Living Life and Doing Shit

I'm currently on what is essentially a working vacation. Well, every vacation I take is a working vacation, but such is the life of the young academic. Anyway, since it's already enough effort to try to squeeze in both work and spending time seeing friends and family, I typically have to cut out all other non-necessary functions. So while I think I'm going to do things like keep updating my blog, I basically never do unless something really important happens.

So this is just a round about way of saying no updates for the next two weeks or so. But really, who's wasting their time inside reading blogs during the summer anyway?

Summer Sucks For The Self-Employed

I've written before about how summer is neither fun nor a vacation for professors. Mostly, it's because during the summer we're basically self-employed; I mean, technically I still work for the same university (although they don't pay me over the summer, so...), but there's no deadlines or meetings or really any externally-imposed schedule. How much I work and when I do it is completely up to me.

Which is great! In some ways. But in many ways, it's also terrible. Because I still have to get work done, I just have no one to force me to do it. Which leads to times like this, when it's a gorgeous day outside, but I'm inside working. Which I know is how it is for most of the working-age populace, but somehow it's far worse when you're the one doing it to yourself. At least when I had an office job I could curse my boss for making me work on a beautiful summer day, but now I have no one to curse. I am that horrible person making me work on a beautiful summer day.

So the point is, as always, that adulthood and responsibilities suck. This is, after all, why Funyuns continue to sell so well.

Moving Sucks

Moving sucks. I think that's a concept which is generally agreed upon. I've learned over the past week that moving sucks even more when you have inadvertently rented from a slum lord. The type of slum lord who acts as if you're a demanding prima donna for wanting outrageous things like "a back door that opens and closes" or "a shower that drains through a drain rather than through the light fixture in the kitchen below it" and seems confused when you ask them when they are going to do enough repairs to make the place up to bare minimum legal code. I can't really say too much more about it as I may soon be embroiled in a legal case against said landlord, but pretty much all of my conversations with them have gone like this:

In fact, here's an honest-to-God, as verbatim as a I remember it snippet of an argument with my landlord.

Landlord: I don't know what you're complaining about! I built you a beautiful new bathroom!
Me: Yes, but it doesn't work. Nothing in it works.
Landlord: How was I supposed to know that?
Me: Uh…try it? Like, after you install a new water fixture, turn it on to see if it works?

So anyway, in addition to the regular annoyances that go with a move, I got to add living out of boxes stacked in the middle of every room (because work crews were still constantly in and out of the house for 5 days after I moved in, so I couldn't unpack anything) and no working shower for about a week. It was…unpleasant. In fact, had my super awesome parents not come out to help me move and basically just made all the repairs the landlord is theoretically legally obligated to but definitely had no intention of doing, I'm not sure I would have been able to contain my murderous rage. But fortunately no one was murdered and the place is now almost up to bare minimum legal code, so life is settling back into an almost normal routine. Except now I can finally unpack, so my life more closely resembles this: