Frustration Happens

Today has been a day of frustration. My anxiety level is high. Nothing seems to be going right.

Well, it’s actually not that bad. I mean, the water analyzer finally decided to work correctly, and my classes went smoothly. And (and this is totally crazy), I actually did my homework before going to class. Yes, I taught the class, but we all needed to work through an exercise in advance, including me – and I did. It seldom actually works out that way.

But then, the mass spectrometer didn’t want to go linear. (Sorry for jargon. It would be better to say that the $300k marvelous piece of instrumentation that I work with daily was being a marvelous pain in my behind.) The long and the short of it is that I couldn’t do the analyses that I needed to do today, so I have to fit them in tomorrow.

Then the boy, despite being chipper and happy as he got on the bus this morning, wound up behaving so badly at school that he had to be sent home. Guilt set in when my husband said he’d get the boy so I could still do heavy weapons practice with my SCA friends later tonight. I hate guilt. I shouldn’t feel guilty, but I do. None of this is my fault, but somehow I take on the blame. Growl.

Then had the student come in to my office and ask for his exam back and be surprized that the homeworks I’ve been assigning all semester (none of which this student has done) actually count toward their final grade. Yeah. It’s in the syllabus.

Other little things have been bugging me too. This big blow up in the blogosphere involving a couple of prominent bloggers and sexual harassment, one case perpetrated on a blogger and the other by a blogger. It’s distressing and bugging me maybe more than it ought to.

And so many other things in life just scratching for my attention.

I feel like I need a vacation. I hope that some heavy weapons helps.

So… how do you deal with life’s frustrations?