Oh, so very tired

Last night, a migraine appeared as I was in physical therapy. It lasted most of the night (not conducive to good sleeping), and today I've had the lingering echo of it--along with the general feeling that the synapses in my brain aren't lining up quite right. I get a little bit of what I've started calling "migraine aphasia": words will arrive eventually, but there's often a long pause when I'm speaking while I wait for the word to turn up. (You know, words like, "novel," or "door.")

Nevertheless, I persisted: I've been knocking off some bits and orts around the edges, getting handouts ready, posting the critical sources I'm suggesting for the Nature in Lit students for their second essay (which involved figuring out a better way of getting print articles scanned into PDFs for posting--our jazzy new copiers in the mailroom, thank you very much), that sort of thing. And class went fine, as I've come to expect. In fact, I had to haul them out of the rafters a bit; they were having such a good time talking in their groups that they weren't listening to each other or to me, losing the thread of the main discussion. Some good stuff going on, though, understanding some of the social critique in Atwood's novels.

And I just like them, as a group. Plus, the student who didn't make it last semester decided to pull the plug early this semester and withdrew today. Good choice. (I didn't understand why he was back in the class, especially when he saw that I was the professor, but, well, there you go.)

Now, I'm sort of hanging on by my fingernails, waiting until it's close enough to 7 p.m. that I can take off. In a wonderful development, the admin has already decided to cancel all classes tomorrow, so I get a much-needed snow day before I head upstate on Thursday (and if the storm timing is as planned, the roads should be clear by the time I head out). I am, of course, deluding myself into believing that I may get some work done tomorrow and over the weekend when I'm away, so I'm schlepping a shitload of work home (and I'm almost caught up with the Nature in Lit class, just one quiz to grade, hooray). At very least, there's some housekeeping sort of stuff I can do. For instance, I just realized that I haven't been keeping up with recording which appointments have been kept for seminar hours (both in terms of the conferences I had with the 101 students and in terms of the actual mentoring I've been doing with other students). So that's something I can do from home, and it will give me the illusion of making progress.

I actually hope I do get some stuff done tomorrow, but mostly, what I want is sleep. Lots of it. A day in my bunny slippers (metaphorically speaking), watching the snow and snoozing. Absolute bliss. I'm probably happier about the snow day than my students.