I’ve been away from the blog for a while lately due to the frenzy of final exam grading and then the intense pleasure I found thereafter in doing absolutely fuck all. Bits of interest that you missed included but were not limited to:
1. A student whom I hadn’t seen since February came by my office to drop off every assignment from the whole semester. Along with his essays he had what turned out to be a forged doctor’s note claiming he’d been absent all semester due to his being incapacitated by the insidious and often overlooked disease of “monomuconusis.” No, that is not even a word. Nice.
2. The student I asked for your advice in dealing with — remember him? He kind-of-sort-of plagiarized his final exam essay. Nice, right? Nice.
3. Another student thought it would somehow be acceptable to send me her final exam essay four days after the exam date and two days after semester grades were completely finalized in the system. Nice, right? Nice.
Nonetheless, the summer is off to a great start. All of that bullshit is over with and I am enjoying my time off before teaching starts again. As it turns out, I have less time off than planned. I was going to be completely footloose and fancy-free until July, but I’ve been asked to teach an additional class in June.
I’m actually quite pleased about this and not just due to the extra money I’ll be making. I’ll leave out the specifics, but it’s a good program and something I’m happy to be involved in. It will also be just a bit different from my usual courses, so I’ll have the freedom to try out a few new strategies and ideas. All in all I’m very glad to have been chosen for it.
Before all that begins, though, I’ll have a brief trip to The Big City, where I’m finally going to get myself a chest of drawers for the bedroom and a better shelving system for my growing DVD collection. My clothes will be so happy to be freed from the Rubbermaid boxes they currently live in and be housed in actual furniture, I tell you what. I’m heading to IKEA on Tuesday and I’m still mulling over the exact pieces I want to bring home, but that’s really nothing to complain about. I love their website. Looking at all that sleek, clean-lined, efficient Scandinavian furniture soothes the savage beast within me.
Next on my exciting list of summer activities is the Decemberists trip! OH YES INDEED! My friends Clarabella and Philly are coming to visit, and we’ll be heading back to The Big City with Golightly and another friend to see The Decemberists! We all love love love that band and I think it’ll be the first time seeing them play for each of us. Very excited (if you can’t tell).
After that I have a trip out to California to see my extended family and pay respects to my Grandma, who passed away pack in March. While we’ll all be grieving a bit, my Grandma had a very long, busy, and happy life, so I think we’ll mostly be celebrating her and the trip won’t be too awfully sad. It will be exciting to see all the far-flung members of my family, some of whom I haven’t seen in over 10 years. When I get back from that trip it’ll be straight back into the classroom. WHEW.
As you can imagine, with this busy schedule coming up, I have been feeling the need to be as lazy and self-indulgent as humanly possible. The last week has faded into an endless stream of reading, TV, movies, and lounging only occasionally punctuated by rounds of the 30-Day Shred (I mean I can’t be fully and correctly lazy if that laziness isn’t tinged with fear for the next time Jillian Michaels will yell “AND NOW! SQUATS AND OVERHEAD PRESSES FOLLOWED BY PUSH-UPS!” – that lady can be terrifying).
I think tonight should be the last day of the lazy parade, though, as I have a million things to do this weekend, like purge my closet in preparation for the new dresser, neaten up the house, do laundry, and plan for the upcoming courses I’ll teach. I shall now conveniently forget that list of to-dos until tomorrow morning, however, because I have tofu a-marinatin’, whiskey a-chillin’, and my Caprica DVD a-waitin’ to be unwrapped. Happy weekend to all of you!