Busy Times

Hi Reader,

It's been a busy few weeks. I've been spending almost all my free time (including my lunch hours at work) preparing for the fall semester. My first class starts September 4, and I do all the prep work I possibly can prior to that first day. I plan each class period, write all my assignments for the whole semester, do all my research, proof everything a number of times (I can't be expecting my students to do this if I don't!), and this Thursday after work I'll makes copies of everything I need for the whole semester. I then organize all this into folders, each folder representing a different unit. It's a lot of work...probably about 15-20 hours a week for the last three weeks. But the good thing is that when the semester finally starts, I only need to focus on teaching and grading. I won't have to do all the other class prep that fills the "free" time of teachers. That's important to me, since I also work full-time during the semester and will additionally be a student mysef...I'm taking a graduate class on e-learning. The good news is that after this week I should be finished with all my prep work, and can hopefully relax a little before the new school year starts up.

Oddly enough, I did manage to fit in some writing time this weekend. I almost finished my revisions for the first chapter in the "scary middle part" of HP. I made more changes than initially intended. I changed some of the prose into dialogue and added a scene between my main character Ana and her soon-to-be antagonist Elly. But right now they're kind of friends. All the better to pit them against each other later on! I ended my revision right at the moment when Ana first realizes that something is very wrong with her cubicle. Nothing major...she just notices the window in her cube open when it shouldn't be and has a weird feeling of being watched.

Other things that happened this weekend: my husband spent some time preparing for his new job, which starts today; had dinner with our delightful friend Joanna and her magical cats; saw this crazy documentary called Man On Wire about the Frenchman who in the early '70s tightrope walked between the World Trade Center towers (in a weird coincidence, this tightrope-walker's name is Phillipe...just like our cement mime!); went to the Joke Joint to see my brother's girfriend perform her comedy routine. We also worked on our enormous unending soul-sucking filing project. I finished a thoroughly-satisfying vampire novel called The Companion (sent to me from England by my friend April). We watched a bizarre documentary on Mary Shelley that was part biography, part travelogue, and part nature program. And, finally, we got our lifetime fill of Michael Phelps.

So, a little bit of writing and a lot of other stuff. Sounds like a lot to cram into a weekend, but I ended up taking a vacation day from work in order to do it all. And now if I finish everything this week I can celebrate by going to the fair on Friday!