Sunday, April 11: Actually, to-do lists work better if you look at them occasionally

I totally forgot to plan the week ahead. Oops.

I did get enough sleep and did my full morning routine. (Still not talking about writing here.) Talked with husband, called my mother and then my husband and I started making pasta from scratch for lunch. It took us several hours but the result was spectacularly good:

I know it doesn’t look like much but each of those individual noodles was hand-rafted by me. It took me one hour to just shape the pasta. I guess the next time I’ll be somewhat faster because now I know how to do it. The sauce has tomatoes and porcini and that’s red beet salad on the side.

I spent most of the afternoon looking at the huge pile of dishes sideways until eventually my husband came by and we tackled them together. I mostly read „Blood Heir“ which is still extraordinarily good but I also scrolled through stuff on my phone got cranky about how the pandemic is handled, wrote some emails to students and played games on my iPad.

Only much later did I realize that I had forgotten about the planning and some other stuff that would have been rather important. I did squeeze some Chinese practice in at the last minute, watched the season 3 finale of ‚Star Trek: Enterprise‘ which was okay-ish but we kept pausing the episode to yell at the screen, „This is not how that works!“ or „Who designed this machine? This is really ridiculous!“ And so on. As one does. The cliffhanger was nice and interesting, though.

I still have a problem with things like, „If we route that pulse through the deflector dish all systems on the ship will be fried!“ turning into, „Let’s just zap this and then fly away!“ and also why do they only have one communications officer on board and how can an officer with PTSD and a brain injury who is still not safe to be moved be better at decrypting a code than all the other people on the ship including all the mates of the guy who encrypted it in the first place? Also, why, on a ship with more than a hundred people, do they only have one doctor and no nurse? Unless there are a lot of people injured at the same time. Then there will be more nurses or medics or whatever but afterwards? Poof! Why is it when Hoshi returns to the bridge (still sick, by the way) her station is unmanned? Why do they only have one pilot? Why is the pilot doing scans? Why does Enterprise in the future not have drones? Remote control for shuttles? Why does nobody think of using the shuttles to tow the ship ever? This is not a car on the road. It is a ship in space. There is almost no friction there. Using the shuttles impulse engines should be better than using thrusters.

I better stop here now. Sorry. Not my favorite series. I mean, I can excuse the whole concept of „let’s just put way more energy through these conduits than usual to create more output“-nonsense but there are many, many blunders in this particular iteration of Star Trek that make me itch all over.

I did go to bed at a reasonable time for once.

Today there will be running, laundry, teaching, Netflix and hopefully going to bed on time again. I also should do lesson prep and learn Chinese. I’m running out of steam with that at the moment because it feels like I’m not making progress at all. I should probably ramp some things up but that would require more time and energy. And energy especially seems to be in short supply at the moment.