Dispatch from the Drywall Dust

My thoughts this morning may be more scattered than usual.  But I've often had that thought and gotten a good post of collected observations anyway.  Let me begin:

--This week at work, I saw the first application from a student with a birth date in this century.  I'm not sure why it felt so momentous to see that birth year of 2000.  But it did.  Hers was likely not the very first application with a 21st century birthdate to cross my desk, but it's the first time I took a look at that birth year and thought, whoa.

--In other workplace observations, yesterday I had a primal start moment when a student walked out of the bathroom with a live snake around her neck--which led me to words I never imagined uttering in my professional life:  "I don't mean to complain, but I have a problem with a student with a snake around her neck outside of the classroom."  Happily, the Vet Tech faculty agreed with me.  Our Vet Tech students often forget that not everyone has warm and fuzzy feelings about their pets that they bring to class--especially the pets that aren't warm and fuzzy.

--I think of this week as being a slow writing week, but I did write a brand new poem, along with some revisions, and I did send work out to journals.

--This is my first blog post as I sit in the dark with my sleeping spouse just a few feet away.  I'm working on the new laptop, not the old laptop with a big monitor plugged in.  This morning, the light doesn't seem to be keeping my spouse awake.  Hurrah!

--You may ask why I don't just switch to the new laptop permanently?  I can't get the Fitbit app to download onto this one.

--Our house is a complete and total mess.  I tried to wipe drywall dust off of the desk before I turned on the laptop so that the laptop wouldn't suck it in, but who knows how successful I was, dusting in the ambient light.  It seems a metaphor for something.

--My spouse had a chat with the drywall guy.  His family immigrated from Vietnam in 1971, and his wife's family is from Afghanistan.  Take a moment and let that sink in--how on earth did these two people manage to find each other?

(Update:  it wasn't the drywall guy.  It was a fellow adjunct)

--It's not a typical South Florida immigration story either.  Until recently, this area hasn't had as many immigrants from Asia or from the Middle East.

--Our house is a mess, but we're making progress on some longterm projects, so I'm not as aggravated as I might have been otherwise.  The Great Flooring Project is progressing nicely, and we're getting places in the walls and ceiling sealed up with new drywall, so that our living space and kitchen becomes one large space.  It gives us lots of options, especially since we got rid of the dining room table and chairs.

--The pool has been taking on a greenish hue.  I poured algaecide into it last night and let the pump run all night.  In poolcare, as in life, it's so hard to maintain a balance!

--I ended the day by sitting on the porch, listening to my spouse play the violin, and reading Peter Brannen's The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions.  I read the end of the book first, the chapter which discusses whether or not we really are in the middle or early days of the 6th great extinction.  It was not lost on me that I'm reading about sea level rise on the front porch where I've gone to escape the chaos of the home reconstruction after one of the more devastating hurricane seasons in recent memory.