I've been waking up at 6am lately for work, but this morning I kept snoozing the alarm until 6:30am. Got up and rushed through my routine - made eggs and coffee, kissed my recently awakened wife, packed a salad for lunch, shaved, applied deodorant, left. Somehow I always leave at 7:45, regardless.
Walked to work, nothing of note today. Last week I found a dead fox along the road; it was beautiful, not mauled by the cars, it just looked like it was resting in the middle of the road. I cried a few tears in secret; it broke my heart.
Administered a test to a first group of students in one of the shitty prefabs. I was doing the rounds to check there was nothing suspicious on their screens and the floor was creaking loudly - I annoyed myself. I don't have an office (AGAIN, for fuck's sake), but a desk in my former office has been vacant, so today I've decided to just take it over. Nobody objected to the fait accompli. Spent the next 3 hours marking, finishing up a different test, printing, then rushed to test a second group in the same prefab. More creaking. This time around, I was overcome by sleepiness and yawned a million times in their faces.
Ate my lunch after the test, then marked some more. Still somewhat sleepy, marking felt like lifting heavy stones - so boring. We got a cheeky email from the exams dept about the submission deadlines. They sneaked in an addendum saying we are now required to submit a repeat one alongside every exam - that's in case like, a fire alarm goes off and they have to evacuate, stuff like that. I'm not gonna do it, they can fuck off. You can't double my workload and keep the same deadlines. The same email revealed only 45% of exams meet the deadline anyway: to me that reads like I can do whatever the fuck I want. To be honest, I think this might just be the exam dept chancing it, trying to strong-arm the lecturers, but it's not going to work. I texted my wife about it; she understands me all too well.
Had a last 4pm tutorial and surprisingly a few students turned up. They only asked a couple of questions in the whole hour; what a waste of time. I dropped off my stuff on my newly claimed desk and bolted out. Along the way I saw a little girl sticking her head out of a car stuck in traffic - she yelled "I AM HUNGRYYY!!!" and it made me laugh out loud. When the car overtook me later, the kid was still yelling and the driver waved hello at me: I recognised it was the guy that sells me bread in the market. I remember him because he's always fascinated by my t-shirts. It cheered me up after a long day. I saw another girl who works at the market later, but she had her face buried in her phone and she didn't see me. Phones bad.
I walked fast the rest of the way home, hoping if I got there a little earlier I could've worked out before dinner (I had no time to during the weekend); but I realised it would've still meant to push dinner forward and my wife has to get up early for work tomorrow. It has been so hard to find the time to work out regularly this semester, despite all the timetable-engineering I've done - all my progress has stopped. My worry is that I'm eventually going to give up, and that angers me because for once I had picked up a habit that was not detrimental to my health. I'll try again tomorrow...
So I stopped instead at a supermarket to pick up my after-dinner dates (the fruit!) and found a bottle of orange wine for a reasonable price whilst there. Got home, kissed my wife, washed the morning dishes. I was hoping she’d washed them but she hadn't found the time. I've been feeling like I could do with some extra help here and there since the semester started, but I also feel guilty for asking her, because she's always busy too and has a small battery on top of that. I end up cowardly hoping she offers of her own volition, and get grumpy when she doesn't - very mature, I know. I should just find the extra energy instead, but life's hard. I did some prepping for dinner and rolled us a small joint. Watched Blob while I finished making dinner afterwards. Lately I've been putting less effort in my cooking as a compromise in pursuit of convenience, but tonight I decided I needed a treat and would be my fancier self. Made a cream of fresh garden peas, courgette and goat's cheese, emulsified with olive oil; poured it at the bottom of the plate, served pasta with pancetta and peas on it, topped with parmigiano, parsley and olive oil. It was delicious and it made me feel better. My wife polished her plate with bread, which is a review in itself.
I ate a few more bits after dinner. I've unintentionally lost a little weight at the start of the semester and been struggling to put it back on; so far I've been eating more than usual at every chance (been having quite a few market pies for lunch), but it looks like every morning the scale gives me the exact same reading as the day before. It occurs to me that it might be the case that after working out for a while, my baseline caloric needs have gone up; but I might be overestimating the effect.
After a cup of tea we wrapped things up and went to bed.