First Day of Class

Four and a half straight hours on my feet entertaining 50+ freshman students is…a lot. One class is overenrolled, so the total number of classmates is, at this time, well over 50. Some will drop, no doubt, but I don’t entertain much hope that the total will fall far.

Fortunately, the 101 course is a five-week session, so they’ll be out of our hair soon enough. Then for two weeks, I’ll only have 25 Eng. 102 students…or however many have survived by then.

The pavement out there is so hot that the soles of my sandals got hot enough, while I was traipsing back and forth between the classroom building and my car, to burn the bottoms of my feet. Had to make two round trips to the car to haul the massive course packets—two rolling suitcases full of the damn things. My feet aren’t quite blistered, but they’re still red and sore, two hours later.

It’s only 105 degrees today, not really very hot. But it’s soggy wet out there. Yesterday after I hung up the laundry, it took eight hours for a bath towel to hang dry. Normally a heavy terry-cloth bath towel would dry on the line in 45 minutes or an hour.

To frost the cake, I’m getting a sore throat. Just what I needed to start the semester: hot feet and a summer cold! 😀

Yesterday M’hijito invited me to a July 4 party at his house. It was a lot of fun—his friends are young couples with toddlers, very cute to watch and play with. But soooo hot! He thinks his air conditioning isn’t cooling the house because of the single-paned windows and doors, but I don’t think that’s the explanation. Something’s out of whack there: I’ve lived in many a house glazed with single-paned windows and French doors and never had the AC not cool the interior. Cost more to run: yes. Fail to operate: no.

So now I’ve got to talk him into letting me call an AC company to see why that’s happening.

My own allegedly ultra-efficient air-conditioning unit has been running almost nonstop and struggling to cool the rooms. Where the old clunk kept the front of the house cool and left the bedrooms hot, this new model cools the bedrooms pretty efficiently but leaves a lot to be desired in the public rooms. With the thermostat set at 80, the kitchen/dining room/family room is 84 and the back rooms are around 81 or 82. The other day I shoved a chair into the hall and parked next to the thermostat to read copy. Not very successful: the dog thought this signaled the start of a great game and so would not leave me alone, and it was dark and gloomy in there. Rather be hot in a brighter, more cheerful room.

Yesterday I determined to clean the filthy house and wash the laundry and do the ironing before today’s classes started, which meant having to get through those jobs in time to leave for M’hijito’s house around 3:00 p.m.

Thought I was gunna die pounding through all that physical labor in the heat. Naturally, it turned into one of those interruption-every-ten-minutes days. Pool had to be backwashed and fixed in the middle of everything; that’s just the most memorable of the drop-what-you’re-doing, tend-to-something-else, try-to-go-back-to-work moments.

Anyway, the house is now nice and clean, but by the time I got to M’hijito’s place I was so tired I could barely speak, much less hold a polite conversation. Had to leave early, before the dessert and fireworks, because I couldn’t hold my head up another minute.

Crawled into bed before dark and actually slept half-way decently. That meant getting up at 5:00 a.m. was no problem.

The idea of measuring out the dog’s food and setting up everything for breakfast the night before worked well this morning: it took all of two minutes to fix food. I may want to make that a permanent fixture, since getting ready in the morning can sometimes be a time-wasting hassle.

Okay…rest break over! Now to figure out which of these students really are and which really are not in my courses.