Mary Anne Mohanraj

Okay. I think I’m through the really intense sequence of one thing that HAD to be done right after another for three days, and back to normal levels of busy-ness. That was a bit much.

Plan for the rest of today — alternate e-mail & course prep with a bit of knitting and gardening for the next two hours, then go into campus and teach my 3 p.m. class, then come home and if not too tired, work on Kavi’s dress alterations.

Autopilot cowl coming along. I was distracted and did too many rows on the border before switching to the main pattern, but eh, it’s a cowl, it’ll be fine.

Mondays are normally long, but had an extra board meeting in the evening on top of it. So yesterday looked like this:

7 a.m. — up, dressed, showered, see if Kavi needs a ride to school (stayed home because convalescent, which saved me ten minutes)

8:30 a.m — got Anand’s lunch ready, packed up, out the door by 8:35. Collected Kevin and drove into campus.

9:30 a.m. — traffic was unusually horrible, took 15 minutes longer than usual, messaged students on Slack to tell them I’d just parked and would be 5-10 minutes late, stressful, I hate being late.

9:35 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. — taught. That was fun. I love teaching, most days.

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. — walked to department, joined monthly GLAS meeting on Zoom. I’m affiliate faculty, so don’t generally have a lot of responsibilities with GLAS these days, so listened to the meeting while simultaneously answering some urgent e-mails, chimed in on a few things with hopefully helpful comments.

12:30 p.m. – 1:30 — lunch break, in theory. In practice, packed up some Delany books I’m loaning a student, walked up to the mailroom to leave them in my box for him, walked down to the first floor cafe and got a chai and some chips to supplement the frozen saag tikka masala lunch I brought from home (brand Deep — was tasty, esp. when I added in the crushed red pepper I keep in my desk), ate lunch while answering more e-mail.

1:30 – 2:15 – SLF weekly meeeting on Zoom. Lots of stuff progressing, is good, will tell y’all more about it soon. Kickstarter launching Oct 1, mark your calendars! I’m going to be trying to raise about $15,000 for the Portolan Project, eep. Will be paying a lot of teachers a lot of honoraria.

2:15 – 2:45 — prep for my next class, organizing bookshelves in my office that had gotten chaotic, cleaning out old papers I no longer need, figuring out what I want to teach today — I came up with a new game for developing characters, which I called “Character Jam” — if I have time, will post about it separately. I think it worked pretty well.

3 – 4:15: taught next class.

4:15 – 5:30: drove home (commuting time is brutal, but I did manage to deal with two doctor’s appointments on the way, hooray for hands-free, and ended up talking to Jed for a while as well)

5:30 – 6:00: Hadn’t quite finished conversation with Jed, sat in garage for 30 minutes talking, until I got a text from the school board president reminding me that we had a special board meeting that night, earlier than the normal time.

6:00 – 8:30: Sat in basement and attended board meeting, which was actually a super-helpful overview of the last twenty or so years of the financial history of OPRF, board decisions, the financial crisis, the levy, etc. and so on. I have a much better understanding of it all as a result, and also of the evidence-based funding model at the state level. Big thanks to Tom Cofsky and Ralph Martire for putting in the time to organize those presentations and teach us all — as a new board member, it was particularly helpful to me.

8:30: board meeting still going, but hunger drove me upstairs (hooray for the ability to turn off Zoom video and mute) to grab a quick sandwich of Roshani’s chicken curry and bread to get me through; I was actually feeling a little faint. Must remember to eat even on busy days.)

9:30: board meeting finally ended. I had some things to do for my students, but I just hit my limit, so hopefully they don’t mind too much that they’re getting this reading a little late. Climbed into bed with a book.

(I’ve been on this weird Pern binge, reading the later books written by Anne’s kids. Not nearly as good, I think, but the completist in me is sort of satisfied to fill out the Pern history. I may write more at some point about what Todd McCaffrey did in writing the same story from multiple different points of view in multiple books — I don’t think it quite works, and I’d like to talk about why. Might be a better reading experience if I weren’t binging, though.)

9:45: asleep.

*****

Woke up today and I admit, I mostly don’t want to work at all. But the cleaners are coming at 1, the house is a disaster, so I’ve been straightening up so they CAN clean. I have a staff check-in at 11; I cancelled the 11-2 staff meeting I would normally have here at the house (we’re meeting out on the porch) because Anand has a doctor’s appt. at 1, and I have a dentist appointment at 3.

This evening, I’m going to probably spend a few hours making alterations on Kavi’s dress for HOMECOMING this Saturday, I can’t even. She picked a gorgeous dress, though. She’s going to look terrific in it.

Now, scanning in some materials for my students and uploading, if any are reading this here, thank you for your patience!