Aren't I Supposed To Be Glad It Is Friday?

To be fair, I woke up in a bad mood: not just the wrong side of the bed, but possibly underneath that side, in another country where I don't speak the language and there's no plumbing.

But it didn't help that my first conversation of the day was my roommate getting upset that my dog got mud on the white bathroom carpet. I mean, first of all: white bathroom carpet? But second, it's a dog, the snows here have all melted but there's been no warmth or sun to evaporate the water, and it just rained. You do what you can - try to dry the dog off for several minutes, cover a towel in mud, walk him on the mats outside the door. But there's a limit.

So you'll understand, I hope, why I was irritated to have the first words spoken to me today be "I'm not going to live in a house like this."

I could go on about that. But the point is really that the day hasn't gotten better. Every conversation - every single one, and I'm now almost 12 hours from when I woke up - has felt like it had (at best) a subtle vibe of combat to it.

Taken together, that means it's probably a bad idea that I designed my entire syllabus today for the course I've been dreaming of teaching since I arrived here in the place recently described as "the godforsaken place you live." There's not really time to go back and redo it, as the deadlines for my third year review have just rolled downhill, and I've got a little over two weeks to do have that completed, plus another course to design and an event to start scheduling for. So at some point in the term, when I'm complaining about the class, you'll all have some context for just how it happened.

Just don't feel the need to point it out to me. Especially if it happens to fall on a Friday.