Hello from the desk in my office at school,

I have one more final to give and a large quantity of grading still staring me in the face. It is one of the necessary evils. I hate grading, not the looking at the papers and working through them, but assigning some sort of value to them. Particularly when it is writing. There is always something personal that the student feels when he or she looks at that grade.

The end of the semester sucks on either side of the blank stare. Technology dependent, we are at the mercy of our course delivery tool and its own peculiarities. It is much like a person I have decided: moody, inconsistent, and easily aggravated. Ha! No, it really does do a lot to make our lives easier, but I surely would not want to be one of the administrators on campus at this time. They are working hard to support us, but there is only so much they can do. There have been more times than I have fingers, and maybe toes too, that I have been timed out or just could not get it to play nicely. I know it is that we are in the middle of finals and so many people are using it.

I am hoping to be finished up by Friday, everything handed in and finished. Then I can relax for maybe three or four days and then I will turn my attention to the spring. So . . . perhaps finishing up is a misnomer at best. There is no finish; there is no beginning; there just is! But is that what life is to be about . . . the image of the hamster wheel comes to mind. Perhaps, if I did the 40 hour-a-week gig, I would find something different, but I have never actually had that sort of job, so I am not sure what I think.

It is hard to believe that Christmas is less than a week away; it is also hard to believe that it was 10 years ago this month that I was setting up hospice for my father and making all the arrangements for his funeral. That was such a crazy fall with surgeries, his Alzheimer’s Disease and ultimately his cancer diagnosis and death in a mere 6 weeks. So much has happened in that decade. Living in four states, working three or four jobs and finally being in Menomonie, and most of that happened in the first 5 years of that 10. I will be going to Iowa next week to see my niece and her kids; I am excited. She is my god-child and such an amazing person. And I adore both kids. It has been a long semester and I have learned much, even more in the last day or so.  . . . I am back . . . a student needed some assistance and it is now an hour later. I seem to have lost the train of thought I was in. Brain dead comes to mind; it is a PLR moment. They seem to happen frequently these days.

What is it we should do or should not do? Who decides? Often it is someone else that decides for us, this does not to insituate that we have no say or as I wrote last summer, we are in some deterministic soup, but often we have less to say about it than we might like. I need to head home and do more grading. I do hope this finds all of you well and I will probably write again in a day or two. While I was away for a while, I am back in the blogging mode, which is actually cathartic for me.

Until the next time.

Michael