In a sea of online classes, a bit of happiness emerges...

Happy Friday everyone! This is the end of my busy stretch of teaching, and I have to say the result is a bit different than I expected. And shockingly...it's in a good way!

As I've mentioned before, working from home, and the way that the pandemic has oblitered my former happy life and routine has wrecked a bit of havoc on my mental health. I know that I'm not the only one in this boat, and so we've all just been coping as best we can. In terms of work, I miss my colleagues, I miss the students, I miss my office, I miss the contened hustle and bustle of the campus and the library.  I was not looking foward to teaching solely online.

BUT, I will say that I'm pleasantly surprised by how it all went now that I'm nearly at the end of this very busy two week stretch. The format does have some challenges, to be sure, and I maintain that it is incredibly difficult to connect with people via a screen, and impossible when they do not turn on their cameras (which is their right to do, to be sure). Overall though, despite expecting to feel overwhelmed and stiff from sitting in front of my laptop and teaching all of these assumedly demoralizing classes online, I found that I was...happy. Tired, but energized. I felt busy, but useful. This is the most like my old self I have felt since March. I'd still rather teach in person, but this exceeded my expectations (which were admittedly low, LOL!). And I got to watch Hallmark Channel during my short breaks between sessions, so win/win/

Going into the winter, at least where I live, which has a cold climate, I'm not dreading the long term work from home model like I was before. It feels a bit cozier to be inside and spending less time by myself with the weather turning. I'll take any little bit of hopefulness that I can get, so I'm pleased with this!

In novena news, I finished up the John Paul II novena (and I'm actually sneaking in St. Jude, I just can't help myself!), and tomorrow we will begin the Novena for the Holy Souls in Purgatory! If you'd like to join in, I created a page for it on the blog. :-)

How are you doing this week, dear reader? Are you looking forward to Halloween and the feasts of All Saints/All Souls? Also, feel free to leave novena intentions in the comments!

A perpetual novena? And misadventures with Zoom...

Hello all, and I hope that your week is wrapping up nicely. 🤗 I feel stressed, no big surprise, but hanging in. Things at both schools are still going well, and I guess (?) I've adjusted to working from home. It helps not having the kids here to entertain at the same time, to be sure. But the other side of the coin is that I'm lonely. I like going to my office, and seeing my colleagues. I miss them, and I miss the students. But we've been told to be prepared to not be back on campus for another year. I have to admit that I didn't take that news so well. I've felt down all week. This is all just so unnatural. I'm doing the best I can.

To top it all off, I started my teaching this week, and this year it's all on Zoom. Nothing like demoralizing bouts of screenshare fails and non-responsive audio to make a girl feel special. :-0 I did not enjoy it, to be sure. I will say that the second class went much better than the first. I got the sound issue fixed, and I experimented more with the screensharing ahead of time to troubleshoot the problems I was having and became much more adept with it. It still feels weird to only communicate with people through a screen, but it was a bit less bad. For now, I think that's as good as it's going to get.

To cheer me, I've been novena'ing up a storm. My piece over at Catholic Mom this month is about potential novenas for fall/winter 2020 (feast days that don't fall on Sundays being my criteria), and I'm pretty much planning to start a new one anytime I finish one up. I'm currently praying the St. Jerome novena, and I ended up adding in the archangels. I have the Pray novena app on my phone, and it sent me a notification about that one, so I figured, what the heck? It pushes the prayers to me every day, so it makes that one incredibly easy. If you do not already have that app, I highly recommend it! After we wrap up St. Jerome/archangels, I will be wanting to start a new one. I'll let you know which one I decide on! If you have a recommendation for early October, please let me know!

 I wanted to pray the St. Therese novena, and maybe *start* on her feast day rather than conclude on it. Thoughts? Or maybe we could select another from the list. Let me know what you think, along with how you're doing, in the comments!