I'm back.

I never do much over my breaks, but that's how I like it. My "normal" daily life is so regimented - from getting up at 5 to get in the hour of exercise, attempting to be at my desk by 7, the daily round of classes and office hours and meetings, and now the making an hour (if I can) to practice piano, that it's kind of welcome to have a large chunk of unstructured time to do "nothing."

I did wind up helping my mom dig up and turn over the soil in her garden so she could plant the cucumbers and tomatoes she had started. And I replaced a bad coax cable to the television she uses in the kitchen. And I replaced the ballcock assembly in the toilet in my parents' bedroom. My dad's knees no longer permit the kind of crawling around on the floor these jobs require, and my mom isn't very handy. (Well, I think she COULD be if she had to; it's just that she hasn't had to do that kind of stuff, well, ever, and I have, so it was easier for me to turn off the water to the tank, take the old thing out, hand it to her, and say, if you go to the hardware store and tell them you need a new one of these, they'll find it for you and then I'll put it in). Oh, I also mowed their lawn, which is about eight times the size of mine. And they have one of those huge, heavy gas powered mowers, which is actually a lot more work than the little reel type mower I use.

Part of the reason for the burst of fixing activity was finding, to my dismay, that my weight had not budged a single ounce when I had my annual checkup. I really thought I had maybe dropped SOME, seeing as I'm able to wear slacks I couldn't comfortably zip up this time last year, and seeing as some people who see me only occasionally told me I looked smaller. Oh well. Maybe I gained muscle and lost fat, which I should accept as a fair trade, but I can't quite, seeing as how we get so hung up on NUMBERS...the size dress a woman wears, her age, her weight.

So I had to convince myself that I really was still sufficiently agile and capable and wasn't turning into a female form of Jabba the Hut. (On the upside, my blood pressure was even lower than it was last year. Not that it's ever been a problem, but it's reassuring to know that those other numbers are still OK even if the weight technically isn't.) And I think the fact that I was able to spade up a roughly 20 foot by 6 foot area of garden in about an hour without being winded or even sore the next day says SOMETHING.

Other than that...my parents' deck (or rather, the underneath of it) was at least briefly host to a mother groundhog and her five babies. (We didn't see them the last several days I was up there; I wonder if maybe she moved them like cats do with their kittens). My mom doesn't like groundhogs (they eat her garden and even knocked down a wire fence last year to get at her peas) but even she admitted that the baby hogs were pretty cute.

I received a second "Please please please can I have a D instead of an F [that I earned]" e-mail while I was gone. This one was more explicit; apparently the student in question is going to be off a sports team without the D.

I haven't responded to the e-mail yet. (the answer, of course, is NO. I'm a little TOO nice to add, "Maybe if you had talked to me about your grade concerns back in March when you could still work to bring up your grade...). But that's what irks me - people (more this year than previous years) e-mail me or stop by my office asking for a grade raise on the last stinking day of the semester. No, scratch that. AFTER the last stinking day of the semester. But do I see them in my 10 hours of office hours DURING the semester? Almost never. (There are probably some dots I could connect here with the current credit-card mess and people having spent themselves into giant holes, but it would make me too sour were I to connect them.)

I'm just glad that (apparently) the stream of begging e-mails have stopped. (Almost time for summer semester to start!)

I do have two weeks off remaining. During that time, I want to get a journal article manuscript I have mostly written finished and out, polish up another one that's essentially done, and inquire about two others that are somewhere in the review process. (I hate bugging editors, but I also hate going more than a year without hearing anything).

Oh, pictures will come starting tomorrow. I finished two pairs of socks, plus a couple other amusing little things.

And I found something that will help me do something I'd been wanting to do for a while, but just hadn't gotten around to starting.