Life update
It's been a relatively trying few days around Villa Villekula. One of those "everything that can go wrong will" sort of times in a bunch of different ways, leading to a bunch of grumping and touchiness from all of us. Here's hoping we're mostly past the ridiculously bad luck we've been having on all fronts. On the positive side, I've finally gotten my laptop sorted and working again. Also on the positive side, our new rubber flooring works as we wanted, and blocks water getting to the basement exactly as hoped. On the negative side, we discovered this because we moved the hot tub back into the room and refilled it. And discovered at 3am that it had developed a leak. It's all drained again and we're working on identifying the source. If we're really damned lucky for once this week, it'll be an relatively easy fix, but after the last few days I'm not feeling like expecting "really damned lucky" on much of anything. Argh. Also, the weather's fucking with all of us, and the associated achies combined with all the crap of the last few days have gotten us downright snippy at each other on a level we very rarely reach (thankfully). The truck's going into the shop for engine evaluation on Thursday, we finally got the blood work done on Fatty Lumpkin and are awaiting results of that (expecting hyperthyroid, and hoping for it among the possible explanations for his weight loss, etc, since it's relatively easy to treat).
This weekend was bizarrely up and down for me. A bunch of good social stuff: Casey's party, which also involved seeing the east side folks I really dig, and getting hanging out time with Katy, a date with Katy Sunday morning, seeing my brother Matt before he headed down to AL again, seeing Nikki on her way through town. And right in the midst of all of it, two conversations totally unrelated to the socializing that both hit me the wrong way and left me more upset and touchier than I've been in a long time, a half-hour bathroom crying jag at about the worst possible time, and just generally feeling like my emotions have been yo-yoing all over the place. That was mostly Sunday and Monday, and I'm feeling more like myself now, thankfully. Yesterday was a migrainey and physically craptastic day, but my overall mood improved throughout, despite it being "the day nothing went right" to such an extent that we couldn't even conquer the sandwich-making process.
I'm teaching tonight, and hopefully hanging out with Casey and household afterwards, but otherwise planning to have a pretty slow-moving day with a lot of sleep, a lot of West Wing (I'm toward the end of Season 4 now), and maybe some more priming and painting. Once we get four or five of us around, we can flip the hot tub up and see about identifying the leak. Wish us luck on the results of that endeavor.
Oh, and speaking of teaching, I did have a really enjoyable conversation with Liv and Grafton yesterday. All three of us work in the patient-instructing program, and every so often we get to geeking about teaching approaches. It's invariably a learning experience, since it gives us a chance to compare how we're teaching various aspects, and pick up suggestions and tips from each other. And because each of us works solo with the students (Liv and I teaching gyn, Grafton teaching GU), it's not a feedback and fine-tuning that happens as much when we're actually at work, so I really value when we end up having those conversations outside of work. Oh, and Casey just got a job working on getting the Sim Center's GTA/GUTA program up and running, so now we get to geek with her about this stuff, too. I'm so psyched she's going to be handling that. We don't know if the two programs will end up merging eventually, and I feel much more comfortable about that possibility with someone I trust as much as Casey in an oversight position.
I really do love my social circle. I was reminded of that by the party at Casey's and the conversations with Nikki and the household and Katy. I love how "silly and fucked up" can integrate so well with discussion of politics and sociology and feminism and health care and such. I suck at small talk. I only really come alive in conversations when I'm passionate about the topics at hand, and I love having so many people in my life who also value those kinds of discussions.
Also, funny Coco story. It's not one of our Coco weeks, so I tend to go out and see her about once a day when I hear her in the yard next door. Usually I just stick my fingers through the fence and she pressed up against it for scritches, but I decided that I'd walk around and come sit on Christina's porch so I could hang out with Coco more easily. Damn, did that confuse the little fluffhead! She just didn't know what to do with me being on the wrong side of the fence. She came running up, bounced backward again, lather, rinse, repeat, went to get Christina, came excitedly bouncing back _again_, still staying a foot or so away from me because it was confusing her so much that I was on the wrong side of the fence. She finally climbed up on me after I moved down from sitting on the step to sitting on the ground (she gets really freaked out by people being taller than her, which makes life as a 10-inch-tall dog a bit tricky). It was all very silly and giggleworthy.
So, yeah. That's where things are at the moment. A run of bad luck and craptasticness, but life doesn't suck.
This weekend was bizarrely up and down for me. A bunch of good social stuff: Casey's party, which also involved seeing the east side folks I really dig, and getting hanging out time with Katy, a date with Katy Sunday morning, seeing my brother Matt before he headed down to AL again, seeing Nikki on her way through town. And right in the midst of all of it, two conversations totally unrelated to the socializing that both hit me the wrong way and left me more upset and touchier than I've been in a long time, a half-hour bathroom crying jag at about the worst possible time, and just generally feeling like my emotions have been yo-yoing all over the place. That was mostly Sunday and Monday, and I'm feeling more like myself now, thankfully. Yesterday was a migrainey and physically craptastic day, but my overall mood improved throughout, despite it being "the day nothing went right" to such an extent that we couldn't even conquer the sandwich-making process.
I'm teaching tonight, and hopefully hanging out with Casey and household afterwards, but otherwise planning to have a pretty slow-moving day with a lot of sleep, a lot of West Wing (I'm toward the end of Season 4 now), and maybe some more priming and painting. Once we get four or five of us around, we can flip the hot tub up and see about identifying the leak. Wish us luck on the results of that endeavor.
Oh, and speaking of teaching, I did have a really enjoyable conversation with Liv and Grafton yesterday. All three of us work in the patient-instructing program, and every so often we get to geeking about teaching approaches. It's invariably a learning experience, since it gives us a chance to compare how we're teaching various aspects, and pick up suggestions and tips from each other. And because each of us works solo with the students (Liv and I teaching gyn, Grafton teaching GU), it's not a feedback and fine-tuning that happens as much when we're actually at work, so I really value when we end up having those conversations outside of work. Oh, and Casey just got a job working on getting the Sim Center's GTA/GUTA program up and running, so now we get to geek with her about this stuff, too. I'm so psyched she's going to be handling that. We don't know if the two programs will end up merging eventually, and I feel much more comfortable about that possibility with someone I trust as much as Casey in an oversight position.
I really do love my social circle. I was reminded of that by the party at Casey's and the conversations with Nikki and the household and Katy. I love how "silly and fucked up" can integrate so well with discussion of politics and sociology and feminism and health care and such. I suck at small talk. I only really come alive in conversations when I'm passionate about the topics at hand, and I love having so many people in my life who also value those kinds of discussions.
Also, funny Coco story. It's not one of our Coco weeks, so I tend to go out and see her about once a day when I hear her in the yard next door. Usually I just stick my fingers through the fence and she pressed up against it for scritches, but I decided that I'd walk around and come sit on Christina's porch so I could hang out with Coco more easily. Damn, did that confuse the little fluffhead! She just didn't know what to do with me being on the wrong side of the fence. She came running up, bounced backward again, lather, rinse, repeat, went to get Christina, came excitedly bouncing back _again_, still staying a foot or so away from me because it was confusing her so much that I was on the wrong side of the fence. She finally climbed up on me after I moved down from sitting on the step to sitting on the ground (she gets really freaked out by people being taller than her, which makes life as a 10-inch-tall dog a bit tricky). It was all very silly and giggleworthy.
So, yeah. That's where things are at the moment. A run of bad luck and craptasticness, but life doesn't suck.