Frayed nerves
After holding it together for months, Anna finally caved in tonight and had a mental-meltdown. At issue: Where she could sit at the dinner table. Not a big issue at all, but it was the straw the broke the camel’s back after a long hard day with lots of moments that were difficult to navigate. And so she screamed at the world for about half an hour before Finnur managed to lure her to the table and have her eat. I’m guessing it’s a good thing that she let loose, after all she’s been a real trooper through all that we’ve dragged her through.
Bjarki hasn’t really completely freaked out yet, and it’s hard for me to say if he’s any more difficult on average now than before the big move. He’s just unbelievable stubborn, tenacious, and single-minded by nature, which probably helped him survive during his first few months. These days he’s learning to use the toilet, and with that have come moments of brilliance, but also a lot of extra laundry for mom and dad.
Yesterday, Finnur took Bjarki to the doctor, who diagnosed him with pink-eye (conjunctivitis). As a result Bjarki’s not supposed to go to daycare until next week, so he spent most of the day home with Finnur today. Finnur has an uncanny ability to work while Bjarki is around (I can’t!) so he got stuff done, but his mom also stopped by this afternoon to take Bjarki out of a walk, which helped a lot.
Meanwhile, I’m doing my best to keep my head above water in my new job, and marginally succeeding, but only just. It’s weird how one has only just put together a lecture, when suddenly it’s already over and the next one looms large. Then there is the assigning/making of homework problems (aka scour other books, and my own old homeworks for juicy stuff), preparation of solutions to said homework problems (I’d like them to be correct), and finally, grading of homeworks (something of an art methinks).
In addition to the teaching, I’m supposedly supposed to spend half my time on research, which in my case is revising a paper I recently got accepted (yay!), and (sigh) finish archiving my data from way-back-when. As of this week (it’s a Thursday night) I think I’ve spent about three hours on my paper and zero hours on the archiving (Sorry Dick!). Not good!
To add insult to injury, I have one lead on a potential project here in Iceland, but don’t have time to follow it down the rabbit hole yet. Why? Because I am slow. Like a slug. Just yesterday I took forever in figuring out what the heck was going on in the next section of the book that I’m teaching, and how to present it, which meant I worked the entire evening. Today I racked my head over the homeworks I meant to grade, but only managed to finish a fraction of them.
My main take-away is that I need to become more careless and carefree about the teaching aspect, but ahemm, it’s hard!
