The Seversons

We finally have a computer!  That is, I do.  Eric’s had one the whole time.  Luckily he was around a lot this weekend so I didn’t have to go through quite as much deprivation as expected.  Still, no internet can be quite affecting.  Our new computer arrived yesterday and is now set up and ready to go.

So now that I’m back and able to say things… there is nothing to say.  We had a slow weekend.  We took it nice and easy, which is usually how we like it.  The only change of note is that I’m able to start talking about our last-trip-before-med-school now.  Previously Eric wouldn’t allow any discussion of this trip because he couldn’t say when it would be or anything like that.  We still don’t have an exact idea of when it will happen, but it now appears that we will be able to take one and so I am starting to put together plans.  Only the vaguest of plans, but plans nonetheless.

I don’t know what my next round of class assignments will be yet, so I can’t say when I’ll have time off.  But we’re thinking mid-September, after the Labor Day rush.  Every time we fly, we say, “Let’s never fly again,” so we are limited to places within driving distance.  And we’re trying to keep the cost down since this is right before the trips for the holidays which do involve plane flights.  So we’re thinking either the top part of Florida or the Barrier Islands of Georgia.  We would go to Hilton Head again, but there’s that whole problem of me being allergic to it. And we’re thinking about making this our first trip where we go to a B&B. Normally, that’s not really our style. On trips we do not like to associate with others. We keep to ourselves, mostly. But I’ve found a couple little places that seem to be more our style and don’t have creepy Victorian-style rooms.

I really like planning trips.  It gives me inexplicable joy.  Don’t ask me why.

Not much else is going on.  Today is the last day of my 6-day break.  Saturday is an 8-hour day and Sunday looks to be a 12-hour day.  Loads of fun.  I only really have two weeks left, though, before the next round starts up so it’s not like I can complain.  And I did squeeze in a trip to the farmer’s market again yesterday.  You will all be the first to know should anything of even the slightest importance occur.

I don’t have much to say, except to specifically say I probably won’t be posting for a while. My respite has finally come. Thursday is the only day of the next 7 that I have to work. I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. Literally.

At the same time that I’ve got bunches of time on my hands and a chance to finally catch up on all my movies and such, everything in the house is broken. The computer died. Which was a particularly cruel thing for it to do after Eric stayed up nearly all night trying to fix it. Without the computer I have no internet access. I have a laptop, the same one I bought when I started law school in 2001. As you may have guessed, it is no longer fully functioning. It’s not that it died, not that it crashed or that the hardware just won’t function. It’s that it won’t open. Something in the hinge is all off so if you try to open it, it starts pulling things apart and gets rather ugly. So it’s virtually unusable. Thus the desktop has been my only computer for a long while now.

We’ve ordered a replacement. Fortunately, we had the funds set aside to cover just this kind of problem. The new desktop is being built and mailed, but it’ll be a while before we get it. This shouldn’t matter so much. I have a lot of things saved on hard drives, but can’t manage to access any of them.

If you are thinking, why don’t you just turn on your television, then you are unfamiliar with the elaborate setup Eric has going on chez Severson. Everything is routed through the computer. Thus, the death of the computer (which came within two days of the simultaneous crippling of the two supplementary viewing machines, the XBox’s) is the death of everything. Internet. Movies. Etc.

The only thing I can do now is read and play Wii. I have been reading like a maniac already and feeling like a break. So much for that. Today I played tennis and bowling for a long time. And my Wii options are quickly running out. I can only play Mario Kart for 20 minutes max because I always jam my thumb too hard on the accelerator. I have pretty much exceeded my maximum skill level on Super Mario Galaxy, so I’m stuck there. So it’s pretty much tennis and bowling. Maybe I’ll have to leave the house once in a while.

Anyway, the only reason I can write now is because Eric is sleeping while I’m doing my normal stay-up-till-2-am thing, since I have a late night drive home tomorrow. So Eric’s lovely laptop is free and available for my use. The sad thing is, we were planning to get a laptop just for me, but weren’t quite ready yet. So my laptop will now be postponed since the desktop is more necessary. Not that I really mind. Eric’s the one really pushing for me to get the laptop. But I’ve been getting used to the idea.

The break is good, though. I have not been cooking nearly as much as usual with my crazy schedule. And the house is not exactly company-ready. And since I don’t know when my next round of classes will be, it’s possible I may have a month or two of free time ahead of me. So I guess I should settle in and enjoy it. I’m just going to have to enjoy it without internet. And while I’m not quite as strongly in the internet-addicted-youthful-generation just below me (I know this because while I am on facebook, I have less than 100 friends, which apparently is unusual among the cool kids today) I still need my fix every now and then. I guess I’ll be getting a lot of reading done.

So we may be a little sparse for the next week or two, but I will definitely send up a smoke signal should anything of note happen. (Chances are low, but I’ll keep a look out.)

You know we haven’t been up to much when little things seem like momentous occasions.

I’ve had a busy week, work almost every day and the drive to Alabama 4 times in the last 8 days.  Saturday was my only break so after we slept in very late, we tried to figure out something interesting to do today.  There was definite cause for celebration since it looks like Eric finally has the data he needs for his paper.  (He would tell you himself, but he thinks it may jinx it.  He’s got a point, it happened once before.)  We decided to go on a hike, but didn’t have time to go all the way up to the Appalachian Trail.

Instead, we went to the Chattahoochee River, not too far away and not too strenuous.  I’ve been pretty bad about working out lately (Pretty bad = Not doing it at all) so we couldn’t do anything crazy.  We packed some water and the camera and headed out.

Here’s a lovely picture Eric took of an old bridge over the river.  Eric said that after they stopped using the bridge, people started stealing people of it to sell it as scrap, thus its sad condition.

And Eric took this picture specifically for you, Bob.

Today Eric is working on his paper and I finally got my first chance to run errands and do chores in ages.  I took advantage of the day to finally take a trip to the local farmers market to do my shopping.  Yes, I am blogging about buying groceries.  This qualifies as excitement for me.  But it really was exciting.  The meat counters kept going and going.  Of course this means I get a lovely view of chicken feet while I get my turkey sausage, but I don’t mind.  And the mountains of produce were fascinating, though it did take me a good 10 minutes to locate basil.  Once you get into the green stuff, they all look the same.  I even found some masaman curry which I haven’t been able to find anywhere else and which Eric always wants me to make.

The only problem with the farmers market is that since I view everything as more healthy, I have less of a problem buying treats.  This time I limited it to just 3 cookies.  But fortunately I decided on those before I saw the goodies in the bakery.  Next time I will have to be very cautious.   I wanted a companion, someone to turn to and say, “Wow, look at all that bok choy!” or “Can you believe there are actually 5 open cash registers?”   Honestly, it was almost like going to Disneyland, which, if you know me and my penchant for Disneyland, is high praise indeed.

Even though I am technically in what I call the “life of leisure” with my under-40-hour work weeks and pay raise and all, this week is the busiest week of this current cycle of classes. I will be heading out of state 3 times this week (one down, two to go), with 5 total classes instead of 4. But this is also the last week of craziness. My first class starts winding down, and I’ll probably only see them once a week or so for the next 3 or 4 weeks. Also I’m expecting more free days period. Both my long-term tutoring students have finished their semesters and gone home, which means that there won’t be anymore work on nights when I’m not actually scheduled to work.

I’m pleased for the change, mostly because for these busy weeks in the middle, I feel like I never get anything done. There are plenty of reasons. Mostly, though, it’s because of my out-of-state class. Twice a week I must drive to Alabama. I must leave around 3:45 p.m., 4 at the latest if I want to gun it the whole way and worry I’m going to be late. I will arrive around 5:30 central time and gain an hour in the time change. I will then teach for the next 4.5 hours. Then it’s the drive back, and losing an hour with the time change this time. Because of this, the earliest I’ve ever made it back is 1 a.m. Usually it’s more like 1:30, occasionally 2 if I stop for food or gas or have to make multiple pit stops. Now this wouldn’t be a big deal if I could come home and just crash. But I have to drive home in the dark in the middle of the night and not fall asleep. Even though I’ve just been exhausting myself for 4 hours.

To solve this dilemma, I have changed my whole schedule. I now go to bed between 2 and 4 a.m. It works great, because then my drive home is easy. I’m not tired and just wanting to sleep and raising my risk of an accident. But, this has its costs. It means that I’m getting up around 10 or 11 in the morning to make sure I’m consistently getting enough sleep to keep my schedule going. And on my driving days, this gives me only a few hours before I have to leave town.

So it feels like I never get anything done. There’s always a list of errands, things to do around the house, and then sometimes Eric and I will have lunch. I would be free and clear if you could just go to the mall or the grocery store at 1:30 a.m. But apparently this isn’t exactly how it works.

Next week once my schedule changes, I’ll still have the late nights since I’ll still be driving. But I’ll actually have time all day on two weekdays (I vastly prefer running errands on weekdays when everything’s not crowded) without any restrictions. Then I’ll get a small to medium (or possibly large) break until the next round starts. The deal is two traveling courses per year, which means only about 40 nights per year of driving. They just come in a big clump. I’ll be happy when Eric and I go to bed at the same time again.

It may be rather silly to blog about this, but lately it feels like this is the only thing I have to discuss. My schedule runs my life right now and that’s that. Be grateful I didn’t write an entry all about how I threw my schedule off this week because one of my 3 out-of-town trips wasn’t at the normal 5:30 p.m. time, but at 10 a.m., which meant leaving the house at 8:30 a.m. on less-than-standard sleep. And leaving me feeling all messed up now. I’m trying to regulate back to normal, but it’s midnight right now and feels like I normally feel when it’s pushing 3.  So now I’m going to kick back and kill some time until I’m allowed to go to sleep again.  Night, all.

I am still recovering, but better overall. As predicted, my throat is fine but now my nose is acting up. It isn’t terrible, but the sinus portion of a cold can last a long time, so I’m not expecting relief anytime soon.

However, I pulled myself out of my sickbed (not really, I’m up and about just fine) to go with Eric to see Iron Man this weekend. Now I know that guys have a tendency to get distracted during movies sometimes if they see a cool car or gadget or whatever. I generally don’t have this problem. But there is one thing that can happen. I obsess about someone’s hair.

For example, Match Point. Great movie, Woody Allen is one of my favorites and it’s one of his better ones recently. But I couldn’t get over Scarlett Johansson’s hair. It was pulled up kind of loosely but looked really cute.

I spent a really long time trying to figure out if I could get my hair to look like that. Still can’t. I know she’s on a set with a stylist and everything, but there seems to be an inherent injustice to it.

In Iron Man, I kept staring at Gwyneth Paltrow’s hair. Not the first time this has happened. The first was in Emma, where her hair was constantly in some insane updo. Like these:

I have never been able to get my hair to do any of those things either. Close, but not quite. Anyway, my obsession with Gwyneth’s hair in Iron Man had nothing to do with the styles. It was all about the color.I used to be blonde, have been getting steadily darker as the years have passed, despite a few years there where I lightened it. Lately, not only have I been getting browner, I’ve been getting redder. Where this comes from, I have no idea. You can see it in some of our wedding pictures, like this one:

I haven’t dyed my hair in years, but I mentioned it to Eric once and asked what his opinion was on the matter. He said he wanted to see it more of a strawberry blonde, with some red in it. Thus my obsession with Gwyneth Paltrow’s strawberry blonde hair in Iron Man as seen here:

Thus far I can’t find a better picture, but it was lovely. The shade looked more blonde or more red depending on the light. And I kept thinking, oh yes, that’s exactly what I want. Then I’d think, maybe it’s too light, it’s almost blonde. Then I’d think, but now it looks too dark, I don’t have those freckles to highlight it. And on it went. For the entire movie.

But this isn’t just a personal obsession. It’s just one of those things I notice. It’s one of the reasons I watch America’s Next Top Model and wonder why they always give at least two girls platinum blonde hair, which is a color that looks good on no one. It means that when I watched last week’s Grey’s Anatomy, along with thinking that I don’t know if I like this show at all, I wondered whose grand idea it was to give Meredith chunky platinum highlights in her hair like a teenager might get.

The Iron Man situation made me realize just how severe a condition this is. And it’s even funnier because I have no actual plans to really dye my hair. It’s kind of a pipe dream, but I’m terrified of actually doing it. I don’t know. We’ll see. Maybe Gwyneth will inspire me.

We know for sure that I’m sick.  And at this point it looks like Eric might be heading down that road.  I won’t be sure until tomorrow.  But I think I’ll be better tomorrow.  Either better or the cold will have made that nastiest of transitions from my throat to my sinuses.  My sore throat today has mostly subsided as have my swollen tonsils, but I’ve been sneezing about every ten minutes.

I haven’t been sick at all this year.  Not really.  Except for when I was sick right before the wedding, which I think was more about stress than illness.  I guess I was due since I’d recently been thinking how it had been a really long time since I was really sick.  Sick enough to not want to leave my bed all day.  And go figure, this is the first year I didn’t get a flu shot.  No more for me.

One of the very few downsides of my job is that calling in sick is not really an option.  So I taught Wednesday and Thursday night in my not-quite-normal condition.  Eric, concerned for me driving home after midnight feeling poorly, came down with me and helped with driving duties for the out-of-state class.  And I had phone duty today, though at least I could do that from bed.

The problem with being sick, though, is that it interferes with duties.  Having to stay in bed or on the couch all day to adequately save your energy for the hours you have to work and use that energy means not devoting any leftover energy to things like your apartment.  And your dinner.  So I certainly hope I feel better tomorrow because now I am once again behind on housework in the week that I was planning to finally catch up on housework.

For those of you with kids, I don’t know how you do it.  Although I have to say, I was recently going back to old diary entries from when I started working just to see how I felt about teaching then (it’s much easier now that I’ve done it for so long) and realized that I virtually killed myself in law school, particularly 3rd year.  I had a job that kept me working 20-30 hours per week, plenty of difficult classes, way too many leadership responsibilities, and was also trying to have some kind of social life.  The fact that I managed to do it all shocks me now that my life is so low-key.  (Though I admit that in retrospect, I should have realized that I couldn’t get awesome grades with that kind of schedule.  My last two years of law school I always felt like my grades should have been higher.  And now I realize that if I had just made my schedule less crazy, that may have happened.  Oh well.)  I guess you always find a way to manage.  Just like I managed when I was working full-time.

Still, I will happily cling for a while longer to things as they are right now.  Despite the ongoing tension as we near the end of Eric’s PhD (the end is a surprisingly long part of the process) at least we are still in the nice gradschool world where I can send Eric emails and he can write me back all through the day.  And yes, they would make you puke from overexposure to sweetness.  And I can have him run home real quick to give me something I left in the car.  Soon this will no longer be possible.  But I content myself by thinking that he will look very cute in a pair of scrubs.