Now that I've had my little pity party (and, I also started my period, so you know, that actually leveled the hormones and angst and sadness a bit because um duh, now I had a reason this week for feeling the way I did rather than it being completely unidentifiable), I've been thinking a lot (again) about both what I need and what I want this year to look like for me both as an academic/professor and as just me.

I go up for tenure next year, so I feel like this is the year that people will remember--not the good or even the mediocre stuff that I've done up to this point, but this will be the year freshest in everyone's memory.

But I need to figure out what that's going to look like for me. I have ideas. I have plans, but as always, how to enact them is the issue.

It seems to keep coming back to the same issue though--I have too much stuff! My office is cluttered; my house is still cluttered; my life is cluttered. But how do I make space when there's so much else that I need to do.

Case in point--Sunday morning--five hours in the damn kitchen cleaning and emptying cabinets because there are ants somewhere. I have only seen a couple since Sunday, and it needed to be done--the pantry is now totally organized. I moved some stuff into the cabinets so overall the kitchen looks and is less cluttered; however, in those five hours, I could have finished all the assignments and tasks for the grad class and could have been using the time I've been working on those things since then reading and doing research. On top of that, I've already got to start thinking about winter quarter, and we're only in our second week of fall quarter (book orders are due obnoxiously soon).

I'm desperately trying to be organized, but not anal, trying to eat right (so that I sleep better and get more things done), still workout regularly (so that I'm not a stress case around the Magpie and cause her to be stressed)--in short, keep my shit together and get things done. This morning was a helluva morning, and I'm not handling it terribly well, but I still made it to my office hours only 5 minutes late. So there's that.

On a positive note, I might not have a new or newer computer anywhere in my future, but the cybercamp director had leftover funds so he bought a couple of us who needed them huge new monitors! Because our department has no money (and I've been asking for a more functional computer every single year since I've been here), I'm cleaning out my old mac mini (still newer than my office computer) from home, and bringing that bad girl up here. This is great news because the bigger monitor will make grading and reading the online class stuff so much easier. It'll make more room on my desk, and overall I think streamline some things. So, it's a start. I'm excited about that. It's just taking a painfully long time for all of my photos and videos to upload online because I have so much crap on there, but I'm going to wipe it clean like the laptop and start over so it will be like new.

That being said, I'm going to organize some stuff for the survey class and get on my way here.