Trying to finish up December 2, 2017

I’ve heard it said that “you teach for free and you get paid to grade.”  I certainly understand the origins of that sentiment.  There is something so painful about grading lab reports.  Perhaps the suffering comes from having to confront the fact that your students understood almost nothing that you explained to them.... and the little that stuck in their mind became hideously garbled.  Can you tell that I just spent the afternoon grading lab reports? Only one more set of lab reports and one group of Lab Practical exams that I’ll get next week.  Those all need to be graded and averages calculated before I get that flight to St Thomas.

At this point, there seem to be plenty of things that I need to get on my ‘To Do’ list.  Re-directing the mail, getting some keys copied and booking a taxi to the airport might be jobs for this weekend. Then there are the cats.  That will have to be a story for another day....

On the sewing front, I have been working on getting a project ready to take onto the boat. I’m nearly finished with that preparation.  It’s a paper-piecing project. That should mean that the size of each block is determined by the piece of paper.  In theory the blocks should all be identical.  There’s many a slip between cup and upper lip.  Take for example the other project I’ve been fooling around with.  It’s a hexagon shape and so far is refusing to lie flat, despite careful measuring and sewing. Did I mention the un-picking and re-sewing?  It’s currently pinned to the carpet and has been ironed down twice.  The hope is that it will now retain a flat shape... The hexagonal shape is going to be “squared off” by the addition of four triangles each with an applique design.  

I have a couple of photos that will not reveal the hair-tearing that was involved.  It might be time to admit that I’m just not as good at sewing as I was at geometry so many years ago.

Gloria