The last few days have been very, very, VERY busy. Non-stop, multi-tasking busy. Busy in a way that has left me pretty wiped out. That's different from the type of busy where you are working on one project all day because it requires a higher level of organization to keep track of what you are doing on which activity especially when they all overlap in a variety of comunication spaces. It's the type of busy where you have to switch modes in a heartbeat from talking to student officers to having a heart-to-heart with a student who is having trouble to discussing robotic research with a University of California professor to participating in a campus forum about the state of and future of technology on campus to speaking with children about weekend plans to speaking with my dad about the house inspection to discussing educational theory with a parent who is threatening to pull his sons from my class if they don't maintain a "B" average to talking with a friend about how things are going to... you get the picture. And that was just in the last 24 hours.
It's hard to maintain a train of thought when being constantly interupted, but I don't want to be rude to people. I do want to be accessible. I actually like the people around me. There's just been a steady stream of little intrusions that make it very hard to get things done, in the door, via email, through IM, on the website. Individually, none of them are a big deal, but collectively, they really get in the way.
I'm trying to juggle many different balls at the moment, including a 3 day student field trip that will take us down as far as San Diego. It involves making contacts at two different universities, setting up housing, gas, and food accomodations, collecting a huge pile of paperwork, and confirming detail after detail after detail so that this can be an awesome experiencee for everyone involved. There's the unit plan that is due yesterday (literally), the VTEA activity and budget that is due on the 20th, and the two robotics classes that have to be submitted to the curriculum committee asap so they can be taught in the fall. Then there is finding time to gather tax deduction info for the accountant so hopefully I can recover some of the $14k I paid in federal taxes last year. Oh yeah, can't forget the conference presentation that I am supposed to be giving in about a week and a half and I can hardly remember what I am supposed to be talking about, much less preparing for.
I had hoped to take the last hour at work to finish up some details, but what do you do when a single mom of 6 comes in and says "You went to school with kids... how did you do it"? And then a student pops up on IM to talk about the upcoming trip? And another walks in the door to talk about his dad and then gives me a tip about how to get my Suburban brakes fixed for really cheap? My priority is, and always has been, one-on-one contact with my students. By the time that was all over, all I had time to do was log off, load up, and head out since I was already running later than I had wanted to get home, hoping to take a mental break for a few minutes before the kids went to bed so I could focus on some paperwork that I have to get submitted tomorrow after they were asleep.
As I drove up to the gate, I saw that no work had been done on hanging up chicken wire on the front fence, like I had hoped. I pulled up to the house to see the door to the trash shed wide open. Thankfully I was able to get it closed before the dogs pulled bags open all over the property. At the same time, I noticed that the one job I gave the kids to do after school, get all the recycling stuff in bags so we can take it in, hadn't been done. I could tell the goats hadn't been fed yet because they started yelling at me. I walked into the house to see everyone seated on the couch watching cartoons. As I glanced around, there was trash everywhere, the paper plates were pulled open and laying on the floor, and dirty dishes were stacked up in the sink. The floor was filthy because I haven't had time to vaccum or mop the floor in over 3 weeks, and I guess no one else had either. I guess they all had ice cream, as evidenced by the empty container in the sink and the dried up ice cream all over the counter. I picked up papers and trash, straightened up the sink, and took the paper plates out to the garage, where I noticed that the metal staples were dumped out all over the floor. I came inside, told them to turn off the TV and clean up their mess, and headed back outside so that I wouldn't give into the urge I had to just yell at everyone "I've been working hard all day... why haven't you?". On the way, I took the large wire cutters back out to the garage because for some reason they were sitting on the bench by the table. I spent 10 minutes picking up trash in the brush that had blown all over the place when we had a wind storm a few weeks ago, just to let off some steam before heading in. I told the kids that they were not allowed in the house until they got the cans, bottles, and glass sorted and bagged, and came back in to briefly close my eyes for 10 minutes while Jeopardy is on. And now I write. What do I need? This would be nice!
