Saved by the Fall

We've had a couple of truly beautiful weeks here in Wichita--temperatures in the 70s and 80s, clear blue skies, and some nice cool mornings (not quite cool enough yet for my tastes, but still, you take what you can get). I've soaked it all up as I've been riding my bike into the Friends University campus every morning, and loving it. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the only time I've been able to love it. Because ever since the semester began, it's seemed as though every spare minute I'm not on my bike has been spent in my office, preparing for one event after another, desperately trying to get everything squared away so I can actually enjoy the start of the school year and what is, in some ways, my favorite time of year.

I have no one but myself to blame, I know. I was the one that, after we returned from our wonderful, three-week long sojourn through the eastern United States, pretty much let the terrible heat which we, along with most of the Central States, suffered through during the second half of July and all of August, just about kill me off. Summertime is a wonderful break, of course, but for an academic and a teacher, it's a good time to get things done as well. Book reviews, lecture preps, syllabus changes, all of that stuff. I had a good five or six weeks to be productive and move ahead on various projects and get ready for events that I knew were going to crowd up right at the beginning of the semester...and I didn't. And then school started, and I had to get things done, and that meant buckling down and plowing through all the stuff which had piled up, just as the weather finally turned nice.

Well, anyway, enough of that moping. It's late and I need to sleep, but tomorrow is the first official day of autumn, and I'm feeling on top of things, at last--for the first time in weeks my desk is cleared, my schedule is made, the checkbook is balanced, the assessment tools and evaluation data have all been submitted...I can actually begin enjoying the fall a little bit. Yes, yes, just in time for me to start getting reading for midterms in only three weeks, I know--but give me a minute to celebrate finally getting to where I should have been a month ago, all right? September comes better late than never, I suppose.