1. I needed to buy some stove top cleaner and decided a hearty walk to Safeway was the ticket. After all, this is why I gave my car to charity: so I'd walk more. I grabbed my camera and took some pictures of foliage between the house and Cornucopia, where I interrupted my walk, near its end, for an excellent plate of bacon and eggs.
2. Kevin, today's breakfast server, inquired about my camera and we got to talking about taking pictures and he told me about shooting snowboarding friends in the backwoods and off 60 foot cliffs near Willamette Pass. My jaw dropped. This kind of daredevil subject matter is way out of my league! Kevin has a couple of pictures on posts inside Cornucopia and he showed them to me. My only response: management ought to replace some of the much less interesting pictures they have on display with more of Kevin's stuff.
3. When I came home from the Bier Stein yesterday and figured out when Jolene had been my student, I realized how the last several years of teaching were a blur, largely because of fatigue. I spent time today sorting out when I taught WR 121 and when I taught WR 122 and with the help of emails and grade sheets, sorted out when I taught what sections. Somehow it was good for me to remember as many of those students as I could, to remember the classrooms, to align what was going on in my work with what was going on in life away from work. Because I'm feeling so much better these days, I'm also trying to chart the ups and downs of my mental health, trying to see and remember what was going on and what I was doing at school, especially in the time leading up to the two hospitalizations in April and May, 2009 when I contracted pneumonia and c-diff. It came back to me how much the trouble with depression was in many ways less a struggle with mood and much more a struggle with fatigue. I always fought through the fatigue at school and gave my all to my teaching and to my students. Away from school, though, I was on my back a lot, resting, sleeping, often isolated at home. It was good for me today to sort this out, to give myself an even clearer picture of the last five or six years. I'm going to keep going back, sorting out, examining: so much of this is related to the aftermath of contracting bacterial meningitis in 1999 and the many years of recovery and the many years of its everlasting damage to my health.
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