School’s out! (…almost…)

w00t! Yesterday was the last day of class! Would that I could raise a toast to it!

Two rafts of papers to read, two courses to post on Blackboard, and then with any luck at all an entire month’s break.

I got a head start on the magazine writing students’ papers yesterday. Today I’ll read the Little McBoingers’ freshman comp papers (what a bunch this class has been!), then finish the budding journalists’ papers on Saturday. With any luck, I’ll be ready to file grades by…what? Monday? Then a day or two to load next semester’s courses, and after that…waHOO! A whole month of freedom!

This is the first real, credible vacation I’ve had in six years. Despite my highly developed expertise in Creative Malingering, the fact is that while “telecommuting” I was reading arcane academic copy steadily, plus supervising three or four bright young editors from afar (and doing freelance copyediting, and noonlighting with one to four upper-division writing courses on the side, and running this blog). Before that, when I was on GDU’s teaching faculty, an occasional break would come up, but it was usually filled with unpaid course prep work. I would grab every summer course I could get, and the time in between was occupied with getting ready for the next round of courses.

Boy, do I need a break! The stress of working 12 to 17 hours a day while trying to make some very frayed ends meet plus worrying about what we’re going to do, if anything, about the underwater house is making me sick. It’s obvious that the belly thing is stress-related, plus I’ve developed a fantastic new hypochondria, highly annoying and distracting. What next, Lord?

Of course, this “break” will be blighted a bit by the Workman Waltz, an added round of hassle one could do without. In addition to the roofers and the AC guy, I need to get the plumber in here. The kitchen sink is backing up in a weird way…think something’s amiss with the garbage disposal. While he’s here, there are a bunch of honey-does he can attend to.

That notwithstanding, I have a vacation plan. Mostly, it entails finally getting back into a healthy exercise routine. The scheme is as follows:

• Walk the dog first thing in the morning.
• Later in the morning, walk in one of the mountain parks, probably the one in Glendale, which is cleaner and more pleasant than ours and whose proprietors have announced no plans to fleece the users with parking fees.
• Ride the wonderful new purple bike in the afternoon.
• Walk the dog again in the evening.
• Spend the time in between gardening, touching up the paint, and reading stuff that is pure froth.

Maybe I can even get some socializing in somehow. That, of course, would entail finding someone to socialize with, not a likely prospect. But at least choir will be doing a lot of singing over the holidays, so that’ll provide some human contact. I’m going to spend Christmas Day at SDXB’s—with M’hijito at his dad’s and New Girlfriend in Denver with her family, we’ll both be orphaned again. Our plan is to hike part of the day and then fix a swell dinner.

So, maybe with some relief from work and a stab at getting back into what was once a pretty typical exercise routine, I’ll start to feel normal again.

Images:

Nikolai Petrovitch Bogdanov-Belsky, Mental Calculations. Public Domain.
Funny about Money, Snapshot of Purple Bicycle. You want that photo? Feel free!