up and began to explain how wrong he was, why he was ignorant of the Bible’s history and interpretation of translations, and that he was preaching hate and unchristian beliefs. The minister then turns to the congregation and says in a sarcastic manner, “Here we go people” in the manner of someone who is already mocking the person talking in an effort to discredit them before they begin presenting their case. That’s when I woke up, and all I could think about was all the things I’d like to say to this hateful preacher and show why he was a hypocrite who was preaching the opposite of what Christ taught.
The thoughts running through my head used to keep me up at night on a regular basis. I just wouldn’t be able to shut off my mind and fall asleep. However, I rarely wake up remembering my dreams, let alone allow an unsettling dream like last night keep me awake. I’ve had other dreams that woke me up, but they were usually more of an erotic nature. I usually have to try to take care of a very different type of “hard issues” before I can fall back to sleep.
Joe
The Closet Professor 