TGTiF

...thank goodness tomorrow is Friday.

It's been a brutal week, both out in the greater world and inside my own internal organs. (I'm feeling some better, thanks. Applesauce, plain yogurt, plain toast, and tea help. And thank goodness so far the P.M. symptoms seem to be isolated to "that week" and they seem to be solely physical with a slight, and easily recognizable by me, increase in ease with which I am irritated. No brain-fog yet, and I hope I don't get it. My mother never complained of same so maybe I'll be spared.)

I cleaned my office some this afternoon. (The mess that is my office is a running joke in the department. No one rides me too hard for it because (a) I can always be counted on to get everything done and (b) I never lose anything - well, for very long, anyway.)

I did this because my research student is coming tomorrow to get all the accumulated data and what journal articles I have on her topic, take them away, and hopefully write a stellar paper for me that will earn her an A.

I also gathered up some accumulated journals I had not taken time to look through - I don't read them cover-to-cover, at least not the heavy-duty ones (the more "current topics in ecology" type ones, I'm more inclined to - the articles are shorter and easier and often it's something I can incorporate into my teaching. And there are few things that bring me more joy than coming into a class and going, "You know that thing you learned about last week? Here's a study that looked at it and this is what they found.")

I'm going to spend a big chunk of the weekend, I think, reading and knitting.

This is one of the skills I've acquired in the past six years or so and it brings me great joy to have it. For one thing, having knitting to keep my hands occupied tends to keep my butt in the seat (and me reading) longer. Also, it seems to enhance my retention of information. (My brother, who has had classes in this sort of thing as part of his training to be a campus minister, claims it's a hallmark of "kinesthetic learning." I'm not totally convinced of those "different learning modes" but knitting while I read does seem to work for me).

And I enjoy reading, at least if the article isn't too dense or annoyingly written. (And yes, some scientists write in a way that annoys me. I can't quite pin it down but there seems to be an underlying humorless need to show everyone how smart they are). It's a way of tuning out from all the crap going on around me and training my mind on something else.

And, I don't know, I think it's good for my brain. You know how you feel really good when you eat some kind of nutritious meal? I feel that way after spending time reading stuff that challenges my mind and makes me think.

I have a journal article that is kind of in limbo - it's a big, ambitious, data-mining type project - that I really should pull out and work on again, seeing as the field season here is over.