Crates

It is the end of the semester at the university. While I very very very much love teaching there, this semester I taught two sections and having double the correcting to do while spending twice as much time in class was difficult. (Spending the time in class was not the difficult part. I love the part of teaching that is the teaching! Finding time to do the persuant paperwork was the hard part. It feels like the end of four months of chasing my tail.) Anyway, now I just need to get caught up at the high school, and it will be time to start thinking about packing things up there. Only five more weeks there, and it will be back to the university.

The other thing to try to fix now is the disaster that is my house. Maybe I have mentioned that I am not the best housekeeper in the world. There are enough interesting things to do in life that housekeeping just fails to make the cut. Some progress on this front had been made as recently as February or so. But we all know that if I can make progress, I am just as capable of double regression. This time it came in the form of books. (!!!) I came into a LOT of Italian books - Italian textbooks, Italian readers, books on Italian study, etc. etc. etc. They have been sitting in the living room for about a month, and with the end of the semester, I finally felt that maybe I could figure out what to do with them. So yesterday I went to Staples and bought six filing crates. Because I figure this way I can stack the books in a corner or something. Really I don't know what I'm doing, but it seemed to make sense at the moment. And I really didn't think I would need all six, but my motto (and the root of all my troubles) is buy too much so you don't have to go back for more.

Between the Italian books and the Theory of Knowledge books I am starting to accumulate, I have seven crates of books in my living room right now. And I think I will probably need at least one more by the time I finish accumulating the first wave of Theory of Knowledge books. The end of which I ordered this afternoon - it should be arriving over the next couple of weeks.

It's overwhelming and crazy exciting all at once to think of how much reading I have to do. I need to go on sabbatical. Which is long overdue. I mean, wouldn't that mean take the seventh year off? And I'm finishing my eighth - not to mention the three pre-teaching years. How glorious would it be to have a year off to study and prepare and think uninterruptedly?

Ha ha. Yes, we know I would spend most of my time surfing the Internet and rotting my brain. Maybe I had better stick with the panic tide of ever-crashing deadlines. Sure, the heart attack will come a few years earlier, but in the end I will have gotten something accomplished.

Would you like a song? note: for this one, be sure you hang on for the instrumental finish.

Beirut - St. Apollonia.