EDLM
2/20/20
When I wake up, I’m in the middle of some vivid movie-like dreams that I keep fading in and out of. I’ve been better about getting up, but not today.
Finally, my wife bugs me enough, and I stretch out in bed and then sit up to take my blood pressure. Part of the new morning routine. The doc wants me recording it to see if I need meds. It’s been consistently too high on bottom and a bit high on top. It’s a little higher than it has been today. Continuing with the routine: feed the cats, feed the humans, scroll through social media in bed while eating cereal and drinking coffee. My feed is all about Warren’s performance in the debate. Sounds like she rocked it, and I vaguely wish I’d watched it. I watch a short video of her taking down Bloomberg. It’s so discouraging that she isn’t getting the votes and the whole systems seems beyond repair.
Alexa reminds me to get a new notebook out for today. This feel indicative of the mixed technology we currently live with. A smart machine reminded me to get out a paper notebook for my hand-written notes (I’ve started using it to set reminders, which is really helpful). I run upstairs to get the notebook and find that the cat pooped outside the box. We’ve been worried about his bathroom troubles for a bit, but it’s healthy looking cat poop and it’s where the litter box used to be, so now I’m wondering if older cats have memory issues.
Contacts, shower, getting dressed. I have to balance a fairly cold day with a hot office, so I choose a short-sleeved sweater, which feels like something an contradiction, but there it is. Dry my hair, pack a salad, pack my gym bag. (Look how healthy I’m being!)
Shortly after 9am, I head to the bus stop. As I walk up, I always hear the radio station that plays, which today says it’s National Pet Day. How many of these things are there? And it tells us to post a picture of our pets and stop talking about politics. I love my pets, but…. Yeah. After a few minutes inside, my bus pulls up and I get on. I make myself pull out a document I’ve been slowly reading for my research. It’s one that can be read in small chunks, so it’s a good use of bus time. Of course my notes are pretty wobbly from the bus, but this practice is important to continue—making use of the little chunks of time. I arrive at work around 9:20, check my mailbox, chat with a colleague in the hall for a few, and start writing up today’s diary.
After responding to some emails, I play around in the graduate course catalog to advise a student who needs to sign up for classes. Sometimes I wish I could just take these! We get him mostly squared away (with a few questions I can’t answer). After that, I work on reading for class for this week, and have two interruptions—one welcome, one not (textbook reps!). Readings were super quick this week, which will be good for students who need to catch up and for working on writing. Futz around with email and the like. Look up the word “futz” to make sure I used it correctly. It’s 11:30, and I’m super hungry. I’m seriously considering saving the salad for tomorrow and going for tacos. After some more small tasks, I delve into the university’s procedures for student conduct and their definitions of disruption. This is very engaging as I’m interested in policies and recent conversations around these issues are on my mind. Time goes by quick as I’m working on this.
I decided on the tacos, put the salad in the office fridge, and head to Chavas in the Village. Then it’s to the Queer Chocolatier about 15 minutes before I’m scheduled to have a meeting with a colleague there. I chat with the owner. This small local business is amazing and so important to our community, but it just isn’t doing as well as I’d hope. I really hope they stay in business! We’ve been trying to get together with the owner and her wife, and so we pull out our calendars and finally schedule something. My friend and colleague shows up, and we order some drinking chocolate, and I grab a box of truffles for my admin assistant who has a birthday coming up. It’s become my default little gift for someone because, again, I really like this place and want it to do well. I chat with K. about job stuff, and a little other stuff, travel. She says my skin looks great, which is baffling to me as someone with historically good skin—but hey, I’ll take it. After a combo of catching up with work things and chatting, K. heads out.
I got a few texts, and one reminds me of a huge task I have to do in the next few weeks, and I start feeling a bit overwhelmed. I want to head home, but I should stay and work for a bit. Another colleague comes in, and we chat for a minute. He sits at my table, and I comment that this will be good if he’s working, I’ll work. We chat a bit about some challenges he’s had with his students, and then we both settle in and work a bit. I look at some student essays submitted for a contest. I’m excited to see several by students of color that engage with their experiences at a predominantly-white institution.
I text B. to pick me up at Queer Chocolatier for our Thursday swim instead of going to her office. It’s on the way out, after all. She texts me when she’s leaving, and I stand in front of Hot Box for about 5 minutes, pretty cold out here, and then hop in. We go to the Y to swim. The locker room smells like gasoline or something, and with some others (employees?) we realize it’s all coming from a locker that has a “DO NOT USE” sign on it. There’s lots of speculation about what that might be all about, including a disturbing conversation about bedbugs. The swim goes pretty well. I have three in my lane for a bit, including a guy I met at the pool earlier this week who seems to want to talk to me. Swimming is quiet time for me. But him being there just means I stop less and go faster. We swim for about 40 minutes, and then shower and pop into the sauna: the number 1 reason that we like swimming here!
Then I head home and do some dishes so the kitchen is clean for my wife making dinner. I put my Spotify streaming playlist on Alexa in the kitchen. I’m thinking more this diary day about mentioning things like that because I read Station 11 not too long ago, which is a post-apocalyptic world, and I’m thinking—either way it goes, technology and how we live with it will probably be one of the biggest changes if these get read some time in the future.
My wife gets home from work about 5:30, and she makes dinner—a ginger chicken recipe. She’d cut it out from Bon Appetite magazine a month or so ago, and I tried to make it when she was super busy, and it was only okay. In my defense, I was missing a few ingredients. So, we’re trying it again, and recipes are always just inspiration for her. It’s amazing, and I’m even coming around to broccoli. The wonders never cease. We watch the second episode from the first season of a show called Miracle Workers that we just started. It’s not about Helen Keller. It’s a comedy with God and some angels trying to make stuff happen on Earth and fucking up. It’s not The Good Place, but it’s decently funny.
After dinner we spend a couple of hours assembling some new shelves that are specifically designed for board games that we bought from a Facebook ad. It took forever for the last piece to get here, and we’re excited to finally get them put up. We chat while we’re doing this. My wife brings up the show we watched and whether I have a position on whether people fit together better when they are more alike or more different. She says she thinks different is good. I say it depends on the person and what they are looking for and what the differences are. I’m not sure I could date an evangelical, conservative Christian or at the very least if I were on the dating market, I’d avoid that. But I’ve been feeling very loved lately for my differences, and we’ve had lots of good talks about how different we are in some of our ways of thinking and being. Someone changing is also a different situation, I say, then if you start out and have a major difference to work through. Because at this point, I feel like we’d work through pretty much any changes and differences that arose.
The shelves are pretty cool and fit very well in the space we have upstairs for them. I like doing something like this with my partner—a joint thing to improve our space. We don’t make any unfixable errors while building them, and then we move the board games upstairs. I’ll let her organize them.
I delve into my video game on the PS4—Horizon Zero Dawn—got a big boss battle tonight, but it doesn’t take me too many tries. Also a few puzzles and some plot info. I’ve learned to do this all with a cat curled up on my neck.
After about an hour and a half, I set the coffee machine for morning, snack on a few gummy bears and head to bed to read. It’s been a pretty typical non-busy day. I wasn’t particularly productive, but the last couple of days were pretty busy and productive, so I’m good with it. It’s nice to have days like this. I’m reading the fourth book in a series that I had stopped awhile back. It’s the Books of the Raksura. by Martha Wells. I like the relationships in these books and the characters. She’s less good at writing the action and it feels a little like random Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) encounters. But the last two books I read were really intense, so I wanted something lighter. I’m reading on the Kindle app on my iPad in bed and doze off mid-chapter.