Tuesday, 02 March 2010 22:59
It started out a heavy, headachy day: I didn't sleep well, and around 4:30 in the morning I gave up the fight and rolled out of bed. I spent a couple of hours answering e-mails--which, for some reason always makes me irritable--before the Horde descended and the school day was on us like an avalanche: gathering speed and no way to slow it down. It was one of those days where all you can do is plod through every activity trying to get through to the other side of it. It was not only physical fatigue: I've come to realize that discouragement is always lurking just behind the corner for me in this job. I have to be on guard against it all the time. Whether it's because I'm far from home, or because our work often doesn't have tangible results that we can tally up at the end of a day, or whether a different, spiritual force is at fault, I don't know. Probably it's all of that and more. Anyway, it was "one of them days."
It was an uphill climb: my eyes felt burny and gritty; my mouth tasted like morning breath, even after I brushed my teeth; my head was pounding. We have a private teacher who comes to the house twice a week to tutor us and the kids in Russian, so I trudged through an hour and a half of Russian verbs, loathing them more with every mistake I made (and lo! they were a great multitude.) I also had some housecleaning to do--never a popular project with me--and throughout it all, the whole family kept catching whiffs of some horrible, sick-making stench we couldn't identify.
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