Faculty life.

Signs that it may be a long, long year, and then another long year after that:

1. I have started dreaming about administrators, and not the one I'm married to.
2. I find myself carrying on lengthy, involved, never-ending arguments with certain people in my head.
3. People have started dropping by my office to tell me true and alarming stories of Things Gone Dreadfully Awry in their respective areas.
4. The classroom I'm teaching in is deluxe but very, very warm.
5. I wore overly ambitious shoes today, an error I'm prone to, which means that by the end of the day I was not only overheated but footsore.
6. I am measuring the year by holidays.
7. I have started referring to myself as "aka, Sucker" when people ask me about being a faculty leader.
8. Many, many of the necessary instructional artifacts for me to teach these classes have yet to be made. Did I say "many"? I meant "endless amounts. Gobs. A whole heap. Incalculable numbers. Myriad. Multitudinous loads. The necessary instructional artifacts yet to be made are legion. Are numberless. There's a whole passel of them. As far as the eye can see would be full of the necessary instructional artifacts I have yet not made, had I yet made them. A whole slew. A zillion."
9. I may possibly be teaching two entirely new classes, as in classes that have never been taught before, in the spring.

I have started every day this week with a loud and encouraging rendition of "Stop Your Sobbing," but at this rate, I may need to play it several times a day. I may need to rig something up so that every time I open my laptop (how many times a day is that? a lot of times.), I can hear these words, in the immortal voice of Chrissie Hynde:

Each little tear

that falls from your eye

makes, makes me want

to take you in my arms

and tell you to stop all your sobbing

--and while I'm at it, I should also stop enumerating The Dreadfuls, aka the reasons why things were, are, and will always be terrible. No: Stop stop, stop stop. It is time for me to laugh instead of crying.

It is the 30th of November. Rejoice!

Although, having said that, I'm not entirely sure why rejoicing is called for. Let us enumerate:

1. I posted every single day for an entire month. Some of my best blogging ever, in my humble opinion! (can an exclamation point be humble? I think not.)
2. Several of my friends and compatriots posted every day for the month, and it was a joy and a pleasure to know I could look forward to that.
3. It's Friday. Friday is a de facto day of rejoicing.
4. I just got a voice mail from IT Guy, and the new motherboard is in and everything looks good in laptop-land. Yeah!
5. This weekend promises two movies, a jazz concert, a party, fresh local vegetables from Chad.
6. I found the two books I was looking for. Behind other books. You really don't want to imagine what all went on in the way of searching, overturning, upsetting, etc., the frail vestiges of organization in my world. But I have the books! I have been diverted!
7. On Monday, there are new episodes of Saving Grace and The Closer!
8. Next Thursday, there's an extended new episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, featuring Vincent d'Onofrio, aka Det. Bobby Goren.
9. All week: good classes. Which may mean the kids may actually have learned something, which in turn may mean I taught them something, or at least didn't get in the way, at least not too much.
10. Because of my relentless searching for two books, I found, and therefore could scan and share, this photo of running son when he was about ten years old: