Ok. So I'm freaking.
This morning, I wonder whether I should have started with the higher number and counted down, rather than the lower one and counting up. Which conveys more stress, do you think?
The worst bit of it is that I don't actually have 31 days. I only have 27 days, (now 25 - oops, 24) minus however long it will take me to get the thing copied and "soft-bound", whatever that means.
OK. so - 22 days? 21? I think we'll have to do the backwards count, cause I'll never get the full picture otherwise.
One good thing: I was cleaning up some text I wrote a year or so ago, and really found it pretty easy to cut all the over-the-top bits and advocacy for a certain point of view. I've been a lawyer so long, I am just always usually picking a side and arguing for it. I'm supposed to be "objective" on this, though. . . . Anyway, it wasn't so hard to cut out all the arguments I'd peppered the text with a year ago.
Poor Magda. She's had to deal with this for years now!
After knitting 5 or 6 inches day before yesterday, yesterday I knit one row. The king was giving me a bit of a hard time about focusing on anything other than my dissertation. . . . He's probably right. But I don't have to like it!
For today, I'll try and remember to take it with me. I have a doctor's appointment. There I was, last week, trying to cancel a diagnostic test I had unwisely scheduled for later this month, and here I am this week, going not for the test, but for a doctor's visit before the test, because they're "concerned".
I'm concerned that they'll just tell me it's stress and I'll have disrupted my afternoon for them to reach this major diagnostic insight. sigh.
Coupla things: Google translate is not bad! Granted, you probably need to speak the other language somewhat in order to make complete sense of the translation (from the German, anyway, perhaps other languages are different, but we all know how amazingly ridiculous the German sentence structure is! If you want proof, all you need do is read Mark Twain's That Awful German Language which I find laugh-out-loud funny! But then I mostly speak German, too. Scroll up to the top, by the way, if you get dumped into the middle of Twain's article, which a link test kept doing to me. Sorry!)
I got to cook yesterday - for some reason the king was not insistent that I not have to take the time away from work. I like to cook, so this was a good thing. We have very little food in the house (as the king is in charge of food shopping, which he hates) so this was a challenging thing. The potatoes weren't too fuzzy, though, and there was half an onion, plenty of garlic, a bounty of herbs outside and an almost-full carton of eggs: Tortilla de pappas was in order. Spanish frittata-type thing a friend of mine who now lives in Spain turned me on to. You serve it with a garlic mayonnaise and, ideally, a green salad.
No salad. Frozen broccoli, though! That'll do. Defrost, saute in olive oil with onion. Just a bit of caramelizing and you're all done! And, of course, half a baguette from the freezer (that's the one food chore the king does like: Saturday stop at the artisanal shop for fresh french bread - best I've had outside of Paris - and cheese. And maybe a run into the wine store).
Well, the day is getting away from me already, and I can't afford it today! I have a pre-deadline deadline, insofar as if I don't get Magda the last chapter - and the intro - by Friday, she won't have time to do any revisions before I have to turn in. New term is starting and she's swamped. So these next few days are crucial.
And the housekeepers arrive today. OK. Eat your heart out: I don't have to clean house. The king had a housekeeper before he married me and I advised him - even when we left his former big house - that I really would prefer to keep the housekeeper as housekeeping is not exactly my forte. . . . and, bless him, he did. Now I clean before the housekeepers get here. The things I don't want them to clean, anyway. Like certain wine glasses, my wooden kitchen stuff and anything silver or other polishable metal. . . . So I have to do that before they get here and then hopefully get out before they get here or I'll be talking for an hour. I'm glad they like me. But when we talk for an hour, the kitchen floor is sticky after they leave. I think they figure the hour's talking is the equivalent of an hour's work. And, granted, I'm sure they don't like me that much! But they do seem to like talking to me. Best just not to be here when they get here.
One day I'm sure I will be glad I recorded this minutia. Off I go, then!
2 comments:
You are very, very lucky to have a housekeeper. I will sell my plasma if need be to have one for our next home. It's easy to "put off" writing for scrubbing the doorknobs or cleaning the seals in the fridge.
Still, it's good that you are cooking and knitting and blogging, allowing life to come in. It'll make your writing better and the adjustment easier when you no longer have the dissertation.
All the best!
Glad you're back in the land of the living, Lee Anne! Having kicked the virus from hell. . . .
And well do I know it, in re: housekeepers. . . . Although there's always something I can scrub if I get really desperate! I was noticing the bathroom tile grout just yesterday. I'm thinking toothbrush and bleach. You know you're desperate when something like that strikes you as a viable action option. (and didn't I read somewhere that whitening toothpaste is the thing for this? Must try. Today.) grin.
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