Finals Week! wOOOOOOOooooOOOooh

First day of finals week is in the bag. My students give oral presentations & turn in a letter of metacognition about their progress over the semester. 

Today was a small class, and they did mostly fine. Yes, some of them put it off until the last minute and it showed, but it was fine. 

But I forgot to bring food with me and had no lunch and came home and had a tasty small ish snack and my hubster is going to make a tasty dinner later. All good things. And the rest of this week I also have finals, with my busiest day being Wednesday, when I have two finals to give right in a row. That's gonna be a rough day; I love listening to finals, and my students are awesome, but six straight hours of listening to oral presentations about their paper topics is HARD, even when the presentations are good. 

SO what's the reason I'm posting? Procrastination, obviously. 

But also-- I have Things That Are Going On Backstage. Concerns and plots that we thought maybe were wrapped up but were actually maybe Chekov's storyline all along. And I dunno. I just wanted to mention it here, and say that sometimes, it's that duck that looks still and peaceful but is really padding under all that water. But I also feel a little like this lil' fella: 

So I'll stop for now and go grade some stuff. And remember to bring a lunch with me on the other days this week. And also remember this inspirational quote from Anne Lamott from Bird By Bird to remind myself that I can still take it one bird at a time. Even if that bird is a little kerfluffled. 

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said. "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

Sleep Can Be a Real Evasive Jerk Sometimes Ya Know?

When I was younger, I lived for a few years with my Grandmother. God, I loved that woman, even though she was difficult at times. But honestly, difficulty is the least of my worries far more often than not. These days I'm definitely team Let's Be Difficult As Often As Possible. I even named my Apple Watch after her because dammit if she doesn't still remind me to get up and go outside. 

(AND NO, GRAMMARLY, DO NOT RESTRUCTURE MY SENTENCES. I WANT IT TO BE THAT WAY. YOU CAN FIX SPELLING OR OBVIOUS SYNTAX ERRORS! NO STYLE CHANGES)!!!!

Okay. Sorry. Grammar argument with AI tone police.  Anyway. Back to my point. In the days she lived with us in Florida, back when my mom finally got her sh*t together enough to buy a house (and really, it wouldn't have happened without Grandma), my Grandma would get up Hella early. The kitchen was just off my bedroom, where I slept with the window open most of the time to the sound of the neighbor's backyard roosters clucking and screaming their "raise the sun" magic. 

Grandma would get up at 6 AM on a regular day and putter around in the kitchen. The cats would harass her, and she would call them "a bunch of beggars" and feed them affectionately anyway. 

And I would lie in bed, secure in the fact that she was there, and I'd need to get up and get ready for school (this is when I had finally figured out how to start college, thank you, Pell Grants). Only about a year before the hubster & I decided to go ahead and get hitched, & everything changed. 

That's a rambly way of saying now that I'm 55, sometimes mornings start ridiculously early because I start thinking of all the things I really need to do, and lying in bed with that process and sleep will not come back. Those frikkin' sheep evade me, and the hubster sleeping happily on his side of the bed just makes me want to poke him and say "you awake?" so he'll make me coffee. 

Submits as evidence: today, on a Sunday (which happens to be the hubster's birthday, so I need to figure out what we're doing for that), I am up dumb early. I woke up at like 5 something. I have papers to grade, and stuff to do, and I probably should exercise, and I am thinking of past things that I should do something about, but not 'til I have time to think, and yet, I am up at 5, thinking anyway, and yeah. "You Sheep Get Off My Lawn!" 

And it makes me wish I could call my Grandma, because you know she'd be up.