I was very disappointed to find out on Tuesday night that Paramount were pulling Star Trek Discovery from Netflix with immediate effect, only about 48 hours before the fourth season premiere. I love Discovery's commitment to diversity and the hopepunk vibe of the last season was so much more what I needed than Picard's dark-side-of-Starfleet shtick, so I had really been looking forward to having the new season to help me make it through the last few weeks until the Christmas/New Year break. Especially as the current Doctor Who isn't quite hitting the spot for me.

I also Very Much Not Here for the people I've seen popping up on other people's posts about it saying "well, I never liked it anyway" or other things of that ilk.

Work is still ghastly. I was particularly unimpressed to be stuck in yet another Teams meeting about the Ongoing Crisis just after 4pm this afternoon, when there was an absolutely incredible sunset going on behind my computer screen. Also, in a particularly clueless email even for her, our VC sent an all-staff email this afternoon which began by saying what a relief it was to be nearing the end of week 6 of term and able to start to look forward to the Christmas break, which I imagine went down like a lead balloon with all the academics about to enter the hell that is undergraduate admissions.

On the upside, C mentioned the other day that she had been known to typo the signoff to emails as "Best weasels" and I immediately demanded that she sign off all future emails to me that way, then forgot about it until this morning when I received an email signed "Best weasels". Which I think is a wonderful thing to be wished.

Work is still awful. I think it is going to carry on being awful for a long time yet.

I am so tired that at lunchtime I sat down in one of the chairs in the staff kitchen after I'd washed up the packaging from the sushi I treated myself to for lunch and couldn't get up again for twenty minutes, despite knowing that I really needed to stop chatting to C and get back to work.

One of my swimming friends is recovering from an operation and the other has a stinking cold, so I may not get any swimming this weekend. And I've just seen someone on the local swimming Facebook group saying their bag was stolen while they were swimming in the lake where we swim when the rivers are too high and fast (which they are at the moment) today, which does make me worried about going there. (I always have my keys and phone with me in my tow float, and I think I need to start putting my glasses in there as well, but I wouldn't want my clothes to be stolen either!)

At lunchtime today, I put my lunch in the microwave, nipped off to the loo, came back to the kitchen and realised that my kindle wasn't on the table where I thought I'd put it. I had a horrible moment where it seemed all too plausible that I might have been distracted enough to have put it in the microwave with my lunch, but fortunately it turned out I'd just left it in my office.

Later, I sat back down at my desk after popping along the corridor to speak to someone, took off my mask and tried to put on my computer glasses, only to realise that I was still wearing my seeing-things-other-than-computers glasses and trying to put the computer glasses on top of them.

At that point, I decided it was time to give up and go home.

Except I think I did that one last week. For avoidance of doubt: panromantic, asexual, genderqueer; or, interested in people, not interested in sex, thinks any kind of attempt to put people into binary categories is basically bollocks.

Today was also the first day of full term, which meant back to in-person teaching for the first time since last autumn, and even a couple of in-person lectures for the first time since February 2020. Amazingly (mostly thanks to the amazing C), it all went very smoothly, and we did not, as we'd feared, have far more students turning up than could fit in the lectures (our lecture theatre only fits about half the year group, so that was a very real concern). Only another 39 days of term to go...

In an attempt to force myself to stop working before I'm completely shattered, I have set four alarms on my phone:

Monday to Friday, 17:00: "Start thinking about going home"
Monday to Friday, 17:30: "Go home!"
Monday to Friday, 17:45: "No, really, go home!"
Monday to Friday, 18:00: "GO HOME RIGHT NOW"

(I normally get to work about 8am, so even allowing for taking a full hour for lunch leaving at 5:30 is an eight and a half hour day, or a 42.5-hour week. Baby steps.)

Let's see what time I manage to leave the office tomorrow.

On a happier note, the lake was truly glorious today.

I am really not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow, and in particular to finding out (a) how many emails have accumulated in my absence and (b) how many job applications I'm going to need to read before Tuesday afternoon's shortlisting meeting for the first of three vacancies I'll be recruiting to over the next six weeks or so*.

Still, I have had a good break, and done lots of sewing and swimming. And on today's swim we saw a kingfisher, sitting so still I actually managed to photograph it.




* the fact that one of my team has put a meeting in my calendar for 9:30 tomorrow saying that she needs to talk to me as soon as possible suggests that I may have another recruitment process to deal with soon, too.

I am on holiday after tomorrow until 13 September.

The university announced today that we would be removing most COVID restrictions from 6 September, including planning for all teaching to be in-person and staff to return to working on-site rather than from home. (I had been aware that this was coming, and got an advance view of the guidance yesterday afternoon.) This meant that most of today was spent in meetings about how we go about implementing this, writing emails explaining how we've agreed to implement this, and updating risk assessments and building guidance.

I had also arranged a team meeting to talk about the proposals for increased flexible working, post-pandemic, which ended up taking place half an hour after the all-staff email about the changes went out. This turned out not to be entirely a bad thing, but it made a slightly nerve-wracking meeting rather more nerve-wracking.

It has definitely been A Day.

(As for how I feel about the changed guidance? Resigned to the fact that it had to happen, attracted by the possibility of not being in pandemic mode any more, but also really quite worried about how it's actually going to pan out.)

Somewhat without quite intending to, I appear to have returned to working in the office full-time and am, on the whole, much happier for it. It's definitely easier to just have one workday routine rather than having two and having to remember which one I need to be following on any given day; it's also much easier to work when I have a big desk and two big monitors and a laptop to take notes on (though note-taking on the laptop is a slightly new thing - I used to use it for face-to-face meetings pre-lockdown, then ended up moving back to using paper and pen while I was working from home, but since being back in the office I've found myself using the laptop again. This may be at least in part because it's not that easy to see my notebook through my new computer glasses...), and when I don't have someone in the next room coming and interrupting me with domestic questions. While I do miss my morning walks I also suspect that it does me good to space my outdoor time throughout the day; a walk to work, a walk most lunchtimes (or, today, a swim), a walk home from work. And I like having that liminal time, actual physical and mental space between work and home.

Having started off thinking that I needed to model being back in the office more to try to encourage my team to return, I now find myself wondering if I should actually be making more of an effort to model a hybrid working pattern if I want to make it clear to people that that would be OK in the post-pandemic world, even though I'm not sure I want that for myself. (Or maybe when I'm working five days a week again, instead of using annual leave to make four, I'll want to spend the fifth day working from home.)

My office window looks out onto the ramp that leads to the accessible entrance of our building (the ground floor is set lower than the street and the grass outside, so there are four or five steps down to the door, or a long zig-zagging ramp). When I got back from lunch today, feeling tired and slightly grumpy because I'd had to go into town, which was Too Peopley (it's always Too Peopley, but clearly COVID makes that worse) and with an afternoon of meetings ahead of me, I discovered three small children using the ramp to rollerskate, and, being tired and grumpy, went out to grump that it wasn't a skate park, and people were trying to work in the building. At which the woman who was with them was so apologetic I felt a bit bad for being grumpy (though I still felt it was a reasonable grump).

Of course, it later turned out that they were the children of the new warden of the college accommodation over the road, who came over later on to introduce himself and apologise again, and followed it up with an email. So now I feel rather embarrassed for making a fuss, when it probably wasn't that big a deal anyway, and if I hadn't been feeling tired and grumpy to start with I might have just let it go with a bit of tutting...

I can't decide whether I actually find work more stressful and anxiety-provoking when I'm working from home in general, or if it's just that my two working from home days this week were the first day back after a week off and a meeting-heavy day before my three-day summer weekend where I was stressing about how to get things done before finishing for the week, and the office days were Tuesday and Wednesday and had neither start-of-week pressure nor end-of-week pressure.

Anyway, I'm quite enjoying working in the office, which surprises me given how reluctant I initially was to go back. It's nice to have distance between work and home, though. And not to have work taking over my craft room. (I have taken a screenshot of the picture from my office webcam, so I can use it as a Teams background when I'm working from home and confuse people.)

But now it's the weekend, and I am planning to attempt to make a swimsuit.