Back to School

We are having our back-to-school "training," which mostly consists of sitting in an insufficiently cooled room listening to administrators talk endlessly about things which could have been summed up in a 25 word email.

Also they are careful to explain to us why we can't have a raise this year either. It is because all the university's money is going to pay administrators, in my humble opinion.

They fed us, sort of. I just drank the coffee. I have discovered I like my coffee black now. I am indeed 100% grown up. (And about time, too.)

One of my students from about ten years ago has taken one of our Visiting Professor positions. I remember them as an adorable, kind of sleepy presence in the front row. Now they are a poet, and the new other half of the creative writing department. (I am the fiction half, they are the poetry half. Our poet for the past seven or eight years left just before the semester started to take up a job that actually paid enough to live on, apparently. God Speed.)

Anyway, more "training" tomorrow, and then first day of classes on Tuesday. It was cool this week, highs in the low 80's and very little humidity -- almost fall-like weather. But now we are in for a stretch of 100 degree days. At least all my classes are in my building or right next door -- no more long hikes across the campus in the killing heat.

Hope your semesters are start well!