Summer 2019 over

Well, for me, in terms of work, anyway - tomorrow I go back to teaching.

One last play of this:



(Yes, it's before my time, but I still remember it from the "oldies" channels when I was young....of course now "oldies" are the music I disliked that was popular when I was in high school, which makes me an Oldie myself, I guess. I suppose it's some kind of weird snobbish hipsterism but I like "Summer Song" far better, and find it far more evocative of what I imagined summer-as-a-teen-and-young-adult to be when I was a kid. Oh, the summers never lived up to my imaginings: I never had a convertible, and never had an athletic boyfriend, and never worked at an ice cream stand during the day and hung out playing mini-golf at night)

I'll be honest: I'm glad to see summer 2019 end. It was a stinker in a lot of ways for me, starting with me getting stuck longer than intended in Illinois and having to scramble to change my plans and ending with....well, you know what July ended with for me, I won't bring that back up.

I can think of two redeeming parts of Summer 2019:

1. This weekend's trip to Shreveport, hanging out with a friend, petting many cats, PETTING STINGRAYS, and just generally having a day and a half of having a running-around friend to do stuff with.

2. Getting that manuscript done and in, and by golly, am I glad I got that done before everything hit the fan.

But yes. I am looking forward to having a regular schedule again (even if it means I probably should go to bed in about 2 hours, so I can get up at 5 am again to work out). Looking forward to cooler weather and getting out my fall clothes (it will be at least a month yet though, boo). Looking forward to moving forward and reconfiguring my life and my thought patterns and accepting the Thing that happened, because I can't change it.

Oh, I know there will be hard times and bobbles and things - there are a number of things I teach that my own father taught me, and there are some things I say in class that are the same things he said in class (and as I said earlier, I talk a bit like he did, I mean syntax and vocabulary choice).

(And I wrote "did" first as "does." And then had to change it to past tense. Dammit.)

There's the photograph of our family circa 1976 at the Grand Canyon I have in one of my Policy and Law lectures. 

And going back to an earlier-to-bed schedule, and being away from home all day (rather than coming home every day for lunch). I will have to force myself to stay off the 'Net more, so I can get my piano practice done, and also work on other things, like class prep and low-level grading, but also I want to get more knitting and quiltmaking done this fall.

And I need to start getting stuff together over at work; it's post-tenure review for me this coming spring, and I want to try to start early so there will be fewer tears over "I can't find this thing I need" or "this is overwhelming, why do I have to do this."

But hopefully I can once again capture some of the joy of teaching, and especially the excitement of those first days (which are the best, because you don't have a ton of grading yet, and the committeework has not yet ground to life)

And once again, here is my little tradition - putting up a version of Brahms' "Academic Festival Overture." This year, I think of it as the replacement for Chad and Jeremy's summer music: