work-life balance

It's been quiet around here lately, I realize. As you can tell from the last few posts, life has been busy and angsty and not a lot of fun lately. But a very large burden has been lifted (which I may blog about at some point, once I figure out how to do so without compromising my pseudonymity), and life is looking better and more manageable, so hopefully I'll get back into the swing of blogging Real Soon Now. In the meantime, here's a random sampling of things that I've been pondering lately. 1. Mr. Jane, who has followed me all over creation and put my career first and has rarely…
Last night I had a bunch of dreams (or mini-dreams?) in quick succession, all with the same themes. Come to think of it, they all had pretty much the same plot, too, just different settings, situations, and characters. The dreams are pretty reflective of how I feel my life is going right now, so I'll share one of them: In the dream, I'm in my office on campus. I've just gotten in, it's late(r) in the morning, about an hour later than I normally get in, and I have office hours starting in five minutes. I've been away from campus for the last few days due to some unexplained family crisis,…
I've found myself repeating an unhealthy pattern lately. I have what feels like an overwhelming amount of work to do. So I stay up (way too) late to make progress on some of it. I repeat this for a few days, until I either (a) get sick or (b) become so exhausted that I'm barely functional. At which point I take an entire evening off to (a) lay on the couch and/or (b) go to bed at an insanely early hour. Which means that I then get "behind", because I took an evening off....and the cycle repeats. At least I've finally recognized this and am trying to break out of it, before it really takes…
Dear faithful blog readers, Please excuse Jane from regular posting for a few days. She has hit the perfect storm of multiple deadlines combined with a hell week for Mr. Jane and very poorly timed day care closures. Once she figures out which deadline can be dumped or postponed with the least dire consequences, once she stops having to do the Day Care Shuffle, and once things return to "normal", she will be back to posting as usual. (And probably have a few things to say about backup child care arrangements.) Fondly, Jane's brain (hmmm, I seem to be having a sense of deja vu, here.)