I can’t remember why I didn’t go to the beach Monday morning, but I don’t think I decided not to until Monday morning. I still picked up breakfast before getting to work. A loco moco from Kam Bowl Restaurant at the neighborhood stripmall. It’s right next to an L&L, but where L&L gives you mass quantities of a mediocre loco, Kam Bowl’s is an adequate serving but of much better quality. Also a few bucks more, but it’s worth it.
Work was pretty good. Did a little more background, edited an appeal letter, worked on some website content. Busy, but neither strenuous nor stressful.
After work I worked on the Beast. My clutter is a gigantic and complex thing, like that garbage patch floating in the Pacific. Broad and deep and perhaps home to a few microecosystems. My strategy is systematically to go through it in increments and in stages, the first stage simply to throw out what is obviously trash. In this way, going through one Rubbermaid tub at a time, I can cut the volume down by 50 percent, I’m guessing. The next stage will be some kind of order, plus another separation of wheat from chaff.
A lot of it is teaching material. Important to hang on to, once upon a time, but no longer. It makes me a bit wistful for days in the classroom.
However, I try not to take too much time for wistfulness. Out, damn journaling rubric that once wowed my colleagues! Out, vile yearbook tutorials on InDesign I so lovingly crafted! Begone, ye factoring exercises for math students needing extra practice!
Some of it made the first cut but may not survive the second pass. The cute in-class exercise for my grad school classmates on Bloom’s Taxonomy, on colored index cards with flower-shaped stickers, bound by a little binder ring. The small guides I created (comb-bound, but on quarter-sized paper — I snipped the plastic combs down to size) about dyslexia (“The Care and Feeding of Your Dyslexia”) and depression (“Sometimes You Can’t Snap Out of It”) for my substitute teachers to read. When am I ever going to need these again? I don’t know but they’re too neat to just toss. For now.
It’s tedious and time-consuming, but at least it’s mostly not strenuous, like the Monster was, and neither is it disgusting, which the Monster also was. And the payoff is usually another plastic tub ready to be washed out and dried, then nested with the other empties for whenever I need them later.
I also finally finished emptying the old freezer. It was all I could take this week. Next week I’ll try to empty the fridge the rest of the way. I did most of the heavy lifting already; now it’s mostly just getting into the back corners and low shelves.
I didn’t get to bed until 9ish and didn’t fall asleep ’til nearly 10. Ugh.
I texted the writing partner to let her know I haven’t forgotten about her. Crush Girl and I talked about our weekends. Looks like we both had pretty good ones, ‘though we both did some work on our days off. I let Jenny know I asked my boss about doing the writing webinar.
Lunch was again a slice of lemon chess pie, and dinner was again some English muffin pizzas. This will be the last of them for a while, the pie and the Englih muffin pizzas. I’m done with the English muffins and I’m giving my parents the remaining half of the pie when I go over Tuesday.
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