Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Yay Summer!

Summer is finally here for me. The quarter is finished (I just have one more class worth of portfolios to pick up). It was a good academic year, though it was quite a bit of work for me. I was a committee of one for the reading series. I had to chase down all the extra money for our terribly funded budget, and when you're the new guy, that's not easy.

Teaching-wise, it was good. I'm getting used to the quarter system and its rhythm. I still don't like it, but I'll be singing its praises when September rolls around and I won't have to go back to work until the end of the month.

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Summer Plans:

1. Taking up where I left off on the third manuscript

2. Teaching a summer class

3. Working at the Kundiman retreat

4. Landscaping

5. Watching crappy movies

6. Exploring the area a bit more

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My mother-in-law arrives today from Atlanta. . .

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Meredith and I saw back to back movies in the past two days. We saw Ocean's Thirteen which was good, and Knocked Up which was also good. The popcorn was very good.

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The raspberries are almost ripe. They're everywhere . . . I've got to cut back several bushes, otherwise, the whole property will get swallowed up. If only they were blueberry bushes.

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We're having a Rufous Hummingbird turf war over our feeders. It sounds like a dozen Jedi Knights doing cartwheels . . .

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I want raspberry bushes! We have just a little blackberry bush, not even enough to bother with really, but I have plans for expansion. Soon. Very soon.

David Dodd Lee said...

It's great when you get four or five hummers chasing each other, whirling up through trees, banking
in the yard, all of it at a million mph . . .

Sandra said...

I was just going through book catalogues for the American Scholar, and I came across the catalogue for SIU...just wanted you to know that the full-page promo for your Furious Lullaby looks *gorgeous*.

Cheers,
Sandra

Oliver de la Paz said...

Jenni,

You DON'T want raspberry bushes, no matter how much you THINK you do. They've got runners that overgrow everything, and on top of that, the birds'll eat 'em, crap, and voila . . . more raspberry bushes.

David,

Four or five hummers? You mean eight or nine! And they're pigs! We keep filling those durned feeders. It's almost a daily thing now.

Thanks Sandra!

Susan Allspaw Pomeroy said...

I miss going to the movies with you, O!

And despite the chaos of blackberries and raspberries, I miss them, too. They don't grow so well in our backyard.