Hey. Camping and hiking was good. Definitely helped my mindset. I got to draw for fun. I was still worried about some of the family stuff, but that’s better since yesterday. Unfortunately, the work stuff was full on in my face when I got home. Grades are due in a week, and now I have more stuff I have to do in the same time frame. I was hoping I’d have more time. Nah. Why give y’all time, you teachers? You don’t need time. I’ll get my head around it (maybe). I’m just irritated at everything piling up in the same week again. You can take time off from work, but you will pay for it later…and before, to be honest. I worked my butt off last week to make sure I was ready for this coming week without having the weekend. Ah well. I only have 7 things to grade and a pre-evaluation reflection to do. I love being told what to reflect about…like I didn’t spend all summer beating myself up about last year. I made goals for this year, all of them kinda shut down for now as we just get through it. None of MY goals are on the district list of what I should care about. And now you want me to make some other goal…ok, I can do that, but I don’t know how to implement it. I don’t have a fucking clue at the moment. I don’t have the time or the mental space. At all. One of my goals is work/life balance. Ironically, that never shows up on the evaluation list. I don’t know how to do that goal either.
Maybe I should go camping again this weekend. Ha! Sigh.
So camping started with hellacious traffic…apparently Interstate 8 is down to one lane for a while, so there was about an hour of this…
Except imagine all those cars and trucks merging into one lane and you’ll have it. We were hoping to get up there before dark. Mostly it was dusk and then dark as we were setting up the campground. We were smart enough to have easy dinner plans. The fire was good until it wasn’t. I think the Man restarted it 17 times. I was drawing the whole time, but my brain was still stuck in work and drive mode, so it turned into a lot of weird balloon heads.
Can’t really explain it. It rained a bit in the night, which is the best time for it to rain while camping. The next morning, we moved slowly, which is also OK. It wasn’t supposed to be super hot this weekend, so getting an early hiking start wasn’t required. Good thing, because I don’t think either of us had an early start in us.
We booked late, so we didn’t have a lot of campsite choices…this one was OK…lots of cars going past, needs some bushes or trees along the road (it used to have them…we could see the stumps)…
But we wandered the campground a few times and found some sites that would be better. Honestly, this was away from all the chaos of the center of the campground. That’s a plus.
We set out hiking late…
The Man hiked south of here when he did the PCT, but hadn’t done the northern section because he came off trail to resupply here. So he missed a bit of the trail. We hiked south to where he had camped last year when he was training to hike the second try.
Lots of trees…
Lots of flowers, which was nice…
Lots of bike tracks (not so nice)…no bikes allowed on the PCT, but this is what the assholes do…
If we cross it off, it doesn’t exist? For the number of people in the campground, I was surprised there weren’t more people on the trails. We didn’t see very many people at all. We did about 4.5 miles, came back to camp and rested/ate, then did another 2.5 miles north…
Just to see the desert view…
Always impressive.
It was National Get the Fuck Outside Day (actually National Public Lands Day or something nice like that…we were on public lands though!).
At that point, it was pretty warm, so I decided to wait 45 minutes for a shower.
Stared at the clouds a lot while waiting. Some people are totally inconsiderate in campgrounds. Like a 30-minute shower when 4 people are waiting. Annoying.
We went out to dinner. We really were trying to take care of ourselves this weekend. Make it good. Setting stuff up and taking it down is hard enough. We didn’t need to haul a second dinner with us. Then a successful fire night! I sat there for probably an hour before I could draw.
I was tired, and the pre-evaluation meeting shit had popped up on my calendar while we were hiking and I was irritated by it. But then I got it out of my head (well, I shoved it into a drawer) and I drew.
In case you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when I draw in campgrounds…
That’s pretty much it. At some point, I put gloves on, because I was cold, and that made it harder to draw. But I did it anyway.
Up the next morning, no rush, here’s the morning wake-up woodpecker.
We made it home, put everything away, bought groceries, and I got back into the weekly grind. Send weekly email, make sure everything is set up for the week, I need sub plans for Thursday and next Monday (literacy meeting and knee doctor, finally). Full on cried a little while grading, after I made the to-do list and tried to figure out how I’d get it all done this week.
Then back to this…
Finally I can see the bottom of the to-cut box! I might finish tonight. Maybe. I have book club on Zoom. I’m supposed to be meeting some curator to pick a piece of art, but I haven’t heard from him, so who knows if it’s tonight or some other night. I have to grade stuff too. Not sure when that slots in. As usual.
Yeah. This is too real right now.
Sigh. It’s fine. Work is not ideal. I’m almost ready to iron this quilt together. That’s cool. I enjoyed most of the weekend. Also cool. Yes, I could take work notifications off my phone, but then I’d never remember to do any of it. Yeah. That might be a plan. Problematic plan, but a plan nonetheless.
Kathy Nida 