The first cool morning of the fall—at last! At quarter to five, it’s 68 on the back porch.
Too bad I can’t enjoy it: in 45 minutes I have to schlep through the rush-hour traffic to Scottsdale, to a breakfast meeting of the networking group I joined.
But it’s one of various small harbingers. Not only is the heat about to break, choir is back in session. Last night we rehearsed several lovely pieces, and on Saturday we meet all day, wrapping up a “boot camp” session with a potluck dinner. Sunday the regular season of singing resumes, something that adds a great deal to life.
Check out this that I found on the Web:
Isn’t that kewl! Not only do you get the lovely choir singing, you can follow the parts! What a grand tool for practicing. YouTube has a whole series of these things.
Meanwhile, the electric bill arrived: only $207! That’s $30 less than last month’s, to my amazement. August was miserably uncomfortable, well over 100, humid, and sticky every single day. By all rights, the power bill should have been through the roof. I’m budgeted for $225 but expect July and August to be a little higher than that. Reason for the drop: unexplained.
It gets better: the water bill was only $83. That’s right: eight. three. In past years it’s been around $125 at this time of year. I think it’s because I decided to cut back the watering schedule and haul the hoses to the plants myself, by hand. Suspicions confirmed: drip systems are another scam, along with the programmable thermostat that jacks up the power bill and the water-saving toilet that forces you to flush three times for every one use. None of the plants died, and I saved over $40 on water.
At the college, my chair says I can have three sections a semester starting next spring, and he will try to get me a summer section. This will resolve my financial problems: with any luck, I’ll never have to go through another summer without enough income to cover base expenses.
My colleague has engineered another eight-week section of the magazine writing course for spring semester, so pleased are they that the current one filled to the scuppers. That means at no time will I be actually teaching three sections at once. Knowing these eight-week courses exist, I intend to proactively go after them, because it’s much easier and much more entertaining to teach accelerated sections, even of writing courses.
God is great!
A light on the horizon! Did you end up having to re-do everything that Blackboard rejected? And are we going to post our 1/2 off challenge tomorrow? I now have a wedding to get in shape for (as if life was not reason enough)
Your dept. chair must love you! It’s still hot here. Can’t wait to get out and about more.
I’m with you on the hurrah, summer’s almost over. I saw a 5 day forecast the other day with almost every high below 100 and got all excited 🙂
@ Jackie: It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? ooooohhhhhh it’s only the first week of September!!!!!!!!! The AC has been off all day and i just finished off dinner on the back porch. joy joy joy!
@ frugal scholar: Hope you get some cooler weather soon, too — without benefit of high winds and floods! Yesh: apparently His Chairmanship approves of whatever he thinks I’m doing. The school’s enrollment continues to rise about 4% to 5% per term, and so he probably needs plenty of slaves to staff those comp courses. As long as the depression lasts and as long as GDU continues to jack up its tuition, presumably there’ll be gigs for the likes of me.
All i need to do to keep getting hired in those precincts, i think, is continue trying to think of strategies that will work for him and help put some extra shine on his already excellent department.
@ Nola: I’ll try to get the half-off challenge up tomorrow. This past week or so has been a shade on the stunning side: it’s been all I could do to come up with posts for FaM!
So funny you wrote this today. When I was writing my similar article I was thinking about you in Arizona and how September must mean something completely different out there in the land of hotness. I guess not! As an aside, I didn’t think it was every muggy in Arizona. Shows what I know!
@ SimplyForties: Late July and August can get pretty damp, partly because of the monsoons and partly because of the inane lakes developers were allowed to build by way of enticing people into the sprawl. This has been an El Nino year, and so we’ve had more rain than usual. Winter was quite wet, and this summer we’ve had a fair amount of rain, too.