20151130.0636

It is payday again, so it is pay-the-bills day again. I have managed to do most of the paying-out; there are still some bills yet to come in, so I have not paid them, but all of those that had yet arrived have been handled. Sherwood Cottage is mine for another month, as is the little shuttlepod that launches from it. With the recent drops in the temperatures surrounding the place, though, I imagine that the next bill to come in--which is usually one of the utility bills, and which may well come today in a weak corollary of Murphy's Law--will be larger than I would like it to be. Most bills are, though, so I will not be surprised to see it happen. And I might get lucky; gas prices are down, after all, and so it may be the case that my utility costs are lower as a result. But I am not getting my hopes up.

Work continues, in part to help with paying bills. I have tried to negotiate a larger order with my regular freelance client; as I write this, I have heard back reasonably favorably, but I have not seen confirmation that the order has been expanded. When it is, I shall seize upon it quickly, but until it is, I will not worry about it overly much. The order will be done, and it will be done in a timely fashion; I have only the tedium to plow through, and that can get done in a day--maybe less, depending on how willing Ms. 8 is to let such things happen. If she takes her nap at a useful time, I can get quite a bit done; there are times when I work better than others, and her naps often coincide with them--but not always. I can hope that today is such a day.

There is other work to do, too. My classes are in the lead-up to final exams; this is the final week of instruction before the exam periods, proper. They will be getting some practice for their exam over this week; I already have an exercise laid out for today. I shall have to assess the exercise, of course, and I do still have stacks of papers to grade. (If I hear complaints about my having taken time off after having fielded complaints about how often I don't, I will be annoyed. It won't matter, but I will be annoyed.) There is still some time to do the grading, though, and the exercise should assess easily enough, so I am not worried on that account. It is simply a matter of getting the work done, of sitting down to do it and clearing it out so that other projects yet can come forward and take its place.

It should be obvious that I am looking forward to my teaching term being done. It is not that I do not enjoy the classroom work--I do, for the most part--but I would like to get some of my projects completed and out of the way at last. What I have to do in the classroom tends to get in the way of that, which is not the most helpful thing.