Read that again.
I have to head in to school for the start of the fall semester tomorrow.
August 12? When in the world did school start beginning in the middle of August? August is obviously and legally summer. It is immoral and unethical to begin classes during it. I clearly remember the first day of class being held after Labor Day, and my memory is, as always, the basis for all rational life. Heck, every university I attended started at the end of September; this seems entirely reasonable and right to me.
I shouldn't complain about having two weeks between summer school and the new semester, and how that seems abyssmally short, but it surely does seem so. After grading, preparing for my next set of classes, and everything else, it hardly seems I've left.
Tomorrow is what my mother calls the "rah rah" day, when you get together throughout the day to hear administrators and beaureaucrats go over what they want from you for the year and their great accomplishments from the previous year. I can see that that has some value, in a theoretical sense, but in actual experience it always turns out to be an enormous waste of time that leaves us all feeling annoyed and ashamed. Last year they had a speaker come to talk about humor in the workplace; the speaker had grown people making animal noises at one another. I was paired with a chiseled older man from the aviation department. We were not experiencing humor. The only laughter to be heard was the nervous tittering of people feeling enormously embarrassed over being forced to act like children for no good reason. I'm sure the district administrators thought it was wonderfully enlightening, but it was merely soul sucking.
After the all-district meeting, we meet again as a school, and then we meet as a department. If I'm lucky, I may get 23 minutes to actually prepare.
I'm not that enthused, is the idea.
On the happier front, we have had a good two weeks, with trips to Mammoth and San Diego worked in there. The boys and the baby have been crazy, but have adapted remarkably well (especially Madeline, seing as how a five-day vacation to Mammoth constitutes about 1/12 of her total life outside the womb so far). Since my fans have been demanding it, I thought I'd put up a picture of our newest little monkey:
And if you don't think she's just the cutest minute simian around, you need your eyes examined. Or simply removed. (You are allowed to think that relatives or your own children are as cute, but no cuter, than my child.)
And, so they don't feel left out, here is my favorite recent picture of Denver and Poncho:
They're up to wacky hijinks, as you can tell.
Next post from "work," most likely.
Huzzah.
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