Thanksgiving Break

For the fall semester at CU, we don't get a break until Thanksgiving week, two weeks before the end of the semester - terrible timing for those who yearn for a well-paced chance to catch one's breath. But this is when Thanksgiving falls, and so, for better or worse, this is when we catch our breath. At least we have all week to catch it.

I don't know how much breath-catching I'm going to be able to do, because I kindly - or foolishly - made the due dates for the second paper for both classes be right before the break, so that the students could relax during their family get-togethers, forgetting that this meant that I would have to spend MY family get-together grading, grading, grading. And I still have the revisions for Mason Dixon: Basketball Disasters to do, revisions which should have already been done. I have a hundred pages of a mentee's manuscript to read, and I need to preview the book I'm teaching after the break, Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, by Carl Elliott, to figure out which chapters to assign as required reading, given that it just now occurred to me that the book is simply too long for us to read all of it. And I have to drive around to local shoe stores collecting empty shoe boxes to use for our church's annual Christmas drive: Shoebox Gifts for the Homeless. At some point I'm also going to have to generate my share of the food for the Thanksgiving dinner, which we're having this year with the family of Gregory's girlfriend, Sierra.

But there will still be time for walks with Rowan, and watching a movie with Diane, and emailing old friends, and hanging out with the boys. There will still be plenty of time for catching my breath, and counting my blessings.