Still Griping.

I suspect I cause my own problems half the time. Take last night.

I got home around 5:00 and found The Professor hunched over his desk, grading papers. He had three tests to give last week, and so he now has huge piles of tests to be graded. Losing the weekend to company didn’t help get the grading done. I walked in to his room to let him know I was back, and he just grunted at me, not lifting his nose from the pile of papers in front of him. I told him I wouldn’t disturb him, and went to tend to Clueless’s and ACfH’s dinners.

It was actually a bit of relief he was so tied up, because I hadn’t had a chance to finish my Latin homework, and this gave me a chance to do my thing. I pulled my notes out and started fooling around with pluralizing declensions. I was at it about twenty minutes (and getting exasperated because the guy teaching the course hadn’t given us all the information we needed to change the sentences from singular to plural). I took a brief break to look up a few things on the web about how to pluralize the possessive and then looked in on The Prof to see how he was making up. This time he looked up long enough to ask me what I was planning to do about dinner, and that he’d purchased some small salmon filets for me to prepare.

This represents a major breakdown in communications.

1) He has never yet this semester wanted me to cook him dinner on Monday night. He never has time to eat it because he’s always preparing for class last minute.

2) I had been of a mind that if he *had* wanted dinner, I’d heat up the chicken rice soup I made the night before. When I got home, I found the plastic container of soup had been taken out of the refrigerator and left open on the counter, with half the soup missing. I took that as a clue that he’d wanted the soup for dinner and had already dealt with it.

3) Salmon is a thick fish. It takes a while to prepare properly. I should have started dinner preparations as soon as I’d gotten home in order to get dinner prepared quickly enough for us to be able to leave for school at 6:30. Problem is, I didn’t even know he’d bought salmon.

I got angry because this meant I couldn’t work on my homework. I bit it back though, since it wasn’t his fault that I’d waited until Monday night to finish it. I went out, got the salmon cooking, put on a pot of water for veggies, and then set up shop at the desk by the kitchen so I could keep an eye on things. I managed to get things done by six o’clock, and let him know dinner was ready. He came out, asked if I’d mind if he took his plate back to his desk to work and disappeared again. How could I say “no”? He then hardly touched his dinner. My own dinner was already wrapped in foil and placed in the fridge.

The trip into school was another listing of how much work he had to do for only three courses and how there wasn’t enough time in the day to do it all. I wasn’t about to pick a fight before class, so I just nodded and said stupid platitudes like how hard it must be. We got to school with very little time to spare, and went our separate ways.

My class ends an hour before his, so I sat on a bench in the hallway outside his room and read (Brin’s Kiln People which is one of the better scifi books I’ve gotten my hands on in recent months). When class was over, his disposition was totally different. He was almost chipper. He wanted me to come into his classroom, see the “SmartBoard” that is a combination computer screen, touchpad and marker board. He spoke about what he covered in class that evening.

We got home, I warmed up his plate for him while he sat at the table watching me and chattering on.(I took the time to fume to myself that he wasn’t bothering to lift a finger for himself.) It was too late for me to be very hungry, so I just nuked a small container of leftover lentil pilaf and ate that while he ate his salmon. The difference between Pre-Class Professor and Post-Class Professor was night and day.

I did not wash dishes, just rinsed them off and left them in the sink. I then went to bed (The Prof had already turned in). He complained about how tired he was, how hard the day had been. I stayed nice. I asked him how late he could sleep tomorrow. He didn’t answer, but mentioned that he’d be losing an hour because somebody had to get up at 6:00 and he never got back to sleep until 7:00 after that. I said sweetly that we were going to bed at the same time, and somebody was getting up at six without the option of going back to sleep. He looked sheepish and shut up.

Small victories. I’ll settle for that at the moment.