Top Left Quadrant: Summer Session, Week 7

Saturday, 20 June 2020

Summer Session, Week 7

I've noticed in conversations with friends that many of us are still adjusting to the loss of our pre-COVID life. And some things will not be coming back; some of those we may be happy to say good-bye to, but others we miss desperately. I want to be back in archives, for instance; a friend commented recently that she desperately wanted to go sit in a restaurant and be served a meal. As a result, I've found that many of us have unpredictable mood swings, "good days and bad days": it's really clear in the comments people have posted. Just writing this it finally dawned on me that we're all dealing with grief, which works much the same way. (Duh. Sometimes I'm slow.) So I thought it would be useful to talk about how we handle the bad days: do you have ways of changing your mood? do you just decide to go with it? Some balance?

Hoping that Dame Eleanor has survived her move, and COVID complications start to resolve for Oceangirl!

Goals from last week:

Daisy
1) Two figures for neglected paper
2) Work on now rescheduled fancy talk related to neglected paper
3) Data processing for favourite co-authors
4) Daily stretching and injury rehab
5) This week’s fun thing for both: brave the insane mozzies and try a camping night? Maybe…

Dame Eleanor Hull
(Carried over from week 5) Successfully get moving mammoth over the mountain!

Elizabeth Anne Mitchell
Proofread 1 hour x 5.
Edit 1 hour x 5.
Continue to clean up fallout from revising introduction outline, and remind yourself that it reads much better and is totally worth the work.
Contact co-editor.
Contact Office of Research for extension of grant-funded travel.
Spend two hours reading new articles on one presentation topic.

Heu Mihi
1. Write 2 single-spaced pages of Fairy Tales talk (a general-audience talk, so I don't feel too much research pressure here)
2. 2 Nunnery articles
3. Read one diss chapter (getting urgent!)
4. Write 30 minutes a day
5. Good Thing daily

Humming42
1 write and submit one book review
2 submit two essay peer reviews
3 write and submit two conference abstracts
4 write 500 words for Tiny Project

JaneB
1) self care - going to bed before midnight would be a sensible focus but we'll see...
1b) finishing up my summer plans (I get superstitious about this because that's usually the point at which I get ill or something else comes along and destroys them, but the act of planning is useful, right??).
2) setting up work for the theory workshop
2a) working on a draft text from LikesMaths
3) making a big outline and setting up a meeting for the giant first year thing (sigh. Thinking about this causes the Mood Mammoth to get grumpy for university-politics reasons)
3a) resist urge to nag about CollaborativeTHing except for one small area where I actually care, and postpone that until Monday evening in case someone else acts
3b) spend a chunk of time on Hated Paperwork, since I HAVE chunks this week... face it and it might turn into something easily squished, right?
4) reply to an email from FormerPDF which will take an hour or so as I have to hunt down details from years ago...
5) tick off another 5 things from the list of small but necessary jobs
6) have a two day weekend!

Oceangirl101
1. Work on Ch 7 4 days
2. Reread Ch 6 to outline rest of Ch 7
3. Medical appts
4. Exercise x 4
5. Fun x 2

Susan

1. Write four paragraphs of chapter, one a day for the rest of the week.
2. Make final decision on book orders
3. Read essays for article prize #1
4. Read essay for junior colleague to help her figure out how to reshape it for publication
5. Finish long overdue book review
6. 6 more journals
7. Keep walking
8. Make some healthy stuff with food from farmers market
9. Get regular sleep

40 comments:

Daisy21 June 2020 at 21:13
That was a very mixed week, a few good days followed by two lousy ones with a bad mood mammoth stomping all over the place… So this is a good reminder prompt – everyone has those days and we all need strategies to deal with them since a lot of our usual coping mechanisms are not available…

The thing that works best for me for a really bad day is to QUIT WORKING and GET OUT! I put that in caps because even though I know should do it, sometimes I delay, and then the bad day becomes a horrible day… OUT can be anything, local beach, neighbourhood walk, backyard visit with someone, aimless drive, take-out coffee, anything works as long as it is outside the house. To make bad days less likely or at least reduce the intensity I now know that I need at least one completely computer-free day every week, and an additional middle of the week computer-free half-day. The blinding headaches after four all-day screen days should have told me that earlier in this adventure but I did not listen well…
I find it ridiculous that so often we know exactly what works for something, and we know if we do it there will be improvements, but somehow we cannot bring ourselves to do it? Why is that???

This week I’m signed up for our university’s attempt at online teaching training. I will attend the first week’s sessions and decide whether to continue the full 4-week programme. I’m afraid it is going to be extremely basic (“now let’s all turn on our LMS!”) because that is the general problem with everything our teaching center puts on. I’m curious though, so if there is anything good in the first week three sessions I will stick with it. But if there is not I promised myself I would quit and not feel bad.

Last week’s goals:
1) Two figures for neglected paper NOPE
2) Work on now rescheduled fancy talk related to neglected paper LITTLE BIT, NOT USEFUL
3) Data processing for favourite co-authors YES
4) Daily stretching and injury rehab HALF-ASSED
5) This week’s fun thing for both: brave the insane mozzies and try a camping night? Maybe… YES! IT WAS GREAT. ALSO DID A BONUS BEACH TRIP to exorcise Thursday and Friday's bad days.

This week’s goals:
1) Two figures for neglected paper
2) Make full draft of talk set up practice days with trusted colleagues
3) MORE data processing for favourite co-authors, what can I say, I like being valuable to my co-authors…
4) Daily stretching and injury rehab and test run – must do better on this!!
5) This week’s fun thing for child: at least two outdoor visits with friends
6) Bonus fun thing for child: giant ice cream after online music exam
7) Fun thing for me: backyard visits with friends and beer
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heu mihi22 June 2020 at 16:35
I don't know about bad days. I have bad times at *night*, when I worry mostly about my son's ever being able to go back to school. Some days I'm bored and antsy, though, and usually I go for a walk or get some exercise...that helps.

This week:
1. Write 2 single-spaced pages of Fairy Tales talk - Yes, and more. I'm doing this 14-day-writing-challenge thing through NCFDD and it's really helped me make progress.
2. 2 Nunnery articles - Yes
3. Read one diss chapter (getting urgent!) - about 1/2, but at least I've started the diss
4. Write 30 minutes a day - Yes
5. Good Thing daily - 5/7, I think

This week:
1. Finish draft of Fairy Tales talk
2. Read rest of diss ch. 1, all of diss ch. 2
3. 2 Nunnery essays
4. Compile teaching section of promotion dossier
5. Write 30 minutes/day (x5)
6. Good Thing daily
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Elizabeth Anne Mitchell22 June 2020 at 18:44
Oh, I'm doing that 14-day challenge starting next Monday. I did one last fall, and it was so helpful.
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Elizabeth Anne Mitchell22 June 2020 at 20:19
Topic: Last week was a string of bad days, as it marked several familial losses, one of whom was a niece who committed suicide at age 25 six years ago today. I tend to let myself mourn, but the silver lining is that it makes most other things diminish in their importance and annoyance. When the minor things start to get to me, I take a walk, or sit outside and drink some tea. When I am really annoyed, I clean. I can get out a lot of aggression by scrubbing the kitchen sink, and it turns out to be a win/win. My house mates know not to get in my way when I start madly shredding papers, although they usually intervene when I start folding or hanging clothes in that mood.

I am also very happy the weather has been good, and we can have a few friends over to sit in the back yard at an appropriate distance. Even so, as many have said here, it is hard to live with uncertainty. We have an all-faculty call with the VP of Finance this Thursday, which makes both me and the Philosopher nervous. Although we are tenured, we are close to the normal world’s retirement age. We worry more about the contingent faculty and untenured colleagues, but we will listening closely as well. I try to fight the anxiety of uncertainty with meditation and breathing.

Last week’s goals:
Proofread 1 hour x 5. Yes!
Edit 1 hour x 5. Yes!
Continue to clean up fallout from revising introduction outline, and remind yourself that it reads much better and is totally worth the work. Put in just over an hour a day.
Contact co-editor. Just barely, but it counts.
Contact Office of Research for extension of grant-funded travel. Not yet. First, I have to find out when I can get back into the research library. After that, I’ll contact the Office of Research.
Spend two hours reading new articles on one presentation topic. No, although I did find and download all the articles I could on all three of the presentations, so that was a good step.

Analysis: As I said above, it was a tough week. I did get a fair amount of little things done, and some bigger cleaning projects. The uncertain future bugs me, and talking with my colleagues during our virtual conference the last two weeks is not reassuring. Lots of state universities are pushing early retirement options--one friend at a southeastern public joked that the university was offering $5 Starbucks gift cards. So it was with a bit of angst that we heard that some library personnel were being recalled to work on campus--the library administration said it was a “return to work” order, to which the Philosopher wrote back that he had been working all this time, thank you very much. Luckily for us, if not for them, it is mostly clerical staff who have had difficulty working from home--it’s hard to unpack boxes of approval books from home, for example. My work is only slightly less mobile than teaching faculty, with the main difference that I really have to be in person to teach rare books.

Next week’s goals:
Read two articles on one of the presentation topics.
Edit 1 hour x 5.
Proofread 1 hour x 5.
Follow up with co-editor.
Contact Office of Research for extension of grant-funded travel.
Figure out what to work on in the two week writing course.

I hope everyone is hanging in there! Float like mist.
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Dame Eleanor Hull23 June 2020 at 15:41
The mammoth is over the mountain.

There was one terrible half-hour when I thought it was going to drop dead, near the summit, and leave me not only with the very large, very messy carcass but also with the unbelievable amount of paperwork that falls upon the hapless handler who has a revived-extinct animal die in her care. But the Talking Cats stood on their hind legs and dug their claws into what they could reach and yowled as loudly as they could, and the mammoth tottered on till it crested the trail and started on the downhill slope.

Now we have to do a great deal of mammoth-grooming and cleaning up, not to mention a certain amount of paperwork (even for a live mammoth, there's paperwork), but the big hurdle is over. And there's a bit of time before the hippogriff is due!
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Susan24 June 2020 at 04:16
I deal with the bad days in two different ways. Sometimes I just give in and crash: I've been giving myself quite a bit of permission on this through pandemic times. But I just finished reading the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu's Book of Joy, and they talked about how they reframed bad things -- pulling out from the immediate and local. So I've been trying to do that. (And face it, what those two have faced is much more challenging than what I'm facing!) So focusing on how to reframe is key. Not always successful, but an interesting discipline.

Goals from last week:
1. Write four paragraphs of chapter, one a day for the rest of the week. NO, didn't touch it
2. Make final decision on book orders YES
3. Read essays for article prize #1 NO
4. Read essay for junior colleague to help her figure out how to reshape it for publication NO
5. Finish long overdue book review DRAFT DONE
6. 6 more journals YES
7. Keep walking YES, kind of
8. Make some healthy stuff with food from farmers market YES
9. Get regular sleep Maybe 5 days?

Well, Tuesday morning I was out for my walk and tripped and fell. It turns out that the laws of physics are not optional: gravity and momentum matter! Since I was walking fast I fell hard; I had/have bruises on my face & chin, my shoulder, wrist and hand, and my knee. Nothing broken, but I was pretty shaken up by the experience. So I slowed down a lot. I cleared out emails, did minor things, but didn't push myself. I got back to walking after a few days, but... I also had to take my mother to a dr appointment, and I saw my own dr. both virtually and in person. Those things really break up the day. But I feel good about where I am, and I'm just going to keep chugging along.

The week ahead will be shaped both by the arrival of my new desk on Tuesday and a heat wave with my fragile a/c. Repair person coming on Friday... The pandemic is peaking here (we hope) around now, so I'm not doing any in person stuff.

Goals for next week:
1. Read essay for colleague
2. Read book proposal
3. Spend an hour three days on Famous Author, write something
4. Six more journals
5. Clear desk at weekend in preparation for the arrival of the new desk / reorganize books.
6. Keep walking
7. Try to turn out the light before 11 (this seems to be the magic divide between good nights and bad nights)

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humming4224 June 2020 at 04:43
I wish I had an effective way to manage the bad days. Strategies include: picking myself up and doing one little thing for self-restoration, eating excessively, sleeping, lots of self-flagellation, and leisure reading. I don’t feel like I’ve had a decent stretch of productive days since before spring break/being homebound. I am really wanting to raise the bar for myself for the remainder of summer. There’s much work ahead, and summer teaching is just two weeks away.

Last week:
1 write and submit one book review: yes
2 submit two essay peer reviews: one of two
3 write and submit two conference abstracts: one of two
4 write 500 words for Tiny Project: yes

This week:
1 present at online conference
2 submit two essay peer reviews
3 write 500 words for Tiny Project/online class
4 write 1000 words for Perform
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JaneB24 June 2020 at 10:10
Right, well, bad days just come. I'm not doing great, because there is SO MUCH RIDICULOUS WORK - and some of it is self-inflicted, like CommunityThing, but on the other hand that is often the only thing I do that feels meaningful and kind and valued by other humans (as opposed to demanded by bureaucrats. They don't seem to know how to value anything), and doing a bit of that often helps with the bad days. It's a mix of grief for what was and grief for the future and hoping I'm WRONG and watching the Arctic blaze and hoping I get to die in the opening scenes of the dystopian future movie because I'm struggling NOW - though at least the Deanlets wouldn't be sending me contradictory demands in a burning wasteland? Although... actually, that sounds exactly like the sort of petty power a Deanlet would retain! External examining and exam meetings this week so still mired in the closing academic year, mostly. YUCK. And a heatwave. And my desk is in the hottest point in the house. BUT on the plus side there are still oscillating fans in stock on Amazon, so I have ordered one on the basis that a) it's arrival will probably coincide with (if not cause) the current heat to go away and b) this won't be the only heat wave this summer.

Aargh ran out of self-appointed blogging time. Feck it. Quick report & goal-setting:
LAST WEEK
1) self care - going to bed before midnight would be a sensible focus but we'll see... it would be but I often didn't.
1b) finishing up my summer plans - well, sort of. I've made some very pretty charts!
2) setting up work for the theory workshop - made a start
2a) working on a draft text from LikesMaths - I'm up to the discussion section so nearly done
3) making a big outline and setting up a meeting for the giant first year thing (sigh. Thinking about this causes the Mood Mammoth to get grumpy for university-politics reasons) - had two meetings so far, it's... a big hill of stinky mammoth poop but thank heavens for wonderful colleagues who keep reminding each other that at least mammoths are herbivores and making jokes about how other teams have to climb Smilodon poo heaps and generally being their creative, delightful selves (and I have to admit I like them all the more for being the tired, sweary, pet-and-child-accosted versions of themselves, because it's so good to have colleagues you trust enough that they are honest with you and you are honest with them when everything is crap)
3a) resist urge to nag about CollaborativeTHing except for one small area where I actually care, and postpone that until Monday evening in case someone else acts - worked wonderfully! Possibly because in that area all the volunteers are female and at least three of us are compulsive volunteers...
3b) spend a chunk of time on Hated Paperwork, since I HAVE chunks this week... face it and it might turn into something easily squished, right? - spent a chunk. Hate it. Not easily squished.
4) reply to an email from FormerPDF which will take an hour or so as I have to hunt down details from years ago... nope
5) tick off another 5 things from the list of small but necessary jobs - made it to 9! Added another 11! Hey-ho.
6) have a two day weekend! - yes and it went better than the last one (found new enjoyable YA novel, made cake that was not a failure despite high level of improvising involved, ate cake...)

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JaneB24 June 2020 at 10:10
THIS WEEK
1) self care - going to bed before midnight (already failed twice...)
2) more setting up work for the theory workshop - finalise the web site and get the adverts out
2a) finish draft text from LikesMaths
3) make progress on big outline for the giant first year thing (sigh. Thinking about this causes the Mood Mammoth to get grumpy for university-politics reasons)
3a) do action points from last CollaborativeThing meeting
3b) spend a tiny chunk of time on Hated Paperwork, as I don't really have time - see external examining, I have about 110 long projects/reports/essays (3000-6000 words) to read for another uni and have to be done by next Monday
4) reply to an email from FormerPDF which will take an hour or so as I have to hunt down details from years ago... well, tell her I'm aware of its existence anyway
5) tick off another 5 things from the list of small but necessary jobs
6) have a two day weekend!
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oceangirl10127 June 2020 at 11:38
Hi All,

I am making some headway on post-COVID complications, so thanks for the shout out about that! Tongue/mouth issues are clearing up with anti-histamines and thrush outhwash. Bloodwork suggests the virus pushed me into rapid menopause, which is ok given my age. And it pushed me into major anemia, so taking B12 and iron to fix that. These issues are likely why my hair has been falling out and why I am so exhausted. Also explain waking up in the middle of the night hot and trouble sleeping. Head/sinus scan shows I need sinus surgery so I am scheduling that for late July. This gives me a real deadline to try to push for the end of the book writing- ideally I can wrap up Ch 7 and write a quick Ch 8 before the surgery. I mourn going to the movies but mostly being able to do fieldwork abroad and to travel to see family. I have managed to get access to my lab, so I do social distance lab work with my two graduate students which allows me to feel like my research is being pushed along. Social distancing walks and meals with friends outside on our yards helps with the need for social contact as well.

Oceangirl101
1. Work on Ch 7 4 days Yes
2. Reread Ch 6 to outline rest of Ch 7 Sort of
3. Medical appts Yes
4. Exercise x 4 No- need to refocus on this in the coming week
5. Fun x 2 Yes

This week:
1. Ch 7 x 4 days
2. Outline list for upcoming pubs with post doc and collaborator
3. Tax stuff, finalize
4. Medical appts
5. Exercise x 4 including some swimmign
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Saturday, 20 June 2020

Summer Session, Week 7

40 comments: