Category: crankiness

I liked the gingerbread plan better.

So, I see that it has been 9 days since my last big whine of a post. Consider this post a continuation of the last one. And let me start by giving a warning: there will be mentions of vomit.

I had a commute day last Wednesday, for something work-related, but not something that leads to any sort of progress towards my degree. Thursday I miraculously managed a full day of work, finally making progress on the list of things I’d been trying to do the week before on a group project. Friday was going to be another commute/meeting day, so when we were all snowed in again, it didn’t feel like a huge loss in productivity to have my lab meeting by conference call instead. (Though it was a bit awkward, as John had a conference call at the same time, so neither of us was available to corral the kids. We put on a movie, which contained Phoebe pretty well, but Theo wandered in to contribute to my conference call several times. Mostly asking me to go watch the movie.) Then there came the weekend, during which I typically end up completely wiped out by the time the kids go to bed. But I wasn’t too stressed. The following week there were going to be 5 days of childcare, two days of which (Monday and Tuesday) I had no meetings or doctor’s appointments scheduled, and surely I would be able to get back to my own research project.

When Phoebe woke me up before 6 on Monday morning with a fever and an earache, I considered dropping out of my PhD program right then.

Happily, Phoebe perked right up with some Motrin, and John decided he could take her to his office for a few hours. However, with their late-morning departure coupled with other home and family things I had to deal with, I didn’t manage to start on my work till noon. That theoretically gave me about 4 hours to do work before it would be time to pick up Theo, but my focus pretty much sucked.

Tuesday I had the day with still feverish Phoebe, which included taking her to her preschool for picture day, and taking her to the doctor’s office. In between, we went out for lunch and went to CVS. Afterwards, we had a bit more than an hour before it was time to pick up Theo. I squeezed in a few work-related tasks while Phoebe re-enacted picture day with my camera, John’s tripod, and a whole lot of stuffed animals.


Yesterday, Phoebe still had her fever, but John was able to stay home. I took Theo to daycare, and rushed off to a doctor’s appointment, which had been rescheduled from the afternoon in anticipation of the upcoming snowstorm. I drove into Cambridge for a work-related thing right after, and then back home just ahead of the snow. When I picked up Theo from daycare, I was optimistic that he’d be able to go to daycare again in the morning, as the snow was expected to be stopped by early morning. (Phoebe would still need to be home, as daycare policy is that kids need to be fever-free for 24 hours before returning.)

As we waffled about what to have for dinner, Theo sat on my lap and we looked at some pictures on my computer. He complained that his stomach hurt. Then he threw up. All over himself, me, the couch, the floor. (Happily, my open laptop was mostly spared.) The rest of the evening was spent cleaning up, and tending to miserable children. Phoebe didn’t want Theo in the same room with her, as she totally dreads vomit (not that any of us like it…). She ended up going to sleep in our bed. After a change of clothes, I sat holding Theo, empty yogurt container and towel-like things at the ready. I realized that we weren’t likely to fall asleep, and I certainly wasn’t going to be able to do work or read. So we watched a movie on the couch (the couch that wasn’t torn apart for cleaning),which distracted Theo nicely. My dinner ended up being some bread, eaten on the couch while I held Theo. Eventually, Theo and I went to settle down for the night on Phoebe’s toddler bed. (We didn’t want him alone in his crib since we were still expecting more vomit.)

Today, though home sick, both kids have seemed largely fine. But there was so much snow that we probably couldn’t have gotten them to daycare and preschool anyhow. It took most of the day to shovel out, as we had to take turns staying inside to referee the kids. The day was remarkably uneventful, if completely unproductive. (Not counting snow removal and additional vomit-related damage control.) And I was very regretful that all of these events didn’t even leave me enough time to bake more gingerbread.

As of now, both kids are asleep in their own beds. I am fully looking forward to sleeping with my legs fully extended in an adult-sized bed.

Theo asked for “the drum” (our nickname for the big empty yogurt containers) several times today, but didn’t end up needing to use it. Actually, what he said was “I need to put some corn in the drum.” (Apparently he’d had corn for lunch yesterday.) He’d sit with his face over the drum, cheerfully half-singing, “Here it comes! Here comes the corn!” Then he’d say “achoo!” (Clearly he is not as traumatized by vomiting as Phoebe.)

Sometimes it feels like the universe is conspiring to keep me from getting my work done.

After an hour and a half of shovelling with the snow still accumulating as I shoveled, coupled with not seeing any signs of a snowplow on our road till almost 10:30, I realized that it was not feasible for me to get the kids to daycare and preschool this morning.

Yesterday the kids had a late start due a dentist appointment, and for related reasons which I may get into here later, I ended up keeping Phoebe home with me while I tried to do work. (I managed some, but not a full day’s worth.)

Last week, as I mentioned, I did not get home, as scheduled, on Tuesday night. (Due to the snow in Boston.) And while I did get home reasonably early on Friday, it was following a pretty hellacious red-eye-with-a-connection during which I probably got about an hour of sleep (cumulative). All night. (The “overnight” flight from San Francisco to Chicago was about 3 and a half hours long, starting at midnight. I had trouble falling asleep, but finally managed to about half way through the flight. Only to be awakened shortly thereafter by a man in the row behind me, who was apparently watching the in-flight movie, and forgot that he was wearing headphones when he very loudly asked the flight attendant for a beverage. (Tomato juice.) (Two cans of tomato juice.) (Which he then proceeded to slurp.) (LOUDLY.) I was so annoyed that I didn’t fall back asleep till the descent, and woke up on landing. Then I had a 2-hour layover, which isn’t long enough for a nap, and then a 2-hour flight to Boston. I dozed off a couple of times during that flight, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve been in lecture classes during which I got more sleep. Seeing as I had an hour of driving to do to get home, I caffeinated myself up at the airport before going to my car.

By the time I got home a bit after 1:00 p.m. on Friday, I was tired and wired, and while I theoretically had about 3 hours to work or sleep before John brought the kids home, in practice I successfully managed neither.

While I have managed to get some work done here and there over the last 2 weeks, mostly at night, I have not had a full workday.

I was completely caught off guard by today’s snowstorm. Having only checked my weather widget, I saw a forecast high of 38, along with the icon for a mix of rain and snow. I hadn’t realized that these events would be after a night and day of cold temps and heavy snow. Right up to the point when I came in for a break from shovelling once I’d seen the snowplow, and saw how late it was, I really and truly thought that I would be able to have a productive day. In the end, I realized that the universe had other plans for me.

The universe wanted me to bake gingerbread.

Welcome, 2011! (Please suck less than 2010 did.)

Here we are, welcoming in another new year. Which is, quite frankly, a big relief. Because, chances are, this new year will be better than last year. If not, please allow me to enter a coma. Right now.

2010 was The Year of Big Suck.

I know I whine, and I know things could have been worse. (Believe me, I’ve imagined ways in which things could have been worse.) But let’s face it, this has been a Really Bad Year™ for my family. It wasn’t All Bad, certainly, but the ratio of Good to Bad was dramatically lower than in most years. Especially given the size of the Bad. When a loved one in the family has cancer, it is hard to imagine the size of the Good to offset it. When that loved one is a small child, even daily deliveries of home-baked cookies, fuzzy puppies, and attractive massage therapists would barely provide a distraction. And not only did I not get any such deliveries, the year instead delivered international catastrophes as well as other more localized family- related, friend-related and personal woes.

I’m not a big one for New Year’s resolutions, but I have often enjoyed looking back in nostalgia at the events of the previous year. “Nostalgia” is not quite the right word the way I feel about this past year. In addition to the aforementioned Bad Stuff, I remember being sick. A lot. I was sick something like 9 times in the first few months of the year, and then got a severe case of poison ivy that lasted for weeks. And while I haven’t really wanted to mention it here, I’ve been feeling pretty awful, as in physically unwell, for a while. Like probably 2 years. I had attributed a lot of that to lack of sleep, but then even once I started getting sleep, I still haven’t felt well. There’s certainly been a lot of worry, and so I thought that (and the ensuing stress-related dietary tendencies) was to blame. But things have been ongoing in spite of various adjustments. (I finally got around to making an appointment to start to address the problem.)

I finally decided to make a push to make progress with my degree, but due to complications of life, health and family, the progress (while not imperceptible) was slower than I’d hoped. The year ended up on a disappointing note after I gave up on a deadline I’d been pushing for.

2010 wasn’t all bad, certainly, and maybe I’ll try to write about its better moments. But not today. Today I’m still holding a grudge.

I am optimistic that 2011 will be a better year. My nephew has finished his treatments, and hopefully he will recover soon from the treatments and the complications so that he can get back to the important business of being a little kid. I am hopeful that I can get my own health in order, and can speed up my own progress with my degree. It looks like this year will involve potentially a lot of travel, and that’s a good thing in my book. In addition to some trips for family-related things (I’m heading to California in a few days!), I am hoping to go to at least one conference in some exciting place. Maybe even Hong Kong.

So, welcome, 2011! I look forward to seeing what you can do.


With 2010 coming to an end, things are looking up for 2011…


…unless this guy is right. In which case things are just coming to an end in 2011.

crunchy bits and squeezy bits and cranky bits

I started this post a week ago. I have a lot of drafts of posts lying around collecting dust. Seriously, I must have well over a hundred draft posts in various stages of completion. And seriously, I think they are dusty. Some of them even have cobwebs.

—

Life has been hectic again (when hasn’t it?) and I’m trying to fit all the bits and pieces together.

A large item that’s been on my mind is that I’m finally going to try to make a push to finish my degree. Sadly, I am really not all that close, even to being ABD. I finished my coursework ages ago. But coursework was the easy part, what with the structure and the regular, manageable assignments with regular, manageable deadlines. My other requirements are larger and more nebulous, with typically much fuzzier deadlines. I have this bad tendency to push off my own research until I’ve worked my way through my other obligations. The trouble is that my other obligations manage quite easily to fill up all of my available time.

Since May, Phoebe and Theo have been in childcare 5 days a week, an increase from the 3 or 4 days they had been going. This gives me more available time. In theory. In practice, there have been more weeks than not during which there was at least one holiday, vacation day, or sick day. Since May I have travelled to a conference in Chicago for work, visited my family in California, visited my in-laws in New York several times, had a short trip to New Hampshire, a visit to New York City for BlogHer, and then most recently another trip to Chicago for a funeral. My job has kept me busy with deadlines for conferences and papers, plus meetings and running subjects. Our house continues to kick my butt, with its demands for upkeep. My head has been full of concern for family and friends.

Each time I have gone back to my own research, I have had to regroup, and remind myself of what I was doing, what I’d done last, and what I was about to do. (I’m working on figuring out better systems for keeping myself on track and moving forward, but I will probably save that for another post.)

—

I know that I can do better than this. I feel like I’ve just been making excuses. I used to be an effective and productive person. I’m trying to get there again, and right now it feels a lot like crunching. I’m trying to squeeze everything tighter to make room for my research. Honestly, all this compression has made me cranky.

One of the few places I can find time to squeeze is my time spent online. Since I rarely get to see friends in person, I’ve been clinging to my online world, the interactions with friends I see in blogland and on Facebook. But I have to cut back. I have started cutting back. (In the last couple of months or so, I’ve had several unhappy exchanges and experiences that have soured my online world and that has helped me pull back. Though, again with the cranky.)

Since I started blogging several years ago, I have spent a lot of my time offline (such as while I’m driving or doing laundry or dealing with other largely thoughtless tasks) thinking about my life online. Often thinking about posts I’ve read, or posts I’d like to write. I somehow need to shift my focus so that I spend that time thinking about articles I’ve read and papers I should be writing.

I’m not saying I’m going to quit blogging, but I can’t participate as much I have in the past. I probably will start leaving even fewer comments, even though I intend to keep reading posts.

I still hope to post here from time to time. Maybe even a couple of times a week if I can do so in a constrained amount of time. I hope to dust off some of the drafts that have been piling up for the past several years, and maybe I’ll still manage to get out some of the ones that have been cluttering up my head.

I’ve been sticking with Project 365, taking and posting at least one picture a day, and that will probably continue to be my main creative outlet. Taking pictures is something I can do in a few minutes if I need to, or that I can do during my time spent with Phoebe and Theo.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post, but it feels like I’ve been leaving my blog hanging.


This photo doesn’t really have anything to do with anything in this post, but I like it.

for crying out loud

You know what? I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in well over a year. At 19 months, Theo still does not sleep through the night.

I could probably count the number of times on one hand that I have gotten a stretch of sleep that is longer than 4 hours. (Theo does sleep longer stretches than that, often from about 8:30 to about 2:30. If I could bring myself to go to bed at 8:30, I could probably get a 6-hour stretch…) Mostly, I go to bed too late, wanting to have time unfettered to get on my laptop and tend to other things. As a result, I rarely get to bed before 1 or 2.

Theo is still sleeping in our room, in a portable crib. At least for the first part of the night. After he wakes up in the night, I take him to bed with me. I don’t typically sleep all that well after that. 6:15, when the alarm clock goes off, comes all too soon.

What this means is that I am not getting enough sleep, and not nearly enough deep sleep. As a result, I have felt like I have developed a cognitive impairment. I have trouble focusing. My memory is leaky. My head is foggy. This does not lend itself well to making progress towards a PhD.

Something’s got to change.

I really didn’t expect Theo to still be sleeping in our room at this age. I think Phoebe started sleeping in her own room around 6 months old. When we were getting ready for Theo’s arrival, we got Phoebe a toddler bed so that the crib would be available. The plan was to move Theo in there, into Phoebe’s room, once he started sleeping well at night. (No sense in waking Phoebe in the night, right?)

So…that hasn’t happened.

It amazes me how different Phoebe and Theo are with respect to their sleeping patterns. Phoebe started sleeping through the night really early. Too early, even. We had to wake her to feed her in the night her first few months. It was a relief when she was gaining weight steadily enough that the pediatrician gave us the go-ahead to let her keep sleeping.

And then there’s the whole sleep training business. With Phoebe, she used to fight us at bedtime. It got to the point, maybe around 7 months, where we would be spending over an hour rocking her and singing to her to put her to sleep, and she’d spend most of that time crying, not wanting to go to bed. It made it easy for us to decide to try some “cry it out” sleep training. She was already crying anyway, and we were exhausted.

With Theo, we could put him down in his crib, and one of us would just need to sit near him a few minutes and he’d be asleep. There didn’t seem to be much urgency to change things, and things were so calm and quiet, with nobody crying. Now that he’s older, it’s a bit more variable, and sometimes he needs someone to sit with him longer to fall asleep.

But he still wakes up.

We even gave sleep training a brief go. 3 exhausting nights, with one angry baby screaming for over an hour. And no real progress. I think we’ve missed the optimal window for that.

I think that maybe if he’s out of our room, he’ll sleep better. Maybe having Phoebe in there will help him fall asleep without one of us needing to sit with him. On the other hand, he may just disrupt Phoebe’s sleep.

We’ve come really close to moving him out of our room several times. But somehow I always find reasons to put off the transition. (I hate transitions! I’m tired enough as it is, thankyouverymuch.) There were some practical concerns, too, though. Like needing to move the crib away from the lamp. Now the furniture is finally rearranged. And once we figure out a secure way to cover the outlet that is within easy reach of the crib (he pulls out the little plug things), I think I will be out of excuses. Theo will be moving in with Phoebe.

I just wish I knew how all of this was going to work out.

Theo, still not sleeping in the crib.

head in a fog

I’ve come down with a bad cold, and my head is in a total fog. It’s really remarkable how hard I find it just to put words together. (I tried to write something funny, but apparently my sense of humor has been impaired by the virus, along with my sinuses. Or maybe my sense of humor resides in my sinuses, and is now inflamed.)

I also find myself really annoyed that this is the 4th time I’ve been sick in as many weeks. I’m not sure what my point is, beyond, um, blech.

I guess I should be relieved that this cold waited to strike till after I was done co-teaching my class last week. (It was a week-long intersession class on prosodic transcription.) As it was, I really enjoyed the class. And found myself quite relieved to not be pregnant while teaching it this time. (This is the third time we’ve put on this class. The first time, I was 8 months pregnant. The second time I was only a few weeks pregnant, and had morning sickness.)

—

Meanwhile, Holly and I have been making great progress with our project to highlight some of the best Just Posts of 2009. We’re quite grateful to have gotten loads of help from readers, bloggers and other friends. Since evaluating posts is so subjective, in the interest of fairness, we are having each post evaluated independently by 2 different reviewers.  Holly and I will then be making the final cut based on the ratings and comments we’ve received, plus our own two cents. (Or possibly 4 cents, since there are two of us. Is someone keeping track of the pennies?)

We’re getting close to having our reviews together, but there’s still more to be done. (A few batches of posts to review have gone astray due to spam filtering or other irreconcilable email woes, and need to be reassigned.) So, if you have the time and inclination to join in (or join in some more!) and look at 5 or 10 posts over the next few days, let us know.

blue state blues

I’m feeling blue today.

Massachusetts held its special election yesterday to fill the seat that had been held for decades by Senator Ted Kennedy.

I did not like the results.

Massachusetts is considered by many to be a liberal stronghold. What has come to be known as a blue state. I like it that way. I like it that we allow same sex marriage. I like it that there have been reforms to the health care system in our state, and that measures have been taken here to ensure that everyone has access to health insurance. Legislation and voting in this state often reflects progressive values. In case you hadn’t guessed, those are my values.

Now my state has elected a senator whose values greatly diverge from my own. As Keith Olberman put it:

In short, in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history, this man would have been laughed off the stage as an unqualified and a disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives.

And you know what? I’m not just blue. I’m angry.

a totally private email to WordPress about “post by email”

Dear WordPress,

I really like your “post by email” feature. It’s so cool, in that it lets me compose emails offline in my favorite mail application. I love the ease of formatting. I’ve found that including images in a post is actually much easier. It’s really great. I use it all the time now.

And I really like that you can send a post to the drafts folder rather than publishing it right away. I often like to do a bit of editing to a post and see a preview of it before I publish. You’ve made this so easy–I just need to include a bit of shortcode. That is teh awesomeness.

But you know what would be even awesomer? Even more full of teh awesomeness? Having the default be to send emailed posts to the drafts folder. Because you know what I discovered? You can accidentally post an email as a blog post. Especially if you are up late at night sending out lots of emails, and not paying quite enough attention to the autofill function of the address bar of your mail application. I’m speaking totally hypothetically, of course.

No, wait. I’m not.

Because even though it’s swell that you can easily type the “status draft” shortcode into any post that you email, people may not consider including that text in every freakin’ email they ever compose on the off chance it might accidentally get published on the freakin’ web.

So, please consider having some sort of “publish immediately” shortcode instead of the “status draft” shortcode, and make the default status for posts by email be “draft.” And save bleary-eyed people like me from the potential embarrassment of accidentally publishing personal emails like this one on the web.

xoxox,

alejna

p.s. You looked totally HAWT the other night in that skimpy thing you were wearing.

p.p.s. Don’t tell my husband I said that, because he’d be sooo jealous.

I’ve said it before…

The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.
The address field autofill on my email application is not my friend.

Have I mentioned that the autofill on my email application is not my friend?

Oh right. I have.

And remember how I said I was loving the WordPress “post by email” function? Well, I’m not so much loving it now. Because I accidentally cc’d that address on an email.

So the email became a post.

And even though I put the post in the “trash” within a minute or so of actually posting it, and cleared it off my front page, I discovered that feedburner apparently still pulls such posts from the the “trash” unless you have also “emptied” the trash. WTF, WordPress? “Trash” means pull from the front page, but still make accessible to feedburner?

So, if you find a rather cryptic post (or another cryptic post) in your feed from me, please ignore it.

You know, I really hate making mistakes. And I really really hate making mistakes that get broadcast.

I guess I should be relieved that the email I posted wasn’t personally damning.