Safety Pins?

The big question in this post is about safety pins.  Are you seeing them around?  I'm sympathetic, but I guess I feel like we're going to forget really quickly.  What do you think?



Other than that, I've been muddling through.  That's how it's been.

I've been ill; just a head cold, but miserable in the head cold way for almost three weeks.  (It's MUCH better now, and has been steadily improving since about Thursday, thanks for asking.)  For most of those past three weeks, I've been coughing a lot, and waking up every couple of hours during the night coughing.  So I've been barely sleeping.

I've been involved with interviews, many of them.  All good, but they take a lot of time.  And then there's the related paperwork, which takes a lot of time, too.

I'm involved in a task force which will come to partial fruition this coming week.  Fingers crossed that it goes well.  I have a couple hours (maybe) of prep to do for my part, then the actual event.

Much of the week was spent doing 20 minute conferences with all my writing students.  It's a lot of time, but very helpful to all of them, I think.  I hope.

I realized on Tuesday afternoon (between conferences) that I'd be teaching "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" on Wednesday, though I hadn't reread them since I last taught the course some 5+ years ago.  Great poems, but what to do?  (It went fine.)  (On Tuesday, I went home about 4, got into bed and semi-slept for 2 hours, got up, prepped for a couple hours, and went back to bed around 8:30 and semi-slept

I've been feeling like I'm juggling, and something's always about to drop and break.  It's not a good feeling.

I've fallen behind on grading.  I need to rethink this sort of assignment because the grading's onerous, even though the assignment is really valuable in getting students to read critically.

The one bright thing is practicing the violin when I haven't been coughing too much.  It totally takes my mind off everything else, just focusing on trying not to sound really bad.