Easing back into the flow

You know, I’ve been crippled up with tendinitis for a while, but I got the pain managed fairly quickly, and have since been in heal and repair mode, avoiding putting stress and strain on my ankle. I have not been happy about this, as you might guess. Today I took the bold step — actually, a whole bunch of steps — bundled up, put on a pair of loose fitting boots, and walked a couple of kilometers in -20°C weather.

I made it! I’m in even worse shape than I was before, so I’m a bit worn out, but I didn’t break anything, no tendons ruptured, I’m feeling no pain. I’m on the road to recovery! I just have to keep walking regularly, and next thing you know…the spring field season! Spiders re-emerge! I’ll be out in the weeds again, finding spiders while the ticks find me. It’ll be fun! As long as I don’t break anything again.

We can sleep when we’re dead

In a classic example of end-of-semester anxiety, I couldn’t sleep last night and got up at 2am to grade lab reports. They’re done! But now I’m either going to be a shambling, weeping mess for the rest of the day, or I’m going to get a second wind and turn manic. You never know! I do wish we had some good drugs in the house, but all I’ve got is ibuprofen and aleve.

See, students, it’s not just you suffering this time of year. Your professors are also going a bit mad.

The final hurdles are two final exams one week from today. I’ll probably make it, I think.

How to tell what time of year it is

Just look at how your college professor is armed for war.

Alternatively, you could look at their haggard face and haunted eyes. I tried that on myself, but fortunately for you, I decide my visage was probably too horrifying. If you think photos of spiders are gross, you don’t want to see me this morning.

My boring goal for this weekend

Next week is the last week of classes, so my goal is to be even more boring than usual, focusing on getting totally caught up in all of my grading and getting my final exams finalized. What that means is I’m doomed to days of mental torment, grinding away.

The good news, though, is that the physical pain has abated! I can walk without grimacing now — I can even go up stairs without whimpering. I’m still wearing a brace for a while longer to make sure the tendinitis doesn’t come back.

Maybe next week, with most of the administrative stuff done, I’ll be able to do some fun things with my new sprightly physicality.

Debooted!

Good news: I had a check up at the doctor today, and she said I don’t have to wear the mega-clunky boot anymore! Instead, I’m downgraded to a brace.

It’s progress. Now I just have to wear this clumsy thing for a month, and as long as there is no relapse, I’ll be free before Christmas.

I have to stop being optimistic

I got out of bed this morning looking forward to my visit to the doctor. My tendinitis pain has been greatly reduced, I’m able to walk without any pain at all, and I expected to be told I can finally get rid of The F$#*!ing Boot. But no, it was not to be. There’s still some residual inflammation — touching the back of my heel hurts something fierce — so the doctor wants to clear out that last little pocket of trouble.

Two more weeks of The Boot. Plus a 5-day pulse of prednisone. It’s the opposite of what I wanted to hear.

To give me something to look forward to, at the end of those two weeks they’ll reassess, and if the tendon hasn’t calmed down, it’ll be time to look into surgery. The way things are going, I’m just going to assume it’s going to go badly and that I’ll get to celebrate Xmas break by going under the knife.

Damn. Well, I needed to be trapped at my desk to do a lot of grading, anyway.

Oh no! It’s THURSDAY!

The most evil calendar would be one where every day is Thursday.

I made the mistake of looking at my calendar for the day.

Doom, doom, doom, doom.

Every gap in my schedule is filled with appointments. I’m about to go in, won’t emerge into the light of day again until sometime after 6.

This life isn’t sustainable

Everything is coming down on me right now — I think it will ease up around Thanksgiving, but that’s three weeks away. I’m coming home bleary-eyed and worn out.

I think the problem is that teaching is a performance, requiring me to present myself as enthusiastic and cheerful…and when that isn’t how I feel, the performance becomes increasingly difficult. If I can get rid of this stupid boot on Friday, and get my students through the next few weeks of rehearsals for their seminars, and if I can avoid coming down with anything else, the load will get lighter and maybe I won’t have to pretend as much.

Until then, don’t talk to me, I’m a bit snarly and bitey in the evenings.

Hmmm. I actually found this short video kind of helpful in giving me perspective.

Here’s the deal. I have enough. I’ve got a nice house, a stable income, good health care, and I feel zero pressure to make more money. I have no desire to be rich. Middle class is fine.

But then there’s the concept of precarity. I’m fine now, but will I be fine in the future? I can’t afford to retire, because then that income plummets, and worst of all, my health care goes away (isn’t this a screwy system, where health care is tied to employment, so if you retire at a time in your life when you’re most dependent on it, you lose it?). I also have to be concerned that when I retire, and when I die, I’m just abandoning my obligations to my partner. It’s also screwy that I can be co-equal and co-dependent with someone my entire life, but as soon as I die, she is left high and dry.

I think maybe that’s what makes me most anxious right now.

I’m probably going to be a bit punchy today

  • Reason #1: I’m off the prednisone and pain-killers, since the tendinitis agonies have now subsided greatly. I’m just stuck wearing The Boot to immobilize my left foot for a few weeks while everything presumably repairs itself. Good news, right? Except now I dread the return of the pain. Ask my wife about all the screaming and cussing that was going on last week.
  • Reason #2: Now my immune system is out of wack. With this round of drugs, I was immunosuppressed while teaching mobs of young men and women, and now I’ve developed a nasty hacking cough and sore throat. This is not good in a time of COVID-19. I should probably get tested soon.
  • Reason #3: Yesterday was meeting hell, and I’ve got the Zoomies now. On top of my classes, we had our annual tenure and promotion review meeting last night…for almost 3 hours. Three hours of pedantry and petty nit-picking. And that was after student seminar rehearsals. If my throat weren’t so sore I’d have been screaming.
  • Reason #4: We only got halfway through the list of promotion cases! We have to meet again tonight.

Reminiscing

I was just thinking that it was a strange coincidence that my ancestors, at least well back into the early 19th century, were all farmers and carpenters and such living here, in Western Minnesota, and that my grandfather had left this cold frigid place for the West coast after WWII, where I was born…and now I’ve ended up right back here. Well, almost — my grandparents and great grandparents and great-great grandparents etc. all lived even further north, on the flat basin of old Lake Agassiz, where the prairie was utterly flat and the winter winds could howl across the farm unimpeded by pesky hills. Then I stumbled onto a small collection of old photos.

Here’s my great-great-grandfather, Jens Westad. No, I never met him. The photo has to be from some time around the turn of the century.

I very much like the formal style. The really tall kid in the back is my great-grandfather, Peter Westad. I did know him, visited him fairly often, did chores like weeding his garden for him, but he died when I was 13. He was a handsome man, with a lovely thick mustache.

I think that photo would have been taken in his mid-twenties, maybe around 1906 when he married my great-grandmother, who was also wonderful and could make an excellent pie or fishhead soup. Here she is in a family portrait.

This one must have been taken sometime in the 1930s, before my grandfather, the young man on the far left, got shipped off to the far Pacific islands to build runways for the army.

I think that sometime this summer I should take a few days to visit the north country up around Gary and Fertile Minnesota since I seem to have fairly deep roots in that region. Not that anyone would remember the Westads, or that anything is left of their residence — damn, but we humans are impermanent — but it would just be nice to see a bit of the land that shaped my family.

Also…spider collecting trip!