8.4.12
I haven't written a blog entry in a long time. I don't even know if I have anything unpublished waiting in my blog folder. Oh well. The first round of the marathon is coming to an end. I never was a good finisher.
I call it the first round because there's a possibility that I'll stay in Dolgoprudny for another year. There are many things that factor into this decision, not the least of which is who I'll be working with, in terms of students and colleagues. But the simple things are rather important too. I think I have been eating very well, and it might not hurt to take another year to investigate the effects my diet has on how I work and live. If I moved to another country to continue teaching, I'd sort of have to start from scratch, not only with my diet. Another big issue is physical activity. I've come to enjoy working at the printing company, maybe not so much for the work itself, as much as for the long walking commute there and back. It takes me about fifty minutes each way. As much as my students there might not like to hear it, I don't know if I'd like working with them so much if the company were located closer to home. I arrive there after a long walk ready to work with anyone! Aside from walking there and back, I've recently started running again, and have recalled all the pleasures that come with it. For one thing, food tastes better. It sounds so simple, I know, but for me, the simple pleasures go a long way.
The company is a lesser part of my work. I only have three students there, each of whom I see individually on different days. I have groups of students, usually not more than seven, that I have been teaching since I arrived here. One of those groups finished last week. Some of those students are going to continue coming and I'll try to do a sort of converstaion course with them. I'm not too optimistic about how that will work out, we'll have our first meeting tomorrow. Another group is finishing this week, and I think they're ready to have a break from language link, although maybe I'll be able to entice them to keep coming until the end of May. I wouldn't mind continuing with them, since they're slightly more industrious than members of the other group in that they're willing to do reading and writing assignments outside of class. The former group complains about having too much work to be able to find time for extracurricular English.
I mentioned experimenting with my diet to see how it affects how I feel. I'm interested in being able to control, or at least predict my mood. There are a lot of factors that play a role here, among them the amount of sleep, the amount of monotonous work to complete and, on the contrary, the amount of variety in a day's activities. Food also plays its role, particularly in how much energy you have, and in how well you sleep. You have to take into account the type of food, the frequency of consumption, the amount of consumption, and the timing too. It's all very complicated. And then there's the weather to consider, and that's where I'm at a loss for estimation; but all in due course.
So far I've been able to conclude that the positiveness of my mood is directly related to how well I sleep

22.4.12
Now the trick is sleeping well consistently. I do that rather well, but just as one eventually gets used to living in paradise, and ones afterlife isn't as heavenly as it was after first entering the gates, so too can I be picky about the quality of my nightly dreams. I sometimes wake up with unsolved problems thinking around in my head. Five years ago they were math problems, now they're students who don't understand my carefully prepared explanations. I have to cut my loses and sleep off my instructional failures. If their demon agents don't give me any rest, then I turn on an audiobook, and that usually gets me snoozing in no time.
Another wrench in my sleep-train's engine is that I haven't been arriving home very early. Thankfully my evening groups have finished and we've switched to a slightly lighter schedule, one which finishes forty minutes earlier, so that I get home closer to ten p.m. instead of closer to eleven. This wasn't much of a problem back when the sun rose after 8 a.m., but I recently noticed the sky getting light just before 6, and my room plenty well lit by 7 a.m. Going to bed at midnight just isn't going to cut it anymore. Tomorrow my roommate is covering me, so I'll have another evening to eat a proper dinner before going to bed at a decent hour, but then I'll have three evening classes in a row, and will have to deal with the early sunlight somehow. So far, for lack of a sleeping mask, I've tried tying an undershirt around my eyes. That's worked all right.
In other news, there's not much other news. You can tell that's the case when you start writing about food you eat and how much you sleep. Maybe I just don't have so much to write about anymore. Or maybe there's as much as there has always been, I've just lost my drive. I've been reading more, though.