ebrillblaiddes

Dinner tonight was practically-scratch vegetable soup -- the chicken broth and vegetable juice that I combined to be a sort of broth were premade, and the the carrots and beans were canned so already cooked and arguably seasoned, but then there were also dry lentils, fresh chopped garlic, and frozen peppers and onions involved.

Work has been a lot lately -- by the time I get to the end of what's scheduled I don't have energy left for working on videos or jumping on to PearDeck to see if anyone needs a tutoring session. Part of the problem is the way things are going at The Day Job, where I'm concerned that our ability to have an impact and maintain an academic reputation are being vaporized.

Crocheting the cardigan is taking foreeeeeeever, which is exactly what would be expected from making a plus-size wearable item with yarn consistent with a 3.5mm crochet hook.

The soup turned out thicker than I meant it to. I wanted it a bit thick instead of stock-like, but for what I'm wanting to work toward -- making big batches to take to The Day Job in my travel mug for lunch, so I wouldn't need to clock out and get takeout, to save money and get done an hour earlier -- it needs to be a bit more drinkable.

I don't mind doing a bit of tech support in the course of tutoring, like showing someone the login screen for Blackboard or how to wrangle formulas and column sorting in a spreadsheet, but there's been a critical mass of people coming in with needing handheld through scanning the screen to the point where I have to hold myself back from saying "can you fucking read" and I know that's a me problem but it still wears me down, or ones whose professors have told them to type paragraphs into a mindmap graphic organizer template and they think that's supposed to be easier than typing into boxes in a one-slide presentation (which I suggested doing in the Google Doc Powerpoint knockoff bc it's a webapp so they can do it from any computer, and it's a familiar interface for most people)...I end up thinking, if I'd needed anyone to show me how to do these things I would've crashed and burned in seconds, and now I could really use some help figuring out some things that actually are complicated and no one's helping me with that and it seems like the rule for having anyone help you is you must not, under any circumstances, be ebrillblaiddes.

Three double crochets, a slip stitch, and two chain stitches. Four loops pulled through previous loops and each other for each double crochet. Fifteen loops arranged just so, for each corner-to-corner tile, times the ever-increasing number of tiles for that diagonal.

I think maybe, for the amount of beans and lentils and carrots, I should have used another broth can of the vegetable juice. That'll be an easy enough change to make on the next iteration, and I knew there were going to be iterations in the course of figuring out the components and scale.

Wednesday and Thursday of last week, I had students coming in for actually reasonable math help, about things like factoring that actually aren't bleeding obvious, so I got to, finally, for what isn't quite but felt like the first time of the semester, teach actual information instead of slipping tab A into slot B type stuff. And I've gotten a few new students for private classes lately, too, including one Friday for a class starting three minutes after I barely remembered to check it.  We'll have to see if it hold up, but it feels like a dry spell might finally be tapering down.

When I say the cardigan is taking foreeeeever, the fact is, it's coming along. The tiny loops are accumulating into tiles and rows; the amount I've done so far, if I hadn't decided to try to make it tunic length and all but the sleeves in one piece, could probably have been one side of the front. And that's also with starting and stopping to work on other things a bit here and there, like the loom knitting sock experiment. Soon I'll be opening up the package of yarn for the project tote bag -- it's been on hold for a bit because of reasons -- and then I'll be able to keep the cardigan handy and grab it to work on in any scrap of time here and there and threads will intertwine into something that matters.