Have you ever been in the situation where you have had some many cool things to do but you never got around to doing any of them? That’s what my past week or two has been like and I’ve been really grumpy about it.
I guess it all started after the spring quarter ended and we were off to Ohio for my brother’s wedding. I won’t go into the trip in this post (I promise I’ll catch everyone up on it later) but lets just say that it wasn’t the best vacation I’ve ever had. It wasn’t a disaster or anything but it was just way more stressful than a “vacation” should be.
Fast forward a bit to after we had gotten back from our trip. I had nearly 2 weeks of free time to do whatever I pleased. Getting caught up on bike repairs? I could do it! Cooking a lot of really yummy vegan food? It was on the todo list. Then a funny thing happened: I didn’t do anything. I mean, I did stuff but I don’t think it was productive either in terms of work or in terms of pleasure. It was just mind-numbing filler. Then I started to get angry. There wasn’t any one moment when I thought to myself “I am so pissed off about not getting anything accomplished.” No, it was a more insidious anger that emerges slowly in the little gestures you make. Of course, I couldn’t really finger the source of my anger and after a while it turned to a sort of sadness. I knew that I needed to get something done yet all I could focus on was the stuff that I had failed to do and I was paralyzed by inaction.
Luckily I have a wonderful wife and she was there to support me through this rough time. With her encouragement I was able to spot the true nature of my discontent and last night I was able to break out of my funk. I started by making a double batch of my favorite chocolate cookies (I would like to reiterate how much I love Dreana Burton for her kickass recipe!). Colleen spotted some vegan white chocolate chips at a local market (score!) so I decided to switch the cookie recipe up a bit to incorporate them. I added some cocoa powder to the mix and used the white chips instead of the regular and the result was pure bliss. The white chocolate chips are far better than the ones I got through the Internet and they are available locally so I was doubly pleased. I saved some of the cookie dough so I could make cookie dough ice cream soon.
Today was the first day of Summer Session I. I am TA’ing for 2 courses this session, neither of which have I taught before: discrete math (cse20) and operating systems (cse120). It’s going to be a lot of work but I needed to do it since there are essentially no TA opportunities for Summer Session II. It’s cool that I get to expand my teaching skills to new courses but I’m also a bit nervous about it.
Colleen and I are really going to make a concerted effort to regularly update our blog so that we can build up what we recently saw referred to as “social capital.” Colleen became a BzzAgent recently so we might start doing some product reviews here to give us something to talk about. I’m setting an unofficial target of 5 blog posts per week. I can’t promise they will be amazing but hopefully we’ll learn to be better bloggers one of these days.
- Sat
