Menu for the Day: Sour & Sweet

Sour: Waking up at 4:38 am with a charley horse in my left calf, possibly from doing the touches on my target at home these past few days without warming up my en garde properly.
Sweet: Being awake early enough to review the text for today's discussion, along with revising my discussion notes and PowerPoint slides, all before 9:30am.*

Sour: Having no way to take a shower at home, as the workmen are still laying the tile in our bathroom. Plus, we have no faucets yet. Or shower head.
Sweet: Being able to wash my hair in the kitchen sink under the new faucet, which is tall enough to enable me to rinse my hair out simply by bending over. (Plus it has a built-in filter for drinking water.)

Sour: Having the puppy poop and pee on the floor of my son's bedroom--again.
Sweet: Finding her following me down the hall with her "rope" already in her mouth, rather than having to tell her to go get it so that she would stop "herding" my feet.

Sour: Having to carry my puppy for the first two blocks of our walk into campus this morning because she simply wouldn't move.
Sweet: Not getting rained on, even though it really looked like it was about to start storming in earnest.

Sour: Confusing the students twice about the reading assignment for tomorrow's discussion because I had not realized that the page numbers and numbering of the items had been changed in the edition that they purchased.
Sweet: Having time to get to the bookstore this morning in order to pick up a copy of the newer edition so that we all won't be terminally confused tomorrow.

Sour: Spending an hour (or thereabouts) trying to find the lyrics for Thibaut of Champagne's "Seigneurs, sachiez."
Sweet: Figuring out how to add a music file to my PowerPoint presentation for today's discussion.
Sour: Not realizing that I probably needed another cable in order to make the audio play properly on the system speakers, rather than just on my laptop (I hope they could hear something in the back).

Sour: Not knowing what to say in response to an email that I got from my brother.
Sweet: Wishing my sister "Happy Birthday!"

Sour: Having a fairly difficult time encouraging my students to speak up in discussion this afternoon.
Sweet: Having my TA suggest a reason why they found the questions I was asking somewhat difficult, to wit: they are more used to being asked questions about abstract arguments, and I was trying to get them to think through the details of a complicated narrative of cause and effect.

Sour: Having to stop more or less every ten yards for my puppy to sniff the ground/roll in something/tug because she wanted to go another direction/sit for most of the way home. Total trip time: 1 hour 30 minutes for a walk I can do by myself in about 25 minutes.
Sweet: Watching her play with all of the big dogs in the park.

Sour: Being too tired yet again to write something more substantive on my blog.
Sweet: Having my husband cook me dinner and afterward watching the new Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law.

*Full disclosure: I should have started on this last night, but it was my husband's birthday and we were celebrating by sitting outside in the gloaming watching the puppy play in the grass.

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