a million little nights and days go by
Friday, 4 December 2020 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtStudent funding application deadline this week, which means my inbox has been flooded with last-minute students needing my advisor signature on their appeals, leading to such student gems as "Do I qualify for the course I want to add?" with no further details. My life is not made measurably better by the need to fire off frequent emails in the genre of "Which course, exactly, do you want to add?" and its ilk. I personally think my patience is commendable, the poor little buggers are all stressed to hell and I mostly manage to refrain from biting them.
Work continues to be infested with annoying dictates from On High, all sublimely detached from the realities of actual students or staff. The repetive nature of this is not contributing in any positive way to the rather alarmingly featureless nature of days spent working from home: one day is very like the next, each week is indistinguishable from the previous, time goes very fast and I genuinely lose track of what day it is. Friday today, apparently, which is nice. I could do with a weekend. The last one was either a month and a half ago or yesterday, one or the other.
The one interesting thing which has inserted some sort of change into the uniform parade of days is the realisation, a few weeks ago, that the city relaxed water restrictions at the start of November: all the dams are full, we are now allowed to water gardens before 9am or after 6pm with hand-held hoses. Presumably this means we're no longer obliged to restrict showers or put grey water into the loo, but it turns out that a few years of water-saving obsession will hardwire you quite effectively, thank you. I am still saving grey water, it feels deeply wrong not to. It's lovely to be able to wander around the container garden with a hose if I need to, the grey water has never been quite enough to cover it and I used to have to ration carefully and endure the poor plants being a bit thirsty in hot weather, but even if they're gasping I have to quite deliberately overcome the knee-jerk reluctance to turn on the tap. Which is terribly lawful good, and probably not a bad thing.
My subject line is, I realise, Magnetic Fields; the phrase has been wandering disconnectedly around my brain all day, without context or identity, and it's been driving me insane. More insane. 2020 is a good year for insanity.
Work continues to be infested with annoying dictates from On High, all sublimely detached from the realities of actual students or staff. The repetive nature of this is not contributing in any positive way to the rather alarmingly featureless nature of days spent working from home: one day is very like the next, each week is indistinguishable from the previous, time goes very fast and I genuinely lose track of what day it is. Friday today, apparently, which is nice. I could do with a weekend. The last one was either a month and a half ago or yesterday, one or the other.
The one interesting thing which has inserted some sort of change into the uniform parade of days is the realisation, a few weeks ago, that the city relaxed water restrictions at the start of November: all the dams are full, we are now allowed to water gardens before 9am or after 6pm with hand-held hoses. Presumably this means we're no longer obliged to restrict showers or put grey water into the loo, but it turns out that a few years of water-saving obsession will hardwire you quite effectively, thank you. I am still saving grey water, it feels deeply wrong not to. It's lovely to be able to wander around the container garden with a hose if I need to, the grey water has never been quite enough to cover it and I used to have to ration carefully and endure the poor plants being a bit thirsty in hot weather, but even if they're gasping I have to quite deliberately overcome the knee-jerk reluctance to turn on the tap. Which is terribly lawful good, and probably not a bad thing.
My subject line is, I realise, Magnetic Fields; the phrase has been wandering disconnectedly around my brain all day, without context or identity, and it's been driving me insane. More insane. 2020 is a good year for insanity.
