Last Day of Lollygagging

Even as I plan to spend the day watching football games, I know that the rush is coming. I know that tomorrow when school starts again, I'll start with a tiny snowball of activity and quickly be rolled into a giant avalanche.
I spent the end of last week preparing the syllabus and the online components of my classes. Then last night, I started on lesson plans. Sometimes I can re-use lesson plans from previous quarters, but I always need to tweak them. And this quarter I have a class I haven't taught since 2008, so the book has changed. That one took a long time to schedule and will take even more time to plan each week.
I'm teaching 19 hours at one college and 8 hours at the other college. Thus, the coming avalanche. However, I plan to swim steadily forward at the top of the avalanche, until I am forced to tread water and if I am buried by the avalanche, I'll stick up my ski pole so someone can dig me out.
After all, the quarter will end eventually sometime in March, and if I work hard and my students work hard, we could end up avoiding the avalanche. And the money that I make teaching all of these classes will cover my daughter's next semester of college.
How about you? Is the new year going to be a challenge?