I woke up half an hour before the alarm for some reason and felt super exhausted and tired and was in no mood to do anything. I forced myself to write morning pages but kept looking up stuff on my phone (and that is why we put the phone elsewhere when we try to focus, kids) and then had a hard time making myself write some new words on the novel. For 15 minutes. And then I skipped both yoga and meditation.
My husband and I had breakfast together and discussed our riveting plans for the day. Which consisted of lots of errands, mostly.
But first he went out and I started the project of installing WordPress locally on my computer so I have a sandbox to play in for the course I bought the day before. I gave in to being triggered by the course and the possibility of learning some new computer stuff and went all in.
And then something went wrong and I got stuck. Of course.
And I ran out of time and did the dishes, woke up the boy for his exam, and then it was time to leave the house.
I took all the empty bottles that need to get returned to the health food store and stuffed them in my backpack and then I set off into gorgeous weather, the sun shining thought it was freezing. First I went to one supermarket for yogurt and vegetarian bratwurst and then to the health food store for all the veggies, frozen meals and chocolate.
I came back home, put all the many, many, very expensive groceries away and waited for lunch.
Just as we were sitting down to eat I got a text from the boy, his train was sitting on the tracks, not moving. For ten minutes. We started eating anyway, there was nothing we could do:
The boy’s train was 15 minutes late! Now this is the lecturer who has loads of rules that no one else has. One of the rules is that you have to be there for your exam 5 minutes before it starts. If you come later you’re excluded. Now, usually the lecturers will tell you it’s your own loss if you come late and have less time but not this one.
Then he had to change to the subway. He reached the subway in time. Phew. Most of his margin was gone but he could still make it.
Only.
The subway was late as well. For a whole 8 minutes. He might have had 4 minutes to dash all the way to the other side of campus. That was the last I heard while we were trying to calm down and enjoy our meal. It was very good. But my husband was unable to focus on eating.
I told myself if I didn’t hear from the boy in the next five minutes it would probably be fine.
The next time he texted me was hours later.
He had made it!
Unfortunately, he didn’t have a good feeling. I mean, with all that excitement…
After lunch I took a break, ate some chocolate and read a bit but the botched WordPress install was bugging me so I tried again. Very slowly I did all the steps again and – it worked! So I tried installing the super fancy WordPress theme but I got an error message. I tried again, no change.
I tried for a while but had to give up because it was time to teach.
I taught two students had one of them tell me they wanted to stop taking lessons because he needed more time to see friends (apparently they are sitting and doing homework all afternoon right into the evening), refilled the water in my piano and then I wrote a note to those of my students who are still paying the old prices.
So, it used to be that every time I raised the price for lessons I’d raise it for all students at the same time. But then my husband said what he does is he gives the new students the new price and just lets everything else go unchanged. Way less work, so I started doing that as well.
The drawback is that you end up with a lot of students paying a really, really low price. Like I had someone start with me a while back who told me another teacher that she had before was taking twice the money for the same length of lesson. Oops.
I’ve been thinking of raising all the prices to the same level again for many months now but I was always too busy and had no idea how to write that note, bla.
But my husband wrote the same kind of letter back in January. And I am trying to get into the habit of asking for help.
So I asked him for a copy of his note, changed it a bit, looked at how many students are still paying the old price and made a list, printed the appropriate number of copies and started handing them out right away.
I taught the rest of my students and since my last student of the day had canceled I decided to get back to my little WordPress sandbox where I had gotten another annoying error message. I googled the error, I found a solution on StackExchange, I went very slowly and carefully, watched some more of the course, and managed to change things in a way that means I can actually start learning things now.
I always get super nervous when I start typing lines of code because I have no idea what I’m doing. But I did know that I could put everything back to the way it was by just re-installing a new version. And I was not working on my live website which is a plus.
Then I finally ate dinner while reading a Sarina Bowen book, ate a ton of crackers, started writing this post, did Duolingo, fell into a social media rabbit hole, decided to start re-reading „Neanderthal Seeks Human“, didn’t make myself stop in time and went to bed almost an hour late.
Today is the teaching day without a break in the middle, so onwards and upwards!
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