Spirits

Spring semester: day sixty-six

I've mentioned here before that while everything is ramping up for my students, my own work (at least for teaching-related stuff) is beginning to wind down. Tomorrow, as you may know, is the last day of my 210 class, and therefore the last Wednesday I'll have to leave the house this semester. Today I do workshops in my 102 class and collect papers/introduce the last paper in my 011 class. Thursday is a Q&A day in my 102 class for final questions for their final papers (said papers are due one week from today), when I'll go over their final exam stuff/exam prep, and when I collect their journals. They take their exam in a week and a half, on May 1st. I have but eight classes total to teach for the rest of the semester between all three courses I'm teaching, not counting the final exam for my 011 students. Four this week, three next week, and the last one on May 6 for said 011s (as the other two classes will be finished by that point).

While this sort of schedule will free up a considerable amount of time for me in the beginning of May, it's not like everything else in my life will be easy after that. I'm still packing, of course -- and I have to do everything else beforehand to prepare myself for the move, as things will start to seriously ramp up between now and then. Today is April 22nd; I'll have to send out my last rent check and written 30 days' notice to my landlord by the end of the week, and I'll have to begin plotting out days and times to turn off all the utilities and other services. Plus, the yard sale is coming up. Plus, I have to book the moving truck. Plus, I have bills to pay. Plus, there's still finals week and the timeframe needed to grade final exams with a "grading partner." Plus, I have to move everything out of my office on campus. It's all going to be a massive to-do list and none of the items on it can be put off or ignored.

Meanwhile, Daisy is plugging away at her new job within her company on a new schedule. She's been off since Sunday, but will go back to work tomorrow evening at about the same time I'll go to teach my final 210 class. She neither strongly dislikes or likes her new position; it's similar to her old one, though it carries what I call "bosslady duties." There are many things Daisy does well -- taking charge of a situation is one of them. After all, she put together most of the wedding stuff/planning herself, as you may recall. I got another email from her company HR guy yesterday for a job starting 5/5, second shift (3PM to midnight). Of course, I can't take that, but it's good to know I'm still on the mailing list for them. 6/5 I could do. 5/5 I can't. Soooo...yeah.

As for other positions I've applied for at other places? Again, I haven't heard anything yet. And that includes the paper-only, snail-mailed application to the university I applied to up there. I've basically resigned myself to the fact that I will more than likely not be teaching this summer or fall, anywhere, because almost all faculty positions have either been filled at this point or they've otherwise disappeared from higher education job boards. This is both good and bad, of course; I'd love to continue teaching, yes, but I'm pretty sure even in Nebraska or Iowa that an academic lecturer position (or equivalent) wouldn't pay enough for us to live on -- it might not even pay the same amount I'm making right now. That means, sadly, if I want to keep teaching I'll have to take at least a semester or two off first to assess financial needs and other issues -- and I may never be able to go back to the career which has been, for the past five semester years, the most fulfilling thing I've ever done with my life. The sad part is that teachers don't make any money, and I will soon have a wife to help support along with myself and the cats -- and probably, within a year, a child.

More than anything else, I'm excited to get this show on the road, so to speak. Yes, I dread moving. I dread the work, I dread the time and money which will be spent on it, and I dread the next several weeks of balls-to-the-wall busy-ness. However, I'm not so stressed out by it that I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel -- marrying Daisy, starting our life together, and starting over in a new home in a new state that's not fucking Kansas. Knowing what's ahead of me/us is calming, in a sense.

Daisy told me last night that one of my family friends back home sent us a very sweet card with a $35 check inside for the wedding. I found that incredibly nice. My parents are close with said family friend, so I asked my mother to forward me her email address so that I could drop her a line. Yes, we're going to send out a lot of thank-you cards anyway, but I'd like to thank her personally while I have the chance, before I'm bogged down by a ton of other shit to do.

Last night I slept rather well, actually, until the cats started fighting over who got to play in the boxes I have downstairs in the bedroom for packing the bedsheets and blankets. Despite that, I still went to bed before dark and slept most of the night. It's now about 5AM (the time where my alarm would normally go off on a Tuesday morning) and I'm awake and okay -- despite the fact that today is my long day. Aside from my normal school tasks, I don't have anything pressing that must be done this week aside from paying the rent and writing the 30 days' notice letter. I get paid again on Friday, I'll probably do the weekly shopping tonight or tomorrow night after class (depending on how tired I am), and overall, I'm in good spirits. Again, I'm excited and anxious to take care of everything I have to do. With every box I pack, I feel a little more accomplished. The same goes for when I wheel 200 pounds of trash and recycling from my cleaning down to the road every week and bring back the empty bins when it's taken away. I'm sure this doesn't mean a lot in the long run, but right now it feels good. Except, well, I'm running out of boxes (I have maybe five left, and they're all relatively small) and I've already burned through a roll and a half of tape on the ones I do have.

Daisy moves into the new place on the 6th, I think. She signs the lease on the 1st, but she will be working after that and won't be able to begin moving her stuff in until she's off for a few days. She's been packing her stuff as well, and has been doing a "great cleansing" of her own -- she said she has something like six bags of donation things for Goodwill from yesterday alone. I myself have two massive bags of donation stuff that I'll more than likely drop off at the Goodwill next to West campus next week when I'm down there for the last time this semester. I'll have more than that, of course, by the time I'm done cleaning and packing -- especially after the yard sale, when I'll either donate or trash whatever's left that I couldn't get rid of.

On the plus side, while doing her cleaning/packing, she found her Super Nintendo and the four games she has for it. She said it needs a new cable (probably a power cable or AV cable) to make it operational again. That's about $1.50 on Amazon. I never had a Super Nintendo growing up -- I was the Sega Genesis guy (sadly). I didn't even get an NES until high school, and that one (which I still have back home in West Virginia) I bought used and professionally rebuilt/refurbished. I still have my original Genesis, too, though all of that stuff has been boxed up in my closet back home for many, many years. All of my games for both systems were sold long, long ago to a used games store in Morgantown. Oh well.

While it has remained warm and pleasant outside for the past week or so (and my allergies have mostly subsided because of that), I've not been feeling that great physically. I do feel like an old man at times -- my body aches from packing/cleaning everything, my stomach has been bothering me off and on for the past several days, and while I've been sleeping okay (mostly), I never feel as if I can get enough solid rest. This is something I just have to get used to, I suppose. I mean, really, I have one super-long day every week -- the rest of the time I can generally sleep when I want and when I need to (provided that I'm not busting ass doing everything that needs to be done, of course). As if I didn't do it enough now, for the next month and a half I'm going to be surviving on little more than coffee and cigarettes and sleeping when I can just to be able to get through everything I need to do within the time I need to do it, so once all of that work gets serious, I'll be even more fried and frazzled than I normally am. 

So that's the next few days for me, really. Here's hoping they go smoothly and swiftly.