20150126.0726

It promises to be a busy time at Sherwood Cottage. It will be my first full week of teaching for the term, as last week's Monday was taken up by the holiday and the previous Monday saw my flying back from Vancouver; the abbreviated weeks have had me tired (although they have admittedly followed weekends of travel, as this week does not), so I am not sure how well I will handle this workweek and its successors. It is also the day I regard my class rosters as stable--two weeks into a fifteen- or sixteen-week term is enough time to let things ride, I think. My lovely wife gets to engage an expanded work schedule, now, as well, since my teaching schedule lets her pick up extra hours--and thus extra money we can use. She will also be attending a meeting tonight, getting together with others in her field of study for erudite discussions and less erudite talk afterwards; I will have the care of Ms. 8, then, and I will still have paperwork to do, for a certainty. So, yes, there will be things to do today, and I hope to be equal to all of the tasks before me.

One that is sadly not, at least as I write this, is freelance work. Pickings seem to be thin in that line, which is something of a problem; my paycheck from teaching meets such bills as rent, insurance, and utilities, but it does not do enough to cover my debt service. Pay for freelance work has been directed to that end, and its lack is therefore somewhat worrisome. Perhaps there is simply a lull in financing from my usual client; it has happened before, as I recall, and then business picked up appreciably. And the lack of freelance work *does* open time for me to work on other projects, such as the papers I need to be writing for my own continued professional efforts or the job applications I hope to have succeed. (Two of those went out last night, as a matter of fact, and one or two others should happen today. Or so I hope.) So there is a positive spin to the lack of additional paid work at the moment.

And, yes, I know that I just admitted to hope and a positive viewpoint on something. I know that it is discordant with my usual means of approaching life, far more so than those who read what I write can know. (Not every word in my head makes it to the page, after all, which is likely a good thing. I get in quite enough trouble as it is with what *does* make it to others' eyes. [The link is NSFW. You have been warned.]) I feel relatively good this morning, perhaps because of the oddity of my sleep, and I felt relatively good over the weekend, waking in my own bed after having been fully caffeinated again for the first time in a long while. If it continues to color my perceptions for the moment, it is hardly an unexpected thing.