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A Sort of Apology.
I feel I owe everyone who's read anything I've written for the past week or so a rather profound and massive apology. Unfortunately, the best you're getting at the moment is an explanation.
1) I've just returned to university for the second semester, and this semester appears to be moving at a rather rapid pace. I have two assessments due next week (one on the Friday night - a 1000 word media analysis; and the other the following Monday morning - a 1500 word short story, with exegesis and proof of drafting included).
2) Part of the process of getting organised for university means I'm having to reshuffle my daily routine, which currently includes about 50 minutes of writing work each morning (30 minutes writing a journal, 10 minutes working on a large piece of fanfiction, 10 minutes working on something original). I've been in the habit of getting this done first thing in the morning, when I'm still fresh, rather than trying to fit it in later in the day. Unfortunately for me, this semester all my classes are early morning ones - two of them are actually at 8am. An 8am start at uni means leaving the house around 7.30am from where we are (gives me enough time to know I'm going to be on time for the lecture - about 10 - 15 minutes of waiting time, in fact). If I'm leaving at 7.30am, and I want to get breakfast before I go, I have to take my thyroxine well before 5.30am (two hour exclusion period on things like dairy foods, calcium supplements and iron supplements means I take the thyroxine first thing when I wake up and wait 2 hours for breakfast). This, combined with the amount of time I take to get ready in the morning, means if I want to get my writing done before my day starts, so to speak, I have to get up at 5am. This, my body rather disagrees with in what is, for us, the middle of godsdamned winter, when the skies are still dark outside. I've shifted my going-to-bed time in the evenings (to about 8.30pm) but it means if I have even the slightest disturbance in my sleep, I start running low. Stress (like from incipient assessments) disturbs my sleep.
3) On Thursday last week, I received a phone call from the person who handles the bookings for the carpenter/handyman who works for the real estate agents who handles the property we're currently renting: they want to put in new kitchen cabinets, when would be a good time for us? Rather than saying "about three weeks ago, when we were on semester break and thus could have spared the time/energy/brainpower for having to pack up the kitchen on short notice" I decided to make the best of a bad bargain, and choose to have this done this week. Thursday, this week, in fact.
Which means, for the past week, I have been running about like a chook with its head cut off, packing away most of the contents of the kitchen, cleaning the house to a vaguely reasonable standard (such that the owner, when he inevitably shows up to sticky-beak, will not find the state of the place deplorable) and being utterly unable to concentrate on my assessments, or indeed anything which isn't concrete, practical and right in front of me right now. The world going to hell doesn't help either. Tomorrow (Thursday) the tradesmen are coming around to remove the old kitchen cabinets and sink, and put in the new ones, and hopefully this will only take the day they have forecast for the job (I hae me doots, and I'm informally planning for at least two nights where we're eating take-out - tonight and tomorrow night - and possibly more depending on the amount of problems they discover). I've pulled out a small selection of crockery and cutlery for myself and Steve to use over the next however long it takes for me to get around to things like unpacking the kitchen again. But yeah... I'm probably not going to be sane enough to get coherence from for the next couple of weeks at least (assignments due next week, non-teaching week the week after, which I currently have planned for things like "catching up on missed sleep and missed readings").
So, apologies for the rather frequent brainos I've been having over the past week. I will try to do better, but first I need to get my brain back...
1) I've just returned to university for the second semester, and this semester appears to be moving at a rather rapid pace. I have two assessments due next week (one on the Friday night - a 1000 word media analysis; and the other the following Monday morning - a 1500 word short story, with exegesis and proof of drafting included).
2) Part of the process of getting organised for university means I'm having to reshuffle my daily routine, which currently includes about 50 minutes of writing work each morning (30 minutes writing a journal, 10 minutes working on a large piece of fanfiction, 10 minutes working on something original). I've been in the habit of getting this done first thing in the morning, when I'm still fresh, rather than trying to fit it in later in the day. Unfortunately for me, this semester all my classes are early morning ones - two of them are actually at 8am. An 8am start at uni means leaving the house around 7.30am from where we are (gives me enough time to know I'm going to be on time for the lecture - about 10 - 15 minutes of waiting time, in fact). If I'm leaving at 7.30am, and I want to get breakfast before I go, I have to take my thyroxine well before 5.30am (two hour exclusion period on things like dairy foods, calcium supplements and iron supplements means I take the thyroxine first thing when I wake up and wait 2 hours for breakfast). This, combined with the amount of time I take to get ready in the morning, means if I want to get my writing done before my day starts, so to speak, I have to get up at 5am. This, my body rather disagrees with in what is, for us, the middle of godsdamned winter, when the skies are still dark outside. I've shifted my going-to-bed time in the evenings (to about 8.30pm) but it means if I have even the slightest disturbance in my sleep, I start running low. Stress (like from incipient assessments) disturbs my sleep.
3) On Thursday last week, I received a phone call from the person who handles the bookings for the carpenter/handyman who works for the real estate agents who handles the property we're currently renting: they want to put in new kitchen cabinets, when would be a good time for us? Rather than saying "about three weeks ago, when we were on semester break and thus could have spared the time/energy/brainpower for having to pack up the kitchen on short notice" I decided to make the best of a bad bargain, and choose to have this done this week. Thursday, this week, in fact.
Which means, for the past week, I have been running about like a chook with its head cut off, packing away most of the contents of the kitchen, cleaning the house to a vaguely reasonable standard (such that the owner, when he inevitably shows up to sticky-beak, will not find the state of the place deplorable) and being utterly unable to concentrate on my assessments, or indeed anything which isn't concrete, practical and right in front of me right now. The world going to hell doesn't help either. Tomorrow (Thursday) the tradesmen are coming around to remove the old kitchen cabinets and sink, and put in the new ones, and hopefully this will only take the day they have forecast for the job (I hae me doots, and I'm informally planning for at least two nights where we're eating take-out - tonight and tomorrow night - and possibly more depending on the amount of problems they discover). I've pulled out a small selection of crockery and cutlery for myself and Steve to use over the next however long it takes for me to get around to things like unpacking the kitchen again. But yeah... I'm probably not going to be sane enough to get coherence from for the next couple of weeks at least (assignments due next week, non-teaching week the week after, which I currently have planned for things like "catching up on missed sleep and missed readings").
So, apologies for the rather frequent brainos I've been having over the past week. I will try to do better, but first I need to get my brain back...