Hibernation in Grading Jail

The hibernation began during the thanksgiving break because of my angst about family issues. At the moment I'm very conflicted about spending time with my extended family and it's adding to my stress levels. Additionally, I'm looking forward to the last few weeks of the quarter being miserable as usual. The end of every quarter is stressful but it seems like winter quarter is always the worst. Unlike Limon de Campo, I managed to ignore my work over the break, although this did little to relax me.

Thursday we spent with friends despite my father's appeals to familial obligation. Friday I went bird watching with my mom. This part of the country has lots of winter wetland birds. Unfortunately, neither of us are serious bird watchers, so we went without a set of binoculars which made it difficult to see the birds. I believe ours were lost last year when Beorn's car was stolen, but maybe they were just misplaced in the move. Saturday and Sunday Beorn and I hid out at home, trying to figure out what to do with ourselves now that we have given up WOW.

This happened only a couple of weeks ago and already Beorn is surfing gaming websites for new MMORPGs. I'm trying to encourage him to explore what real life activities he might enjoy. For example Saturday night, under Beorn's lead, we made a huge pot of apple-persimmon chutney. There is a persimmon tree outside our house and we don't like to eat them fresh that much. They are perfectly good, we just aren't used to them. The chutney turned out well and we'll probably can a bunch of it to give as gifts.



This isn't our persimmon, but it looks similar. Isn't it pretty? The fruit stays on the tree after the leaves have fallen. I stole the picture off of Krista's website. Krista is my favorite female weightlifter and feminist scholar, if you haven't ever seen her website you should check it out. She gives tons of practical down to earth advice about weightlifting and exercise. I read it whenever I'm trying to get inspired.

]Now that the break is over I'm back to being overwhelmed by grading, the writing assignments for my class, and dealing with field work (focus groups, meetings, etc.) I'm always fearful that I'll forget some important and everyone will know what a flake I am, which will somehow ruin my career and my life. (The truth is everyone probably already knows what a flake I am.) I'm only writing a blog post to avoid grading. The sci-fi papers aren't as bad as I expected so far. Now I have to apologize to Trillwing for being so whiny about the assignment.

I am looking forward to the end of the quarter, but these last few weeks always seem to linger. It seems that grading continues practically till Christmas, even though finals are over a week before. Between grading, finishing my own assignments and preparing for Christmas I always feel completely exausted and burnt out, which makes me a complete grinch. So I'm trying to work out a plan to relieve my stress and reduce my grinchiness. I like Chris Brogan's idea for exchanging little holiday packages. I'm working on my package wish list.