Every fall

I spend the first week or so of classes feeling like this time I have a schedule I can stay on top of.  Then October arrives, and I realize I was fooling myself again.

Thursday I worked on my merit file (for my semi-annual review) then went to Berkeley for some meetings; the trip there, the meetings, and the trip back ate 9 hours.

Friday I completed my merit file and then spent a few hours adapting and a letter of recommendation for a graduate student, tailoring the letter to each job. That was two days of no writing and not much chance to interact with my current students.

Yesterday I fit in a few hours of writing, then wrote another letter of recommendation for another graduate student. Taking care of some urgent emails and some others that were not urgent when I got them, but that were getting old enough to be pressing, took another hour.

Today I did more writing (getting ready for the upcoming ASBH conference) and finally now am able to turn my attention to my classes.

It's all good, just... there aren't enough hours in the day, just like there weren't last fall, or the fall before, or the fall before, or...

Dev's not sure what all the racing about is about. His newest goal is to get someone to make him a tiny little version of this outfit:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

UWP 018: Style in the what?

Image
I have taught  UWP 018: Style in the Essay  once, in Fall 2014, and am looking forward to having it again. As you can see from the official course  description , it's pretty poorly defined, both in general (so many goals!) and in specific parts (e.g. "Students should be familiar with the general principles of good writing upon entry into the course," whatever that means). Even the topics are hard to pin down, especially "the essay." It's vague enough that Phillip Lopate's anthology  The Art of the Personal Essay  covers 2000 years (starting with Seneca) and several countries and languages (with translations from Latin, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese). Round 1 (2014) Given this range, I thought for a long time about what  the essay  is before teaching UWP 018 for the first time. I thought back to what I read during my MFA in nonfiction writing, not only essays but also books and articles about the various forms of nonfiction prose. I also ...
Read more

Some architectural comments

Image
Some Vancouver locals call it The Rainy City, or Raincouver. I call it the City of Balconies. The city has extremely high population density, achieved in part by having lots of high-rise residential buildings -- and by lots, I mean all over the place, with more going up all the time if the number of cranes and construction sites are any indication. This is part of downtown Vancouver: And this is the view from our hotel window, out in Burnaby (part of the metro area): Some of the buildings are fairly bland. Some I like because they are reflective, and I enjoy taking pictures of things reflected at the scale of an entire building, especially other buildings. Some of the buildings were lovely and unique. We saw the Woodward's Building from several angles, starting with noticing its rooftop grove poking up from behind another building: When we got closer, we saw the lovely exoskeleton: It turns out the building was torn down and rebuilt just a fe...
Read more

Moray Coast, Day 2: Findhorn to Hopeman part 2

Image
I was pretty bushed by the time we stopped in Burghead; we'd talked about resting a mile or so before town, but there was no shade, so we pushed on. Dev, of course, has ridiculously long ostrich legs and therefore was not fatigued at all. (Also, he rode in my pocket, though he prefers I not point that out too often.) He found some interesting items in the cafe, such as these ship-building tools used by Daniel Young Hopeman: This is the boat Dev would like to have built if he had Dev-sized versions of Mr. Hopeman's tools (and the skill to use them). We didn't have time to look up Mr. Hopeman at the time, but later investigations revealed that he was a fireman on drifter (a kind of boat, I assume) that sank on June 10, 1931. The Glasgow Herald reported: Dev also was intrigued to learn that Rhubarb! (And, of course... Custard!) Our next stop was a local shop where I attempted to buy a sun hat. We were ready for rain, but we were not ready for so much...
Read more