Dark Times & Knitting

Yesterday was our all-day faculty meeting to begin the new academic year. At the last moment I realized that I had no suitable project to work on, since I haven't done any knitting since mid-June, and threw supplies in a bag to make these coasters. The yarn is Knit Picks Swish, leftover from my Catan blanket years ago. I had to use my pocketknife to cut the yarn because I forgot to bring scissors. I finished four coasters and started a fifth during the meeting. I'm going to try to make six and give them to my friend M. who told me the other day ze has no coasters in zir house.

I'm feeling pretty hopeless today. My first classes are tomorrow and the next day. I don't want to teach them. I'm not excited about meeting the new students, or doing anything in class. Things in my life are difficult and unhappy. This morning I felt heavy grief for what has already been lost and what is still to be lost. Am I deluding myself that anything will turn out well for me? I can't see any light at the end of this dark time. I don't know where I'm going. Am I even going in the right direction? Why don't I just give up? Would I be happy if I left this job, left this place, left these people, and started over somewhere else? 

More About Friendship

My therapist reminded me that friendships take effort, like dating. Of course I knew this, but I needed it said to me. She challenged me to take one step with someone I think could be a friend before our next session. Because I'm Type A, and so scared about the mess my life is right now, I may have gone overboard.

I have a lunch date today with two colleagues that I've hung out with a few times in the past. They are both friends, and maybe they could become close friends if I let them. I want to try. None of the three of us is good socially (which is maybe why we ended up together at all). I don't know how to get from the sort of Level 1 friendship we have now to the Level 2 or 3 friendship I would like to have.

I have a frozen yogurt date tomorrow evening with someone from the game group. This one is probably a dead end and I'm already a little disappointed about that. But I'm going to meet him anyway and hear what he has to say. Maybe I'll be surprised.

I have a coffee date with the wife of another person in the game group. I've always admired her, but since she doesn't usually play games with us I haven't had the chance to get to know her. I think I'd like to know her better, hence I asked her to coffee and we'll see.

That's the short list of potential friends I came up with. I'm searching for other activities that would allow me to meet new people. A book club? A choir? Volunteering somewhere? I know once classes start, I won't have a lot of free time or energy for these things. An added challenge is covid-19; our county just moved into a high risk category again, masks are required on campus again starting today. But all I can do is keep trying, right?

Meanwhile, a person I once thought of as a friend continues to act in ways I cannot accept. I have been trying to understand and looking for a way to reconcile this person's actions with their statements of friendship to me, but after this latest episode I just can't do it. There's too much other pain going on for me to deal with this person's bullshit. I've told the person to leave me alone. Maybe at some point I'll be ready to hear their explanation and possibly I'll be open to something like friendship again, but that time is not now. 

Friendship and Trust

 I almost cannot believe it is the last week of July. I have done essentially no work for school since June 16. I promised myself that it's all right not to start prep for fall semester until August 1. I have a lecture for D&D Camp this Wednesday that I am working on, and one thing for an independent study student due the end of this week, but otherwise I'm giving myself permission to just coast awhile longer.

The big problem is still there: still big and still a problem. Last week I had several days in a row when things seemed to be improving. I ate more, I slept more, I felt more positive and hopeful. Cypar and I had a very good weekend together. It's such a disappointment to find that all of that hasn't made the problem go away. I really haven't knit at all since mid-June. I don't have the spoons for it when I'm concentrating so much on dealing with this other problem. 

My therapist and I have been talking about friendship. Why do I feel that I don't have many friends? What has to happen for me to consider someone a friend? Have I always felt this way, or only recently? I then feel sort of deficient for not making friends more easily. I seem to be setting the bar much too high. My suspicion is that it's a combination of moving to a new state when I was growing up (leaving all my friends behind and having to start over in the new place) plus having a bad time with low self-esteem in graduate school (the people I hung out with treated me disrespectfully but I kept hanging out with them because I didn't think I could find anyone better) plus the normal experience that it just is more difficult to make friends once a person leaves school. I guess I don't know how to develop a friendship beyond the initial "hey, you're interesting" phase. 

Besides that, it appears that I am not a generally trusting person. I do not just assume other people have good intentions or are trustworthy until proven otherwise; I typically wait for evidence that the other person is trustworthy first. For example, Cypar and I discussed M., a person we both know. Cypar says he trusts M. completely, they have worked together, hung out together, and traveled together. Cypar doesn't like everything that M. does, but he still says he trusts M. I, on the other hand, do not trust M. I think M. would go through my cabinets if he thought he could get away with it. I don't like the way M. has tried to take advantage of Cypar in the past. I don't like the way M. talks about certain subjects. Cypar was surprised by my lack of trust in M. and seems genuinely unable to understand why I feel that way.

So, if I find it hard to trust people that would also prevent me from feeling close or friendly with them. After all this, I am feeling pretty unhappy because it's all my own fault that I have constructed barriers between myself and other people to keep them at arm's length. And if that's true, what do I even do about it? How do I change? How do I even convince myself that change is worthwhile?

Loyalty Circles

This week was a little better: I once went 48 hours without crying, I ate a full meal Thursday night, and I slept almost the whole night a couple of times. There has been almost daily conversations with Cypar, which usually helps. Sometimes I get myself all worked up (not "for nothing" of course, but maybe out of proportion) and then it's still difficult to regain equilibrium.

My therapist this week wanted me to talk about my family and we drew a big map of all the relationships. Her board wasn't really large enough for everything; I wonder what she does with a person who has a bigger family? Mine is so small. She also included people I consider close friends (that made me sad because the list is so short). She let me just describe each person in whatever way came to mind, and it was pretty stream-of-consciousness. She asked how I knew those people loved me and I tried to think about that. At one point I said something about how I didn't know what I was going to do, going forward, and she said "what has changed?" That question has stuck with me all week. Okay, so I know some things I didn't know before, and they are unhappy things, but is anything actually different? Well...yes and no? I don't know. My brain says nothing has changed. I'm the same person, doing all the same things. I don't feel the same, though. I feel sad, hurt, and scared.

I was trying to talk about this with Cypar afterward. I often visualize my relationships as concentric circles (not necessarily coplanar, though, more like the orbits of planets and comets around the sun). The smallest, closest circles are the people closest to me (do I need to explicitly state that I'm the center of the circles? okay I am), who I feel the most responsibility for. So Cypar is in the first circle, and there's a separate circle for people in my family, and another circle for my department colleagues. I feel different levels of loyalty and responsibility for people in different circles. For example, the guys at work I feel responsibility to take care of their needs because I'm their chairperson. Even when they are acting in ways I dislike, I still feel protective of them. But faculty in other departments are not my responsibility and mostly I am fine letting them fend for themselves. I once tried to explain this to my Dean, when she was first hired, because at the time there was a discussion of whether the sole physics faculty person would be a department of one or combined with my department.

I was just trying to say that I need to know what circle that person belongs to, so that I know how much energy to devote to thinking about their needs. The Dean basically blew me off. That was the last time I tried to talk to her about anything personal.

Anyway, the point is that I feel deep loyalty and responsibility for the people in certain circles, but not for people in other circles. When a new person enters my life I guess I try to figure out which circle they fit into. People can move between circles, for example a person I met recently can become a closer friend over time. I have chucked people out of circles, rarely. I don't like to do that. I always try to keep those people in some kind of circle as long as I can. 

Time Passes Unhappily

 It's been ten days. I have cried on each day, at least once and sometimes multiple times. I am having a lot of trouble eating. I find fruit and vegetables okay, but sometimes I can't even look at other foods. I eat as much as I can before I am repulsed (I feel nauseated), and that's just as much as I can do. This morning I ordered two smoothies for delivery, in the hope that I'll be able to ingest some calories and protein that way because I could barely eat my banana and drink a cup of tea for breakfast.

I also am not sleeping. Some nights I sleep for a few hours, then wake up and cry until morning. The better nights I wake up for an hour or two and then fall asleep again. Cypar and I usually talk for part or all of that wakefulness because it's better (I think) to talk about my feelings with him than to just drown in them alone. Last night was particularly difficult. I felt physically crushed under the weight of everything. It was terrifying. 

This is making work difficult. Last week, I tried to keep my morning routine as much as possible. I went to the office and did as much as I felt able to do, which some days was just answering email and then staring at the wall. I try to eat lunch there, and come home in the early afternoon. I think it helps to go somewhere neutral and be forced to interact normally with other people, but I just can't do a lot of that.

I have noticed that my eyes seem to be behaving a little better, which is weird. Maybe I'm imagining this, but earlier this spring I started noticing a lot of ghosts. I would be looking at something, maybe knitting in my lap, and I would suddenly see something move in my peripheral - like a flap of cloth, or an object shifting - but when I turned to focus on that, there was never anything there. It hasn't happened for a few days now when it used to be frequent. I wonder if I was picking up stress from another person and that was leaking out? That sounds so stupid and new-agey, but I don't have anything else.

I have two books I am reading to learn more about the problems. Tomorrow I see my therapist for the second time. I will try to make a list of questions for her so that I might get some relief, some way to feel better (at least functional) in the short term while I devote energy to the bigger, long-term problems. I try to remember I'm not the first person in this situation, and other people have managed to get through it. 

A Terrible Day

 I hate to call it "the worst day of my life" because that sounds like a dare the Universe would not be able to resist, but it was pretty awful. I'm not going to be able to say exactly what happened here. On Wednesday, June 16, I learned something very upsetting that has had a continuing effect on me ever since. Sleep has been poor or nonexistent. Food tastes like ashes and makes me nauseous, yet my stomach hurts like it's empty. There has been much crying.

I am taking care of myself as well as I can. I drove to Indianapolis last Friday to spend most of the weekend with my good friend there. I played with her dogs and was pleasantly distracted by her family members. She listened to my problem and sympathized extremely well, so that by Saturday night/Sunday morning I was able to eat a bit and I felt strong enough to come back home and start working on things. 

Monday (yesterday) I saw a therapist. She let me talk for most of an hour about whatever nonsense came out of my mouth. I think she will be helpful going forward. I don't know what comes next. Right now I'm still just trying to figure out how I feel about everything (besides "bad") and what I want to do.

Newly Finished Objects

 

I finished some things! This hat is a pattern by Franklin Habit, one of his historical adaptations. It has been in my queue for eight years and I finally got around to it. You knit a small rectangle for the top and then pick up stitches around that and knit down to the neck, which is just 2x2 ribbing. Last, you pick up around the face opening and do more 2x2 ribbing there. I only worked on it on weekends, and mostly only during my little knitting group, but it was pretty quick to make. I used leftover yarn: the brown is the remains of a blanket I made for my sister and the green is from a baby blanket. 

Next is the fifth pair of mittens. I think I've explained this previously, but the short version is I had a great idea in November to make six pairs of mittens for the staff in one of the non-academic departments on campus. I found a pattern for fingerless mitts that I liked, and I bought yarn (too much, as it turns out). I was able to modify the pattern to make a closed finger top instead of ending with ribbing. The first three pairs were fast, but I got bored with the fourth pair and it lingered for several months this spring. Now I only have one more pair left, but I'm starting to question the impulse. Is it okay for me to give staff gifts? And, in November they were all women, but now there's been a hire and it's a man. These mittens definitely won't fit a larger hand. Do I send him a scarf instead? Or try to make bigger mittens?

Meanwhile, summer progresses comfortably. It was suddenly very hot and humid last week and the science building went all weird. On Monday it was too warm in my office and there was some humidity in the labs. Tuesday we started measuring the humidity in the labs and it got up to 85% by Friday. I complained about it to the Physical Plant almost every day, but never got any answer so I don't know if they did anything. Thankfully this weekend the outside weather went back to a more normal (for us) temperature and humidity, and the labs are back at 50% humidity now. 

I continue to scan old articles into my reference manager. I'm also trying to catch up on the journals I'm supposed to be reading but haven't. I spent one whole day last week doing remote advising of incoming first-year students, and I have another of those tomorrow. The department newsletter was printed, and I stuffed envelopes and sent them off to be mailed yesterday. I also repaired one of the HPLC instruments that has had a broken degasser for years (maybe 5?). It's been on my list every summer but we never seem to have the money to replace it, but this year I just decided to spend the remainder of the department budget to get it done. So that made me feel pretty happy. I like when I'm able to make stuff work.

Last weekend I had friends over to the house. Friday afternoon is the usual beer on the lawn day, but Cypar had to work and one of our usual guests is visiting relatives out of state, so I invited a colleague and her wife instead. The three of us sat outside under my umbrella for about three hours, talking and drinking beer. It was very enjoyable. On Sunday I had the knitting group over (it's me and two colleagues I taught to knit a couple of summers ago) and we also used the outdoor furniture. Cypar says he's very proud of me for doing social things with my friends. I need to remember more often that I have my own friends (even if they are all coworkers) and do stuff with them.

Four Nice Weeks

 The summer break has been very nice, so far. I did not have much drama related to spring classes/grades. The weather has been mostly pleasant. I have a new routine that I am enjoying very much. Most weekdays, I am waking up about the same time as always, then having the usual walk in the park after breakfast, and then I go to campus and do something useful in my office or in the lab before coming home at a reasonable time for supper. I have about two hours for knitting while watching TV and then we read a few pages of a book before sleeping. We're reading Mysteries of Terra Firma currently. I am enjoying the history of geology, and the question of how old the earth is (and how we know that) is really interesting.

I finished the socks (photo above). I immediately started a bunch of new things: a lace shawl (which I've already frogged and started over), a hat (with leftover stash), and another pair of mittens. It felt really good to start new and have different yarn to look at, different problems to solve! I'm now about halfway through the shawl. It is not a difficult pattern - I needed to photocopy and enlarge the charts, but I can do several rows in an hour.

We've been out disc golfing a few more times. Visited two parks in the city I had never been to (despite living here for over 15 years). We usually golf with the same core group of friends, but Cypar and I went ourselves on Memorial Day because it felt wasteful not to do some kind of outdoor activity together on that holiday. I think I'm getting slightly better throwing the discs, but I still don't get a lot of distance on the drives. We practiced putting for a while after playing nine holes on Memorial Day; if I was a serious player, I'd probably practice more. I really just want to play as an excuse to be outside and moving.

May We Never Speak of It Again

 Done! I have administered all the exams and graded all the work. Today I submitted grades. We all received an odd email from the college president yesterday, stating that employees will be back in their offices starting in July, classes and student activities will be in person as normal in the fall, and facilities will be putting all the furniture (that was removed to enforce physical distancing) back in the rooms over the summer. I think he meant it as a morale boost, but it just seemed weird to me.

Today and tomorrow are empty interstitial days. A previous provost insisted that we should end final exams on Wednesday and have two empty days before Commencement, but we have never used them for anything. I had a walk in the park this morning and saw three rabbits, a cat, and a lot of deer. It's raining now so I'm glad I walked first. Then I came to campus and submitted grades and attended a Zoom meeting. I cleaned up the lab, washed glassware, put things away. I sorted papers. I have one more meeting this afternoon before I go home. 

I finished two of the interminable knitting projects in the past week. First, the blue baby blanket that I started in January for my nephew (he was born last Thursday). I mailed it to my sister on Saturday and she called me Monday afternoon to thank me. I guess the post office is back to normal delivery times. I also sent a pair of tiny baby socks that apparently fit him perfectly. A mildly funny story: I have been visiting my local post office regularly on Saturday mornings since January to send books to people, and I always have the same clerk to help me. He definitely recognizes me. When I brought in the blanket package last weekend, I said "it's not a book this time" and his reply was "oh, I'm not sure I remember how to do those!" And then we laughed. It was really nice. Anyway, I think this blanket turned out great. The saturated blue color is beautiful. The cables were a pain, but worth every minute now that I see how fantastic they look.

Second, I finished a pair of mittens that I've been working on since February 1. All that is left of my long-term projects now is the second sock of the pair. I finished the foot last night and should be able to do the toe tonight. Meanwhile, I've started a new lace shawl and I'm about to start a hat. This feels like progress and I'm a bit more cheery.

Sunday afternoon BAM and I met a group of friends at a park and played disc golf. I'd only disc golfed one time previously, at least 20 years ago, so we weren't competitive. It was a bright warm day and I actually got a little sunburned (when was the last time I had that much sun?). It was really good to be outdoors and to talk to people almost normally again. Everyone in our group wore a mask although it probably wasn't necessary outdoors. They did it for me since I was the last of the group to get my vaccine. I came home and collapsed on the sofa with that good kind of tired feeling. I'm hoping to do this more frequently; I've even bought a starter set of discs. I don't care so much about the game but it's a way to get more exercise and be with people.

Second Dose

 I had my second dose yesterday on my way home from school. The injection felt like nothing. I went home and continued to feel fine all evening. My shoulder muscle (deltoid?) became a little sore by the time I went to bed, and like the first dose that soreness kept me from sleeping well. 

Today I felt completely normal until mid afternoon, and then I got increasingly achy. and cold. But that isn't actually unusual after I sit in my office for many consecutive hours. I went home for supper and my temperature was about half a degree Celsius higher than it was in the morning. I took an ibuprofen and drank a beer, and after a while I felt fine again. I guess I will call that a mild reaction, as long as nothing more happens.

Tomorrow is our last day of regular classes. I have one last lab session, and a bunch of meetings. After that, it's just final exams.

Finally Had Enough of the Card Table

 Here I am at the end of my 10 day quarantine, thankfully with no symptoms of COVID-19 still. I have been teaching from home since April 8, and it has gone about as well as I could expect. I couldn't teach any labs of course, so that is the biggest disappointment for me but the students have not complained much about it. 

The first day I returned to my attic "office" I decided I had had enough of the card table I used as a work surface all last year. I bought a writing desk from Target and it arrived Tuesday. It is one of those flat-pack things and I was really amazed at how efficiently all the parts were packed together in the box. It took me a day or so to put it together but I'm already thrilled with it. It is sturdy, looks nice in the space, and even has a little drawer for my pens and other little items. It's slightly taller than the card table so I am working at a more comfortable height.

I have to have a negative COVID-19 test before I am allowed to return to campus, so I drove over to the Walgreens yesterday morning for that. They do drive-thru tests, which actually means they send the swab through the little drawer in the drive-thru window and one has to do it oneself in the car and send it back through the drawer. It was a PCR test and sent out to a contractor for processing (and a weekend) so I have no idea how long it will take to get the results. The pharmacist said I should call if I haven't heard anything in 72 hours, which will be Tuesday. If the results don't show up by this evening I will have to teach Monday's classes from home again, which is fine but I don't like the uncertainty. Will I be here? Will I need to pack things up and go to campus? Do I have everything I need in the same place? Besides that, I kind of need to know if my non-majors class will be able to have lab on Wednesday or not, and it would be helpful to be able to tell them in class tomorrow.

Are We Making Any Progress At All?

Feeling defeated today.

Monday I did go downtown and get my first dose of the vaccine (Pfizer). The clinic is in the convention center and it was packed with people. It was weird and uncomfortable being around so many people. Everyone was well-behaved: wore their masks properly, distanced from each other, and followed the instructions of the many volunteers. My arm hurt that night, it was sore enough to wake me when I rolled onto that side, but by Tuesday evening the pain was gone and I don't think I've had any other effects.

Classes resumed. I only have an upper-level lab on Tuesdays, first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, one of my three students tested positive for COVID-19 later that day. The college considered me "exposed" and I got a phone call from HR yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon, just as I was preparing to leave campus for the night. I need to stay home in quarantine for ten days. It is unlikely (but not impossible, of course) that I have been infected. The lab is pretty big, and well-ventilated. I was usually at least six feet away from the students. We all wore our masks and didn't touch each other. Will the vaccine I received ~19 hours earlier do any good?

I grabbed what I could think of from my office and now I'm teaching from my laptop in my attic again, just like last spring. I had to tell those upper-level students today that they don't get any more lab experience this semester. By the time I'm out of quarantine, there will only be a week left of this semester and not enough time to do any of the remaining activities on the schedule.

I barely slept at all last night. My brain was full of what I needed to do this morning to be ready for the Zoom lectures, anger at the student who exposed me, and just plain anger and frustration. Our state is having a huge spike in COVID-19 cases right now, and my school has the most cases we've had all year (it was something like 37 active cases when I checked most recently), but the administration keeps saying "business as usual" and classes are still primarily in person, our athletic teams are having practices and traveling for competitions. All the students went home for Easter last weekend, and I've overheard enough of them talking about all the fun things they did that I just despair for the future. The city schools are all having spring break this week, too. It's going to get even worse here when those people get back from Disney or wherever they all went. 

Taking Forever

 The days are passing at normal speed, I know it. Yet it feels like everything is stuck. I've been knitting the same three projects for months: a pair of socks, a pair of mittens, a baby blanket. I think I'm happiest with the blanket. It is for my unborn nephew, due in early May, and I've been working on it every weekend since January. On Saturday mornings, after my walk, I listen to Radio Deluxe and do another 6-8 rows. The cables are massive and take a long time. The pattern is for a full-size blanket and mine is only about half as wide, but it is difficult to feel like I've made any progress, week to week even though I've used up six skeins of yarn so far.

I think the main problem is that life just keeps going on, every day basically the same as every other day. Some days I go to a classroom and talk to students about something, some days I stay home. We're down to the last month of the semester and I think I care more about their work than the students do. They are still very polite, and they humor me when I try to get them interested in whatever topic I have to tell them about, but no one cares. This part of the semester feels the worst, when I start questioning why I keep doing this job when obviously I am bad at it. Maybe I'm not good at anything else, either. What's the point?

But, yesterday was our first day off since the semester started (and we have another day off Monday) for the Easter break. I went to campus and spent the day grading papers in my office, in the nearly empty building, sort of like old times. It felt nice in a way, and I was happier after that. 

Today, after the weekly Zoom call with my family, we're going to a friend's house to sit outside and drink beer and talk. I have only been to two other gatherings in a year, both of them last August. It is a sunny, warmish spring day today (nearly 20 C!). It hasn't been too bad for me, but BAM used to have two or three friends over on Friday afternoons and they would sit outside and drink beer together. He hasn't been able to do that all winter and that has been hard for him. I guess I have less need for people (though not zero). It will probably be good to hang out with people before I forget how.

Monday I have an appointment for the COVID vaccine and I am looking forward to that. I felt such visceral relief when I made the appointment last Tuesday. Happy, of course, but also relief that maybe, maybe, maybe this nightmare might be almost over! I can still count the number of non-home, non-work places I have been (pet store a few times, supermarket twice, dentist twice, car service place twice, lab for a blood draw, Walgreen's for a flu shot, haircut place, Lowe's, and two small gatherings). I am afraid to feel too much hope, in case something still more awful happens. My parents this week mentioned they want to come visit us this summer and I can't even comprehend that idea.

Other than the teaching part, school has been terrible lately. I don't like the new Provost, I think he is either lying or has no idea what he's doing. In February he announced he is expecting the faculty to study the idea of changing our courses to a 4-credit standard (it's 3-credits now). That's not so bad since almost all my department's courses are already 4 credits anyway. His other big idea is to switch our semester schedule to a block schedule, to which my department is adamantly opposed. He also wants to reduce the number of adjuncts (I approve) teaching undergraduates, but won't answer who is supposed to teach their courses. It's not as if the college will hire an equivalent number of full-time faculty. He wants to cut the number of courses required for majors and minors, and cut the number of majors. This type of talk always makes the chemists anxious, as we have few majors but high expenses. Then, there's this presumption that the faculty will spend the summer working on all these projects and I have actually started to speak up in meetings to object. Firstly and most importantly because that's not how I want to spend my summer break. Secondly because I don't think it's right to put that kind of pressure on people who are going to feel they have no choice but to comply. Every time I talk to this Provost, I get the strong impression that he doesn't want to listen to me, that I am only opposing him because of my lack of vision (or something). He tends to fall into a rut of these same messianic plans no matter what topic is being discussed. He says he wants the faculty to decide, but it feels like the decision has already been made (by him) and he's just waiting for us to confirm, or submit. As I say, I don't like him.

Update During A Snow Day

 Spring semester classes have just finished week 3. Last night (starting about 4:30 p.m.) we received a big winter storm, and campus is closed today. I'm thankful I'm only missing my Instrumental lab this morning. It snowed about six inches overnight. Cypar agreed to work for a colleague today, so he got up early and ran the snowblower to get his car out of the driveway. I'm going out later to shovel the sidewalks. So far, I've answered emails, graded online quizzes, and reviewed a student's lab notebook.

I also sent one of my classes a notice that they need to improve their attitudes and their performance. There are only three in the class, all junior and senior majors. They all took my fall analytical class last semester. They know me, and they know I have high expectations of them. I understand that this is a tough time for students, and there is always a bit of rust that needs to be knocked off after a long break, so I tried to be understanding and gentle the first week or two when some students didn't watch the lecture video, or forgot when the homework was due, or whatever. But now it's week 3 and instead of getting their acts together, they seem to be less engaged and less attentive. None of them have been to a single office hour in three weeks. One seems to have copied homework answers directly from the solutions manual (which they aren't supposed to have). Two of three did not do the assignment for yesterday's class, so we had to spend half the class period on that and then we went over time trying to accomplish what needed to be done. We have two 3-hour lab periods each week, and I've watched them spend that time surfing the internet looking for jobs, watch class videos for other classes, and talk about sports. After yesterday, I decided I had to say something. I told them their behavior this week was unsatisfactory, I reminded them of the many hours during the week that they have my attention, and I told them they need to get it together because the way they are currently acting is disrespectful to me and to their classmates. 

I'm glad to be back to teaching after the five week winter break. I am actually in a classroom with my nonmajors' class, with half of them on Zoom and half in person, alternating each day. That class is fun to teach, and I think at least one of the students is really enthusiastic about it, which helps. I have a handful who are taking the class "fully remote" and I told them they had to source materials and do the lab activities on their own. We'll see how that goes.

I am still plugging away on the six pairs of mittens I committed to in November. I just started the fourth pair this week. I finished the cowl for my mother's birthday and a pair of socks for my father in early January.

I started a pair of socks for Cypar and a baby blanket for my sister's second child, due in May. The blanket is a heavily cabled pattern and it has 196 stitches per row, so it's slow going. It takes me about two hours to do seven or eight rows. Also, I noticed immediately after class started that I come home a lot more tired, so I can't do much knitting in the evenings. After supper and washing up, most evenings I only last one or two hours before I am falling asleep where I sit. I try to do one repeat of the sock pattern and a few rows of mitten each night, but I don't always manage it.

We had a few more minor disasters at home. I brought home a live rat for Cody the Friday before classes started and put the carrying box on top of the recycling bin in the garage. The rat must have knocked the box over, and it fell off the bin and broke open. So then we had a domestic rat loose in the garage for several days until I could acquire some traps and catch it. Luckily, it only chewed a little insulation off one of our extension cords and didn't do more damage. I felt very guilty about the whole thing. It was my fault for putting the box on the bin instead of on the floor, and instead of being eaten by my python it was hungry and cold in the garage until I killed it with a trap. 

Another morning our furnace came on and cycled on and off for an hour. I knew that wasn't normal and I had Cypar call the HVAC people we use. It turned out to be a dirty air filter that was easy to replace, and I felt kind of dumb because it cost us money to have the tech come to the house just to tell us to replace the air filter.

After that, the bathtub drain stopped draining. We tried the drain opening chemicals and the hand snake, but couldn't fix it, so the plumber had to come and he ended up replacing the whole drain pipe. Which was expensive. But now the drain works. As a bonus, the plumber replaced the old tub stopper which didn't work with a new one, so now a person could actually have a bath! The plumber also installed that hot water shut off valve under our kitchen sink that I needed in December. Cypar and I used the sketchy shower in the basement for a couple of days while waiting for the plumber, and it's nice to know we have that backup in time of need.

One neat thing that has happened lately is that I discovered our local Buy Nothing group through Facebook. This local group is really active, and while most of the stuff they have to give away is not of interest to me (kid's clothes, tchotchkes, some old furniture), I appreciate what they are trying to do. People in our group are also offering a lot of food, homemade soups and cakes as well as packaged things, especially for people who can't get out. I've seen them offer to pick up groceries for others, offer rides to the doctor, and shovel each other's sidewalks. I got my rat traps from someone in the group, and I've given away a couple of things so far.