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991118 Thursday about that sleep I mentioned... |
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I could have slept until a reasonable hour this morning. With the grading done, I could have taken a break from the 5 AM awakenings. But the Leonid meteor shower was in town, and the house was abuzz at 5 AM with the comings and goings and ruckus that accompanied the kids' attempt to get out with their mom to the tubes at Tuttle Creek dam, a place they thought more advantageous for viewing meteors. A trip out the back door would have yielded little because our yard is too shaded and the show was too low in the horizon, but a trip out the front door would have revealed a wonderful display of meteors, probably more than I've seen in one viewing ever before. Between lunch and my 2:30 class, the accumulated fatigue caught up with me. I was having a really tough time staying awake, but I mustered just enough focus to rearrange the lesson for the class, reducing the lecture and increasing student performance in the group writing task. Fortunately, many of the soldiers in the class were out on a field exercise, so the class attendance was down to eight students from its customary thirteen. That helped assuage my sense of duty. I wouldn't want them to miss too much of my scintillating presentation on writing sets of instructions. I hope my body is not fooling me, allowing me to believe that the recent lack of sleep is the cause. I've begun to worry that the fatigue is a symptom for some other underlying physical ailment. Today my energy level plummeted remarkably suddenly, so I'm not convinced that the cause is just lack of sleep this week. The thought just occurred to me that I would be cheered to learn that the fatigue was not the result of lack of sleep, nor of some darker physical ailment, but of the general miasma of depression. There's an irony. I am writing this by hand as my class works on their papers. They are hard at work, staying on a task that I had thoroughly described to them yesterday and cursorily reviewed today at the beginning of class. I am writing so that I remain awake and do not go into a full-drool snooze in front of the classroom. But I am running out of things to brainstorm. Ah, pens. There's a topic. I could ramble about the fact that I now prefer a word processor to a pen and paper, or I could fess up to my pen fetish without revealing my office supply fetish (oops). Long aware of the pen snobbery that prefers almost any writing instrument to the humble ballpoint pen, I nevertheless confess my unrepentant preference for ballpoints. I still own the Esterbrook fountain pen that carried me through much of high school and all of college (keeping a pen is important to me too, for some reason), but I haven't used it in years. I now prefer ballpoint pens, and cheap ones at that. I own a full complement of pricier pens: several Cross pen & pencil sets, a Mont Blanc set, and a very pricey sterling silver Parker set. But my preference is a simple Parker T-ball Jotter, no matter the lack of style or panache. To be more precise, I prefer the heft and girth of the Jotter's barrel; however, for a point, if I could, I would stick a Pilot Fine in the Jotter barrel if it fit (it doesn't). And the Pilot is my choice for a really cheap stick or click pen. None of this makes a difference in the perspective of eternity, does it? I don't know -- matters of pen preference and matters of eternity seem to have equal merit at the moment. I'm trying to break loose from my fatigue with very questionable success. And either my handwriting is becoming less legible or my vision is deteriorating right before my eyes, or that dreaded other physical ailment mentioned earlier (I always worry that I'll develop adult-onset diabetes, as my mother has) so I'll stop for now. Class is almost over, and I'm beginning to wonder if I'll fall asleep on the way home. If I don't fall asleep (and I don't really believe that I will) I plan to find a warm spot on the couch as soon as I arrive home. Outta here in a big, honkin' hurry. My attempt at a nap was interrupted by an opportunity to chase a fire truck with Taylor. We were joined by Leif and Knute, two neighbor kids (five and three?) who wanted to see the action too. A car in a parking lot at a small apartment complex across Bluemont had caught fire, damaging three other cars around it. The kids were agog to see that the heat had popped the tires on the cars, a phenomenon that still curiously engages me too. So, I made it home safely, I did not nap, and I am not feeling better, so this night will end early. Down by 10:30. |
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I'm not the sort to say that I've been blessed. Trust me on this. But this November the weather has blessed us with days in the 70's and nights in the 30's. It cannot last, but I could live with it if it did.
I've lost a link to a humor writer from Colorado. Remember to search for that. He might appear in the Denver Post or the Rocky Mountain News (is there such a paper?) Look for it tomorrow. | |
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