dog

Tired and Annoyed

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday. I’m a little out of it this morning – I took a sick day yesterday, so I’ve spent the morning catching up on emails and Slack messages. I’m quite sleepy. I got an update from the sleep center on Friday that we’re not doing the in-center sleep study (insurance won’t approve it right now), but I am getting a CPAP…eventually. Evidently there’s a worldwide shortage of CPAP machines right now due to some massive recall. So that’s annoying.

Probably as a side effect of being overtired and also because I’ve just had a lot of work to do between work and school lately, I have felt really irritable this week. It’s not my favorite thing. I feel like I’m unpleasant to be around. I’m doing my best to compensate where I can and to be honest about my feelings where I need to be, but yeah. It’s not the most fun I’ve ever had.

Nova went to the groomer on Saturday and is once again a TikTok star. They do a great job of capturing her personality. I don’t have much else to say this week, so I’ll leave you with a few pictures of Nova when she was particularly shiny and still wearing her bandana from the groomer (before she tried to eat it off of her neck and I had to confiscate it haha):

Sleep is Important

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It’s been a week. I had a lovely rest of my time off last week; even though I have some regrets about not working ahead on school work, I think I made the right choice to take the time to really relax.

As I mentioned last week that I was doing a home sleep study Thursday night. I got the results back, and as it turns out…I’m really bad at breathing when I sleep. I have severe sleep apnea, which is why I’m tired all the time.

The good news is this is totally treatable, and once I’m set up with a CPAP machine and get used to wearing that when I sleep, the chances that I’ll actually sleep well are vastly increased. The idea of getting an actually restful night’s sleep is mind-blowing to me and I’m very excited to find out what that feels like.

The bad news is I have to wait for my insurance to approve the in-person sleep study they need to do in order to set up the CPAP correctly for me, and that can apparently take a month. And now that I know definitively just how awful my sleep has been, it’s like I can’t pretend that it’s okay anymore, and I feel extra tired.

I’m really grateful that my husband pushed me to get this checked out and that I got the ball rolling now. I’m also really frustrated with American healthcare right now.

Next week for school I have two papers and a presentation due, in addition to the usual readings and reflections, and I’m a little overwhelmed about that. I did get one of the papers started last night, and that helped the anxiety somewhat, but I didn’t exercise the greatest judgment when scheduling my weekend in light of all of this homework. We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, that’s my week. I’ll leave you, as always, with a few silly Nova photos from this week:

Vacation!

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers. It is Thursday, and this blog post is late, because I am on vacation, and what is time? I hope you’re all hanging in there with everything that’s going on in the world right now.

I have mostly unplugged this week. The friend who was going to be coming into town ended up not being able to make it, so it’s been lots of quiet family time at home, which, frankly, was really what I needed. I’ve played some video games, I started knitting a new sweater, I’ve been doing a decent job of not thinking too much about work or school. Tonight, I’m doing a home sleep study, so that’ll be interesting but will hopefully lead to some helpful insights to help improve my relationship to sleep.

I don’t have much else to write about this week, but I will leave you with these photos of Nova being very confused about why the yarn ball wasn’t for her:

Vacation Imminent

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers! We have made it to another Thursday. I kept thinking yesterday was Thursday, even though nothing about the day indicated that it was anything other than Wednesday, and today I woke up thinking it was Friday, so we’re not off to the best possible start. Still, it’s almost Friday, and that has to count for something.

Last weekend I wrote my first real paper for seminary. It was just a few pages long, but it was more academic than any writing I’ve done in over a decade, and the citation style was different than what I used in my undergrad life. It didn’t actually take me that long once I sat down to do the writing, but gathering the materials and trying to make everything coherent was a struggle.

But now, it’s almost a vacation week for me! Next week is symposium week at school, meaning no classes and no homework due. I decided to also take the week off from work (because my brain really needs a break). One of our best friends from Chicago is coming up to hang out for a few days, and it’s going to be great. I am very excited to have almost zero calendar commitments for a whole week.

I am pretty fried and don’t have a whole lot else to talk about this week, so I’ll leave you with these photos of Nova:

It’s a Blog!

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to another Thursday. I am struggling a bit this week – I have a lot of things going on between work and school (not to mention the rest of my life), and I’m having a hard time holding it all and prioritizing which balls I need to keep in the air and what I can allow to drop for a bit. I will be fine – I have therapy this afternoon and I know that none of my problems are all that big – but I am tired and my jaw is tight and I’m just a little overwhelmed.

I wasn’t sure what to write about this week beyond the overwhelm, but I thought after showing off how my new electric mandola looks last week, maybe I should share how it sounds, too. Last Friday I took the day off with the intention of spending the morning taking some assessments for school and the afternoon doing music as a chance to kind of reset my brain. The assessments ended up not taking very long, so I was able to record one song I’d already had pretty much figured out and then write and record a whole second song that afternoon. Here’s that second song:

Awake with You by Alyxander James

This was an experiment in GarageBand – it’s not perfect and listening to it again there are definitely things I’d change. But I’m pleased with it overall for not really having a clue what I’m doing.

Here are the lyrics, for the curious:

Today was another hard day
I know you’ve had a lot of those lately
Everything feels like a mess
Been a while since you knew it’d turn out okay
Now you lie in bed
With the day on replay in your mind
Wondering whether the tension will ever unwind

But I will stay awake with you
I will stay awake with you

I am not going to say
That life will look better tomorrow
And I am not going to tell you
That every day you’ll be subject to sorrow
No one can say
What’s waiting for us down the line
But whatever it is, I’ll be right by your side

I will stay awake with you
I will stay awake with you

oo

I will stay awake with you
I will stay awake with you

I’ll leave you with this photo of a Very Good Doggo looking intently at something unseen by the humans in our apartment.

Searching for Focus

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday. I am all sorts of confused about what day it is – I ended up taking Monday off because I was fighting a headache most of Sunday night into Monday morning, and that always throws the rest of my week for a loop.

It’s been a decent week, but I have been struggling to focus. I got my homework for the week done early. I should have started working on a paper that’s coming due in a couple of weeks, but I didn’t. I need to make sure I have enough sources for the paper I want to write, and even that has been an uphill battle in terms of focus and prioritization. I’m enjoying my classes, but I’m still trying to figure out how to keep my life relatively balanced between work and school and play (and no, I will not be giving up play while I am working and in school – that way lies madness).

I’ve been increasingly excited about music, thanks to FAWM – I haven’t finished any more songs than the one I wrote on the 1st, but I’ve got some snippets of things down that I’m trying to find time to work on. And a couple of days ago I got a new electric mandola, which I’m super excited about and having tons of fun with in whatever down time I find.

Eastwood Airline Electric Mandola

I’m aware that bringing a new instrument home in the middle of when I should be working on homework was a questionable decision, but I don’t have any regrets at the moment.

I’m taking tomorrow off to catch up on homework and hopefully get some music time in, too. So I’m looking forward to that.

I think that’s about all I have to say this week. As always, I’ll leave you with a picture of Nova:

The inside-out ear just slays me

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I hope your weeks are going well. I’ve been feeling tired and a bit overwhelmed, myself, but not to the same degree that I was last week (this is probably because I had Tuesday off from work this week).

FAWM has begun! I realize every year that it has totally changed my perception of the month of February. In the MIdwest, it can reasonably be argued that February is the hardest month of the year – it’s cold and dark (even though it’s slowly getting lighter), and you know that winter is going to continue for at least a couple more months. But because of FAWM, February is genuinely one of my favorite months of the year.

Because I ended up having Tuesday off this week, I was able to actually get one song written, which was my goal this year. Between work and school I don’t know if I’ll get anything else written, but I wanted at least one on the board, so I feel good about getting that done. And it’s incredible to be able to listen to the songs other people are creating! There’s so much talent in the world. It’s inspiring.

I don’t have much else to write about this week, so I’ll leave you with this: Nova went to the groomers on Saturday. When I went to pick her up, they let me know they were going to make a TikTok of her later – “She was very good…just, you know, awkward.” I think they really captured her essence here.

And finally, here’s a picture of Nova napping yesterday that made me laugh:

Sleepy baby

So Tired

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers – we’ve made it to another Thursday. I am particularly grateful for calendars and to do lists today, because I definitely forgot about blogging until my phone reminded me this morning.

I am…weary. Classes are going pretty well, things are good at work, everyone in my household is staying relatively healthy and well, but I am just exhausted. I’ve been a bit sniffly the past few days, so maybe I’m fighting off a cold, or maybe it’s my body’s reaction to the fact that I woke up yesterday to an actual temp of -15 outside and a windchill of -35 and I just want to hibernate. (It has warmed up significantly since last night, but it’s supposed to start getting cold again over the weekend, and the variation in temperature mostly just makes my joints ache.)

My Tuesday class, which I usually go to in person, was moved to Zoom this week because our professor had a covid exposure a couple of days before. Thankfully she seems to be okay, but for safety we all Zoomed in from our respective spaces. My husband also had a music class Tuesday night, so we were both occupied with our computers for a while and Nova was not happy about it, which was a little distracting. But we made it work, and hopefully we’ll be back to in-person class next week.

I am feeling a little behind for tonight’s class – I finished the readings and the written assignment in plenty of time, but the professor for this class records the lecture portion of the class on Tuesday afternoons to make the Thursday night class an hour shorter, and I haven’t had a chance to watch the lecture yet. I’ll have to figure out free moments in my work day to get it done, I think, which is not ideal.

Really, though, it’s not been a bad week. I’m just so tired…

Anyway, I leave you, as always, with some Nova photos from this week:

Sleepy bean
She’s such a weirdo
The best smush

New Routines and Tiny Gratitudes

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers! We’ve made it to another Thursday. My week has been decent, but underlined by a background anxiety that I’m not going to be able to figure out how to get all my homework done in time. New routines are hard – all change, even if it’s positive, is hard to some degree – and I’m worried I’m not up for the task. I’ve already had to turn down some social plans in favor of getting homework done, which doesn’t feel great. But the work is all really interesting so far, and I really appreciate my classmates and professors.

I realized in therapy last Thursday afternoon that I was particularly anxious for my Thursday night class – Religious and Theological Interpretation. After talking through some things with my therapist, I realized it was largely because the last time I had engaged academically with stuff like this, I was in undergrad at a small, conservative bible college, where I was coming to grips with the fact of my queerness and watching interpretations of religious texts be weaponized against people like me. So it makes sense that I was anxious! Thankfully, I was able to name that, not only in therapy but also in class, and it seemed to resonate with a lot of people. I’m really grateful to have landed where I did.

I’m going to wrap up this post with a brief little list of things I’m particularly grateful for right now:

  • Supportive communities. My husband and I have incredible support networks (some of which we share, and some that we don’t), and I’m so grateful to know that there are multiple communities of folks looking out for us, both when life is particularly chaotic and when things are really wonderful.
  • New (to me) ideas. My classes are introducing me to concepts I’d never considered before, and I am enjoying the challenge.
  • FAWM. While February has not started yet, the FAWM website is up and running and people are starting to gather. I have no idea if I’ll write any music this February, but I’m excited to listen to what other folks come up with.

And, as always, here’s your weekly dose of Nova:

School Days, School Days

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday. I’m a little discombobulated around what day it is – I woke up feeling rather under the weather yesterday and ended up taking the day off, which was needed and lovely but also threw me for a bit of a loop in terms of my internal calendar. Thank goodness for my calendar and to do list keeping me on track!

It’s been a big week – I’m officially a seminary student! I had my first class on Tuesday, and it was great. It’s a small group (there are 10 students and only four of us are in person, with the rest of the class Zooming in), which I think will be particularly great for this particular class, which is “Introduction to Personal and Spiritual Formation” – basically looking at who the person is that you’re bringing into this seminary journey. My other class (“Religious and Theological Interpretation”) starts this evening. The professor normally commutes up from Chicago to teach on Thursdays, but due to Omicron, he’ll be zooming into class, and invited the students to do so as well. While I tend to learn better in person, this is a larger class, and I think for the time being I’m more comfortable with attending virtually.

I’m already a little overwhelmed by homework and figuring out my new routines, but I’m trying to remember to be gentle with myself as I learn how to navigate these new responsibilities. The class material is already very engaging and I’m excited to continue to dive into it.

I don’t have a lot of other news this week. I leave you with this photo of Nova, with some very sweet context – she fell asleep like this, leaning on my arm as I held her paw, for a solid 30 minutes last weekend. (What the photo didn’t capture were the tiniest little snores.) She is truly the sweetest doggo.

Sweet, snoozy Nova