Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Postponed freshman fifteen

Over the course of the term since September, I have noticed myself progressively gaining weight and am now at the point that I am the heaviest I can recall being at around 200 lbs. This was happening at the same time as I was doing Judo twice a week, but I suspect only a fairly small fraction of the weight gain is from muscle. In fact, I suspect excess weight may be contributing to my apparent tendency to get injured infrequently often during class.

I have generally found 185 lbs to be a manageable, though not ideal, weight. I am going to try to trend back toward that level despite continuing with Judo in January, and will hopefully stop popping buttons off my MEC cargo trousers.

Anticipation of the solstice

Oddly, two days after my last Judo class of the year this Sunday (a visit to the Annex Judo Academy) my Judo aches seem more acute than during ordinary class-to-class time since September. Between September and now I only missed two classes: one optional Thursday session which conflicted with another obligation and the final (extra, post-term) Saturday class because I just hadn’t had enough sleep.

Perhaps the elevated aches now that the pressure is off are because my philosophy has been to keep going with it, often taking special care to avoid further injury in one place or another, rather than taking breaks and missing classes.

Having ribs heal, in particular, is a multi-week issue, as a number of the more experienced students have reinforced for me. I hope the repetitive stresses of Judo will eventually make them stronger, and that I will eventually develop a layer of muscle between them and my skin.

Tomorrow includes the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere: the moment when we are tilted most away from the sun and the astronomical beginning of winter. I hope the winter will be a productive one: my PhD puzzlement will resolve into the elusive puzzle and I will come up with a way to keep being useful in the climate fight during these challenging times.

I will be getting out a bit into the High Park woods tomorrow.

Into December

The grading saga continues, with tomorrow as the slightly-stretched deadline. It’s going to be a long 24 hours, followed by dealing with plagiarism cases and calculating participation grades.

Over the weekend, I did photograph this year’s Massey Christmas Gaudy. Some preliminary, minimally-edited photos are already up.

Tomorrow we are being graded in our Judo class, for possible advancement to yellow belt. They actually taught us more than the assigned syllabus includes. My technique certainly isn’t great (especially for escaping hold downs and smoothly transitioning between them), and I will need to do a bit of vocabulary cramming tomorrow.

Once I am done with this term’s TA duties, I need to turn back to my PhD work. I will be working as a research assistant, but need to decide if I should also try to get some (considerably better paying) TA hours next term. Next year my departmental funding gets cut by half, and then it goes away altogether the year after.

P.S. It was good to see the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reject the easement requested for the Dakota Access Pipeline, pending an environmental assessment. There are no permanent victories in the fight against fossil fuel infrastructure, but anything that delays project and increases risks for investors hold out hope for helping us avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Now 100001

As a coincidental birthday gift, I finally received my September, October, and November pay today. The first order of business: pay off my frightening credit card balance.

I won’t be able to spare much time for celebrating today, as I am still embroiled in my second big wave of grading for the term. Once this finally wraps up, I will be able to focus on my neglected PhD work.

Friendships and Judo aside, a miserable time

My second (worse) wave of grading for this term has begun: first year essays which we are vexatiously required to grade exclusively online.

At the same time, my PhD proposal continues to drift into strenge new realms of lateness; opening my email inbox produces blasts of panic; and it’s hard not to obsess over the insanity south of the border, even if that obsessing serves no productive purpose. The Trump victory also raises questions for my PhD project, with my supervisor making the dispiriting suggestion that it may be wise to drop Keystone XL from the analysis, and possibly refocus the whole project on opposition to natural resource projects in Western Canada, including fracking. This is about the last thing I want when I desperately need to get a proposal submitted and approved, and then get ethical approval granted.

On another note, the Lionel Massey Foundation (Massey’s student council) has acclaimed a “new College photographer” whose one set so far, from the Halloween dance, strikes me as rather amateur in quality.

To add to it all, I have not been paid for my teaching work since April 28th and have been living by drawing down the PhD account I established while still working and spending every cent I have ever earned from photography (no gear replacement or repair for the foreseeable future).

Another difficult rent day

I finally learned the reason why I haven’t been paid since my previous teaching assistant job ended in the spring. In an email from July where the body text said nothing about action on my part, one of the attachments contained instructions that have to be followed to get me into the UTM pay system. Submitting it means I will get paid for September through November at the end of this month.

During times like this, I find that I have to establish a gating mechanism for stress because I can’t hit all my deadlines if I am worrying about everything at once. That means I often need to freeze and exclude particularly stressful aspects of life until I have enough breathing room to engage with them without knocking everything else out of smooth operation.