If I can get this bloody dissertation done by tomorrow night, I will consider this Spring Break a success.
So far, this looks likely. I have read the junk I need to read (almost all of it, I haven't found the last little bit of info I need showing numbers of European immigration in Chile/percentages of European descent), so all I'll need to do is plug in the pieces of info where they go.
Of course, the desired outcome would be MUCH more likely if someone were working on her bloody dissertation right now, instead of blogging while watching reruns of NCIS.
I had a nice list of things that needed to get done this Spring Break.
Finish the book we're reading for the women's retreat at church
Start the book my Sunday school class is reading
Read Notorious for the book club I skipped Wednesday (since I never read the book)
Very little of this was actually accomplished.
And not much more of anything else was, either. I just flittered around, not doing much of anything, but feeling guilty about not doing the stuff. So I didn't even get to relax and enjoy my vacation, because of the guilt.* I hate it when I do that.
I just realized I have already seen this rerun of NCIS. (First repeat I've come across, actually.) This must be God's way of telling me to get to work. So, if you'll excuse me, I'm turning off the TV, closing TweetDeck, and getting to work.
(Or so I claim. I'll let you know later how it turns out.)
*The guilt, by the way: a nasty side effect of growing up Catholic. Pretty much everything else I've been able to shake, but not that.
"... and the rains came down, and covered the lands, and froze. And the district declared an ice day. And there was much rejoicing in the lands, and it was good."
Last night, Freddy and I diligently read the school closings and delays listed across the bottom of channel 8's screen. The two districts where we live had already decided to close for today, but the district where I work, 30 minutes away and notorious for refusing to cave in to silly things like snow days, had not said anything yet. Freddy, who'd been out earlier last night because of an audition, declared I was not going anywhere today, no matter what the district did -- I was going to call them and tell them I was taking the day off anyway because it was not safe to drive. While I agreed with him (I do have several bridges and overpasses on my way to work), I wasn't too keen on the idea of making sub lesson plans over the phone (especially since I'm going to be out Friday already, so I'll need sub lesson plans [read: pointless busywork] two days from now).
We checked the district website, which stated the decision on bad weather would be made by 6:00 am.
This morning, the alarm rang at 5:45 am. In my sleep stupor, I was coherent enough to realize I had not gotten The Call yet, which meant school was NOT closed. Crapfest. Freddy was not going to let me go to work. Who did I need to call? When would someone be at the school for me to call? What crappy lesson plans was I going to give the kids? (Draw the vocab is a popular one. What else are you going to do with a level 1 class?)
Then, at 5:47 am, my cell phone rang -- a call ring, not the alarm ring. It made me happy.
I went back to sleep with a fat cat on my back and a kitten on my side.
Until 6:32 am, when the automated phone system called me to let me know the district's schools were closed.
I forgave the automated phone system, and went back to sleep.
So how to spend this glorious free day?
Playing with FrontPage and my website
Polishing disseration
Reading/editing LIFE CHOICES
Creating budget for the month and fool-proof ways to stick to it
Tonight, I'm going to see One in Three. I thought it only ran last weekend and I'd missed it, but it actually got extended through next week. Awesome!
So the "Does Criss need a new job?" question has been answered with an emphatic, "Yes, I do believe so." It is now time to put A Plan into action.
I should be a pretty marketable individual. But all my job experience is in education, which apparently is synonymous with "Jack Squat" in the non-education world. Funny. In a very non-funny way. But I won't jump on that soapbox today.
The Plan is to start applying to jobs now. This means I'm not really giving this semester much of a chance, but that's okay with me. I'm still going to put effort into my job, I promise. I just know I won't be going back to it, because too many aspects of it irritate the living bejeezus out of me.
Since I am notorious for having absolutely NO self-discipline, and because the Internetz has been known to suck entire days from my life, I must formulate a detailed Plan to keep my butt in gear. And to keep my sanity from imploding.
The Schedule:
Leave school by 5:00 every day. Screw it if I still have other carp to do; at 5:00 I'm out.
Limit weekday Internetz time at home to 6:00-8:00. The first hour can be fun stuff, like email and blogs and Facebook (when we're on speaking terms), but the second hour has to be work: applying for jobs, updating resume, fixing dissertation, editing novels.
Get off the computer at 8:00 and join the World of the Living. (Namely Freddy.)
Be in bed by 10:30, so I can at least have enough sleep to face the soul-suckingness of the day job.
If anyone out there is looking for a passionate, motivated, hard-working bilingual (almost trilingual) employee, please let me know. I have references.
I didn't make a concrete lists of to-dos, but I had general ideas:
take the car in for an oil change
type the last pages of edits on the bloody dissertation
catch up on blogs I've meant to write, both here and on another blog
create the semester exam for my level 3 classes
Things I actually accomplished:
this blog post
Okay, fine, that's not entirely true: Freddy and I have done some cleaning up around the house, and I finally posted on Freecycle items we'd been meaning to give away or get rid of. (Turns out, lots of people want wetsuits and red velvety curtains.) We also took the two bags of trash bags full of clothes down to Goodwill, along with other stuff that needed to go. And we cleared out some more tubs of stuff out to the shed. And I am writing to you lovely people sitting at a proper desk, not couch -- meaning the mountain of paper and debris that used to reside on this work surface has also been conquered.
So, some cleaning was accomplished. And little annoying things that have been needing to be done got done. Not a total loss of a weekend, all in all...
My problem is that I have a nasty habit of quitting while I'm ahead.
The first 18 pages of my dissertation? Written in one weekend. The last 5-10 pages? Took months.
Whenever I start working on something (laundry, cleaning the house), I start out strong and get a lot done quickly. And then I see that I'm doing well... so I give myself a break. And slow down. And never finish what I started.
Since I have no self-discipline, I can't make myself go back and finish. So I'll do three loads of laundry, but the last load remains in the dryer forever (if I've done four loads of laundry, the clothes stay in the washer... which means moldy clothes, which is nasty. And counter-productive, since I then have to wash the clothes again). And the socks never get matched up.
I'll do an awesome job of cleaning up the bathroom, but then never do anything about straightening up the bedroom.
And I'll stretch out three hours of work on my master's into a month and a half of dilly-dallying.
Meh.
Another productive blip on my weekend: yesterday was the first meeting for the writers group formed from interested Wrimos in the area. I took the first chapter of my 2004 NaNo; I had done some massive chopping before taking it to the group, so I was pretty pleased with myself to begin with, but their feedback and suggestions helped me figure out ways to make the chapter even better. So, I'm excited. Tomorrow I should sit down and get some more writing done (on the dissertation and the novel).
"New Year's Resolutions" has become a bad word. If you say you're making "resolutions," you're not saying you're resolving to do things in the new year; the modern connotation of the word is that you are making a list of things at which you will FAIL this year, probably within the first week.
It's much trendier to say you're setting "goals" for the new year. So that's what I'm doing. Because I am hip and trendy.
Earlier in 2008, my sister started talking about this Dave Ramsey guy and about making budgets and getting out of debt. She lured my mom and stepdad to the Dark Side and they've gone all gung-ho on this debt-free life; when they were in town to see Freddy's last show, my stepdad was reading Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, with all these nifty worksheets to get yourself on a budget and pay off your debt. I expressed interest, in that, "Yes, when I cross everything else off my list I'll look into it" way. He left the book with me.
I need to write a post dedicated just to the book, because it does kind of throw your financial belief system into a tizzy. But in a good way. Because our current financial belief system, here in the Grand Ol' US of A, is really screwed up.
But, for now: Goal #1 for 2009: Get out of debt. We can get everything except for student loans and the mortgage paid off probably by summer, of not spring break, and then start saving up and buying things (with cash) and finally having a savings account worthy of being called that. (Freddy is mostly on board with this plan... he hasn't read The Book yet, and I don't know how much he's buying of what I'm relaying to him, but I trust he'll come around. He is a smart guy, after all, and this stuff makes sense.)
On Monday we got a storage shed (just a little one; paid cash for it, thankyou, did not open a Home Depot credit account), for all the crap that's been cluttering up "the office." You see, we have this extra bedroom. This room was supposed to be an office, for all the writing and translating and so on that I should be doing. Instead? The "office" is a black hole for anything and everything I don't want to find a place for right now. My laptop lives in the living room, where we actually have added a desk. Now, the main reason the desk is in the living room is because it was too much hassle for the two of us to try to maneuver that thing into the "office," which is at the end of the twisty hall, but another reason was because there was no room in the "office" to put this desk. The saddest thing? No, I don't even use the desk out in the living room. Because it's cluttered with more crap. I write to you now, dear readers, from the couch. Where I do most of my computer work. (And we wonder why I have back and neck pain issues?)
Goal #2 for 2009: De-clutter the house. This includes taking the bikes out of the "office" and into the storage shed, taking all the masses of boxes and storage tubs other junk out of the "office" and into the shed or out to Goodwill, and finding a place for the junk we actually use. Which is probably going to be a very small percentage of the junk we currently own. There should be another blog post about de-cluttering in general, big and little things, with some tips that hopefully you will find helpful. (Though, really? Not so likely. Because the only person that reads this blog is Marcy, and I got the one big tip I'm super excited about sharing? I got from her. So she already knows it.)
Goal #3 for 2009: Submit my dissertation and claim my Master's degree. It's written, but needs read-throughs and edits. (But, instead of doing that, I'm blogging. Because I'm smart and productive and disciplined like that.)
Goal #4 for 2009: Edit LIFE CHOICES and begin querying agents. Now that the dissertation's not hanging over my head, and I've finished the one big freelance assignment I'd been working on forever, I can work on my fun writing guilt-free. Also, I have written three full novels, two plays, and have one novel that's desperately wanting me to finish it. I really need to start doing something with all those works.
Goal #5 for 2009: Blog more regularly. Both on this blog and my teaching one. I want to say I'll post once a week, but who knows if that'll work. We'll try. (NO! Do or do not -- there is no try!!!)
Goal #6 for 2009: Start a compost pile. When I shared this with Freddy, he got all practical and asked me what I was planning on doing with the compost. My first answer was "keep it out of landfills," but somehow that didn't seem to be a good enough answer. This leads me to Goal #7 for 2009: Plant a vegetable garden. Probably a very small one. But it's a start. Baby steps, people!
Goal #8 for 2009: Figure out the job thing. Do I still want to teach? Do I want to stay where I am, or do I want to move up to college-level? Do I want to move into some sort of admin position? Do I want to be an IT? Could I quit teaching and do the translating/editing this full-time? It's all up in the air right now. I'll keep you posted.
Goal #9 for 2009: Be a better wife. Help out around the house more -- right now Freddy does pretty much all the housework. He works less hours than I do, most of the time, so I rationalize the guilt away with that thought, but still. Spend less time on the computer when I am home; spend more time with him. Do things together (we spend a lot of time just sitting, watching TV. Good TV, but still.) Not let work and other stuff overwhelm me, to the point where I don't have anything left for him.
I know lists usually have 10 items, but I like 9 for 2009. And I can't think of a 10th item that's worthy. So there you are. What are your "goals" for the New Year?
