Ladies and Gentlemen of the Blogosphere, it’s been a busy week here in the Boro and especially here at Belle Reve.  Midterm has passed and so, it seems, have the last of my kidney stones.  Now that I’m feeling better, I’m also feeling as if I’m standing at the edge of the site of some disaster, surveying the damage.

Here’s the thing about feeling bad: when you’re feeling bad, you feel bad.  And when you feel bad, it’s hard to do things.  It’s even harder to do things quickly.  I’ve somehow managed to keep my head above water for the past few months, but that meant having to let a few things slide.  Times have been desperate, which means that measures must follow suit — and there are few measures more appropriate to such desperate desperation than the making of a color-coded chart.

When there’s more than three colors AND ONE COLOR IS GLITTERY, you know things are serious.

That, my friends, is a schedule.  My schedule.  And it’s the schedule I intend to stick to for the rest of the semester.

I admit that I’m pretty terrible at this sort of thing.  In grammar school, I almost failed two classes.  One, predictably, was hand-writing.  The other was some sort of organizational-skills-teaching-class (though perhaps they should’ve instead taught sentence organization) in which we were tasked with keeping a planner.  I spent most of my time forgetting that said planner existed and then filling it in at the last minute.  I think that was when I learned a very important lesson, which was that when you’re filling in a long-term assignment at the last minute, you should probably change pens and vary your handwriting a little (as I type this, I’m realizing that some of my students read my blog — so guys, ignore that last bit, okay?  You never heard that, and if you insist on saying you heard it, you didn’t hear it from me).  This time, though, I’m going to go for the gold — or, at least, the green, blue, pink, magenta, and sparkly lavender.

Speaking of schedules, it’s time for me to post my regularly-scheduled picture-of-the-day post.  Transition MADE.

Day 278: For some reason, I’ve never really noticed this tree on campus before, despite the fact that I walk by it approximately eleventy million times a day. When I did notice it, I also noticed that it was so beautiful that it deserved to be my photo for the day.

Day 279: Alice B. Toklas really, really didn’t want to come inside. This is, incidentally, the exact opposite of how I generally feel, as I generally really, really don’t want to go outside.

Day 280: If there’s anything I love, it’s a project, and the more intricate and obsessive the project is, the more I love it. I’m teaching myself how to sew, and there’s really no form of sewing more obsessive than making a quilt out of these tiny little hexagon pieces. I swoon.

Day 281: I know, I know. There have been a lot of cat photos on the blog as of late. First of all, it’s the Internet, and I am therefore required by the laws of man to post as many cat photographs as possible. Second of all, THE CUTENESS. Third of all, this — the togetherness without the violence — is such a rare occurrence it deserved documentation.

Day 282: The weather has taken a definite turn towards the fall-ish, which means that it is not only Cat Cuddle Season, but also Awesome Boots Season, which I kicked off in style by wearing these Katniss boots (photographed after I kicked them off to reveal my good-luck socks).

Day 283: As the temperature falls towards fall, so does the sun fall earlier — which means I see some awesome shadows on my way out of my night class.

Day 284: Color-coding, Power-Pointing, and E-Literature-Reading — there’s a whole lot of geekery going on in this photograph, and Gertrude Stein is having none of it.