Back to the Mines

Last day of winter beak before the semester takes up on Monday.

I'm not deeply pleased by this. Not that I don't have a good semester coming up -- it's a nice enough one. History of the English Language again, a new class of my own design, Mythology in Lit, which ought to be fun, Chaucer again, and a second-semester comp class. Only four classes. I can teach a four-load in my sleep.

No, it's just that I've been writing. Nine hours a day I've been writing. The muse is riding me like a demon. I don't want to give it up. I wouldn't mind giving it up to teach, but Monday and Tuesday is something our university sweetly calls "pre-school conferencing," and one of my fellow English Professors calls "the monkey dance." Non-stop administrative tedium, in other words, from 8 in the morning to 4.30 at night: workshops, presentations by those traveling folk who spend four to eight hours giving us presentations on "learning styles" and "true assessments" and "values-based testing" or whatever, and always seem to want to start the sessions by asking us to get into groups and decide what sort of fruit we would be, if we were fruits, or what color we are, or if we could design the perfect cubicle, what it would have in it, and don't these lackwits know I have actual work to do?

Anyway. Enough venting.

Let me write, here on the last purely free writing day I have left: