Stop, please stop

I've had a bit of a frustrating week. Actually, the last 2 weeks haven't been so great.

The worst thing that happened last week was that I was denied more than half the conference funding I was asking for. The school has agreed to give me just under half the amount I needed, which frustrated me a little bit because it was my first time asking money for an overseas conferences and I knew of other people who had been fully funded before (including sustenance allowance - imagine that!).

I got over that eventually (ok, maybe not completely but getting there) and decided to dip into emergency funds as well as self-fund some of the expenses. It will be very difficult to self-fund given the financial difficulties of this first half of the year, plus the fact that I can never seem to claim money for work that I've done because payroll cannot get their shit together (urgh.. god forbid they should do their job properly).

Then I started marking. Oh, what a doozy... I'm still marking and it was just absolutely appalling. My students were meant to prepare an individual assignment and the quality of the work was so disappointing, it got me a little bit upset. These were kids who actually come to class and they get it all wrong. I've marked about 30 so far and I've failed more people in this lot of 30 so far, than I have in any other semester of teaching this unit. Absolutely atrocious.

It got to the point that I was really second-guessing myself and wondering if I was being too harsh. I met with my unit co-ordinator yesterday just to go through the ones I'd already marked and he agreed that I was pretty spot on. Far out. At least that was one good thing happening this week.

At some point, I also got into a fight with Damien about milk. Milk. Don't even get me started. And then this morning, he was really pushing my buttons again. I had organised to do dinner with the girls at work for Friday and we were all going to bring our boys. I couldn't ring the restaurant on Monday as it was closed and I forgot to ring on Tuesday. By the time I rang on Wednesday, they were fully booked for 8pm and could only do 6pm.

The problem is, the Crusaders and the Hurricanes are playing at 5.30pm on Friday. We would have been able to do an 8pm dinner. I know a lot of people don't get rugby/don't like rugby/cannot see what the big deal is, but I am too much in a bad mood to put up with those sort of bullshit comments, so please indulge me. I love rugby. I love the Crusaders. I also quite like the Hurricanes because they're from Wellington and Damien is from Wellington. I told him about it on Wednesday night over the phone, saying we would miss the game this way and that I was upset. He said it was fine.

He said it was fine. And then he gave me grief about it the next morning!!! WTH? I think, on some level, he was just giving me a hard time and didn't mean anything serious by it. But I was seriously bugged. Like, seriously, enough. All of you who know me, know full well that most of the time, I cannot take a joke. So what. Tough shit, I cannot take a joke. So if you wanna give me a hard time, go ahead.. but then please stop.

I am just so annoyed. More marking to go. Have to host a visiting academic today for a few hours, and then attend a "Women in Research" function tonight. So much work to do. Am so frustrated. Am so so grumpy...