tough week

Is Mercury retrograde?

This past week was so difficult for so many people I know, I want there to be some cosmic reason for it.  I don't know why, exactly -- perhaps if the responsibility is shifted to the heavens, I'll feel less miserable.

But I know it's all on me: last Friday I took DD and her kitten back to her campus, a nearly 3 hour drive since we hit rush hour on the way out.  It's frosty up there!  We unpacked everything, had a nice dinner, and then did a grocery run at Target since she needed everything, having been at home for a month.  Then I had a 2-hour nap and drove home, so I wouldn't lose a whole day of the weekend.

The drive home was instructive.  I'm still a Luddite when it comes to cruise control, and what I learned is, if I'm the only car on the road (happened quite a bit), I drive either too slowly or much too fast.  I liked having a pace car nearby.  The trip home was entirely uneventful and possibly set a land-speed record in spite of the occasional too-slow periods. 

Came home, went to sleep, and slept in just a bit.  Puttered around the house feeling empty since DD is gone, and couldn't bear to look at my schoolwork. 

So I just didn't do it, setting myself up for this dreadful week of working late every evening catching up on everything.  I'm still behind, because even though I've graded mostly everything, I still have to enter the grades in the grade books! That's relatively quick compared to the actual grading process, though.

Still left to grade: one class set of quizzes, relatively quick to do; two class sets of Distribution of Resource essays, which look to be dreadful based on the few I glanced at; science fair reports: somewhere around 50, I'd guess, ranging from horrid to excellent.  Given everything else I still have to do (planning, etc), I'm very thankful for the long weekend because I need that day to get caught up.

In between grading sessions today, DH and I went to see Aquaman, which was quite fun, but I would've enjoyed it more if I hadn't found out something troubling about someone I really care about immediately before we left.  I'm usually pretty good at compartmentalizing ("Put it in a box, put the box away") but that takes some time, and I'm trying not to ruminate on a situation I literally cannot do anything about. 

Part of me wonders if that's true while most of me recognizes it is.   The thing is, lies of omission hurt just as much as the other kinds.  My hope now is, having spewed this here, I can get on with the boxing-it-up.