Countdown ...

Almost over the hump. I think. I hope. I’m trying to train my body to wake up early but that’s essentially just caffeination and not going back to sleep if I wake up at 5:30 AM. It’s Hell. I’m in Hell.

I’m writing this on Thursday, the date of our entrance ceremony for new students. I set an alarm for 6:00 to make sure I was up in time for the bus and ended up waking up at 2:50 AM. After failing to get to sleep for three hours I bit the bullet and got ready for work.

Everything was going quite well, I showered, dressed, walked to the uni (while watching an honest to God moon-rocket launch!!) and then caught a bus with the rest of the teachers to take us to the event.

I greeted new students as they came in, chit-chatted with teachers and then when we sat down my body realised “Hang on you’ve been awake 7 hours on about 3 hours of sleep and you haven’t given me anything but coffee!”. I may have used up too much energy when the Artemis rocket (aka, the aforementioned honest to Godmoon-rocket) took off. I think I scared our American lit teacher a little…

I’m trying to make a concerted effort to get rid of things in my office before I leave it, which for most people is easy. For me it involves scanning worksheets, finding new homes for board games and actually reading books before I get rid of them. I started Amberlough, a book my friend El over on ermreading gave me about six or seven years ago.

It’s very good and I’m kicking myself for not starting it sooner. Like all recommendations I am given, it is hard for me to actually make a start on anything until I'm in the right mood. It’s wonderful, I have a feeling it’ll vibe with anyone who liked SpyXFamily. It’s that same idea of a spy story against the backdrop of an imaginary world (but while SpyXFamily is more 1960’s inspired, Amberlough is firmly inspired by the roaring 20’s and the rise of fascism in Germany at the time).

I think I need to get back to making this blog mostly about media I'm reading/ writing/ watching/ playing so I can stay on track because the rest of the days just sort of ... merged into one.

Friday was mostly helping the exchange students get a handle on how to sign up for their classes on our system and grab a few students to work as Teaching Assistants for me because I am lazy and want other people to grade my student's quizzes want to get young people into teaching.

A larger selection of volunteers than we got last semester which is nice. We only had a handful of volunteers last year, and they were mostly for me and Cedric's research project into Mausritter. Speaking of which work on that has been glacial. His mother is visiting Japan and without someone to keep me on task I've been ignoring it. Part of me wants to ignore the lit review and jump right into our data and make charts and graphs and write about the trends. But I promised to be good and get the lit review done.

The weekend was a little dull in all honesty. I spent most of Saturday in bed and then went out to play Pokemon Go. It's cherry blossom season and I pride myself on doing cherry blossom season wrong. There's something I find beautiful about looking at a sea of green and seeing a splash of pink cherry blossoms in the middle of them.

Then on Sunday I gave myself food poisoning. Yuck. Hence why I'm writing this up Monday afternoon instead of Sunday evening.

Next week I'm going to get back to work as classes begin on Wednesday.

Wish me luck!