Blogger sign-in

Made it. End of semester yesterday--the first time in my life that it's happened on both May Day (ancient springtime holiday), May Day (International workers' day--One Big Union!) and my anniversary (26 big ones, baby).

The end of this semester, as I have told several, is like being shot out of a cannon: because the Uni is on a very, atypically early schedule, we both started back early in January and finished remarkably early: last couple days of April. It meant that I gave two 2.5 hour finals on Thursday (and graded them), had end-of-semester meetings and consultations most of the day on Friday, gave a 2.5 hour final Friday late afternoon, and then graded 50-some rewritten undergraduate research papers: fortunately, we use a fairly detailed first draft + reviewer comments + final draft + corrections tracking-sheet (so that the student has to tell us "here are all the things I was supposed to fix, and here is how I fixed each") sequence, so the re-grade goes really quick.

Still, I was up late grading.

Then I got up at 5am, to (not) make a 7:36am flight--because I'm so fucking stupid I grabbed the wrong person's passport as I left the house in the dark, and had to have the right passport brought to me--rescheduled for a 10:40am flight with a real photo-finish connection in Houston for Newark, where--if I make all the connections that, in my disorganization, I've done my best to screw up--I'll get on an overnight flight to Shannon.

In Ireland.

For a month.

With my treasured students and my gem of a wife, of 26 years.

[...crickets...]

This is the sound of me not complaining.