I think this is the longest I've gone without blogging since I started this blog almost five years ago. It's been a tough summer and I couldn't seem to write non-whiny posts. I've been intensely frustrated with my marriage but that's not blog material. (Sometimes in the Catholic blogosphere it seems that everybody is in shiny happy marriages where they're jointly striving for heaven and Communicating Effectively and nobody else is fighting unproductively about the same damn thing for ten years. And counting. Am I keeping it real or bringing things down if I say that sometimes it's really ferociously hard to be married?)
I hope the kids have had a good summer. We've taken some fun weekend trips and had some fun local outings. I felt like a rock star yesterday because I took five kids boating (the two oldest in a canoe with the 6yo between them; the 9yo in a paddleboat with me while the 2yo sat between us) and everyone had a grand time. The 14yo said afterward, "We should do this more often," and given his usual views on my ideas about fun stuff to do together (in a word: dim), I'm taking that as a ringing endorsement. We had a picnic afterward featuring pan bagnat and nobody complained. (The two oldest boys enjoy it as much as I do; the younger kids are not fans. Perhaps they'd worked up an appetite paddling around the lake.)
Classes start soon and I'm wildly excited. I have gnawed off all my fingernails in my moments of "I-think-I-can't" (how's that for a bestselling children's book: The Little Engine Who Was Pretty Sure She Would Fail But Persevered Grimly Anyway). I have a string of happy updates about my new job: the chair asked me to co-teach a second class this fall, which accomplished a few really good things: it gave me clear direction about whether to continue my postdoc on a quarter-time basis; it allowed me to ease into planning a syllabus for the first time, using someone else's established framework. And get this: the subject matter for the two classes overlaps slightly, so my co-instructor said, "Here, want to borrow this book? And I've got a bunch of notes posted on the web if you'd like to look them over." Coincidentally (or not), this is the section of the course I'm teaching alone that had me the most worried. How cool is that?
A week or two later, the chair called me back again to ask if I could teach a second course in the spring semester. It all feels so providential to me: a course and a half in the fall, with the hardest part of my solo course out of the way before my half of the co-taught course begins, and then two courses in the spring with a fair degree of overlap (one grad course and one undergrad). Forgive me for repeating myself, but it's exactly the kind of gig I hoped to land when I started this whole undertaking and it still boggles my mind that it plopped into my lap. God is good and I'm feeling optimistic.
Of course, my daughter still sleeps like a wombat (read: badly. Badly badly badly.) and sleep deprivation does bad things to optimism, so I'd better wrap it up. More soon, about summer reading and summer knitting and TICKS SUCKING MY CHILD'S BLOOD and especially the questions I asked you to ask me back at the beginning of July and then was too morose to answer. Soon.
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