When a pumpkin isn't just a pumpkin

Happy Halloween!  I'm still catching up on everything, but seem to be making slow and steady progress.  It just occurred to me this morning that my Mom's porch light is on.  That made me think of Halloween, my Dad's favorite holiday.  He always dressed up as a cowboy (does it count as dressing up if it's your true identity?).  When I was a kid, he was one of the Dads that took the neighborhood crew trick-or-treating.  Back then, people weren't quite so freaked out by guns, so he would load up "blanks" (noise, no projectile) and carry one of his "six-shooters" firing blanks here and there.  

When I was no longer trick-or-treating, he'd hand out candy with Mom.  Our house has a screened in porch, and Dad would rig up a ghost that would rise out of the corner as the kids opened the door.  It was great fun hearing the kids get startled or hearing the kids yell "Hurry up, that's the house with the ghost". 

But even bigger in our family was carving pumpkins.  We're not a family to grab a carving knife and gouge out a face.  No, we carve our pumpkins so that the skin is only cut half way through.   These fancy pumpkins are quite trendy now, but that's the only way my Dad and I have ever done it.  When you light them, the carved spots glow.  It's quite a messy job.  You do the usual deseeding, but to carve, you use an Exacto knife to cut a grid into an area, then pop out the little squares of rind.  Yes, they fly all over the kitchen.  Then you use a spoon to scrape the remaning rind smooth and to the thickness you want.  That part is messy too.  You light the pumpkin with a small lightbulb.  I'll never forget Dad sending me my "pumpkin light' my halloween away from home.

My Dad could draw really well, so he had some great pumpkins over the years.  I'm not as good of an artist, but mine haven't been too bad.  I've avoided the templates they sell at the store on principle.  I was too young to remember it, but when Dad's little sister was killed in a car accident, he made a pumpkin that was crying. 

This year, I just don't have it in me to carve a pumpkin.  I haven't had time to select one, and right now I just don't feel like taking the time and making a mess.  And I guess that I just don't want to.  Maybe I'm on a pumpkin strike.  I know that there's no one to trade pumpkin pictures with after the holiday is over.  I've e-mailed Mom's neighbors and asked them to turn off the porch light for tonight.  I'm wondering what the neighborhood kids will think when they find that screened in porch dark tonight.  Our porch has been a halloween institution for 20 years. 

The porch light and the pumpkin have made me miss my Dad more today than I have in the 7 months since he died. 

Catching Up is Hard to Do Part II

Here we are, over a week later, and I'm still not caught up.  In fact, I think I'm farther behind.

Man plans, God laughs.  Dr UpsideDown plans, God laughs his *** off.

Last week included a cold, a cat back to the vet, my first presentation to the Faculty Senate at my U, the fallout from that presentation, and a whole lot of time not used well.  Now my U is on fall break, and my plans to conquer the world in 4 days have once again not panned out.  Methinks I plan too big.

For those of you that are time management junkies like me, you're very familiar with Steven Covey's quadrant system.  He encourages us to take what we spend our time on and sort them into quadrants according to whether the thing to do is urgent/not urgent vs important/not important.  Here's a graphic from Helen Wilkie's blog.

From http://tipsfornewmanagers.com/is-it-important-or-just-urgent/

Like most who feel as stressed about time as I do, I spend a lot of my time in quadrants 1, 3 and 4.  Everything is on 4 second lead time, and that stresses me out so much that when I can breathe, I do a lot of quadrant 4 - watching TV, playing on facebook etc.  I want to move my life to quadrant 2, accepting that quadrant 1 things will still happen. 

So I'm rethinking what "catching up" really needs to be.  I'm not going to get all grading done, lectures for the next 3 weeks written, the house completely clean and organized, my Mom entertained and well cared for, and my finances perfectly balanced all in the next month.  It's just not reasonable.  Maybe I need to spend this break figuring out how to use the time I DO have more effectively.  I tell many of my struggling students to write schedules for their "unscheduled" time.  Clearly, I need do what I say.

So, where to now?  I'm going to meet a friend that I haven't seen in 6 months (quadrant 2) and spend the morning with her and her kids at a nearby museum.  I'm bringing Mom (quadrant 2).  Then I'll plow into grading (quadrant 1, but seems like 3 sometimes).

Catching up is hard to do

It's that time in the semester where I seem so far behind in everything, and I have no idea where to start to catch up.   For a while I was blaming taking care of Mom for being behind, but a friend reminded me that this time of fall semester is just like that. 

So today is a glorious catch up day. I slept in, which kind of messed up my plans to get to the office early, but as Mom always says "oh well".  Now I need to clean my office, process my inbox, figure out what my to do list looks like and start getting it done. 

Then some shopping with Mom.

Then go home and repeat "clean up, process inbox, figure out to do list".