12 Days of Appreciation -- Day 8

Today, on the first day of the new year, after staying late at a party, my husband got out of bed and went to work. Someone always has to work holidays at the newspaper. He doesn't complain about it. 

And he has worked hard at his daily job since I first met him. His salary has been the one that supported our family, giving me the luxury to stay home when the kids were little. 

I appreciate that my husband is a hard worker and good provider. 

Morning Chaos

I returned from my run this morning as the sun had just started to rise. I held a package of three toothbrushes that I stopped and bought at the grocery store as I got near mile five. Then home again to make it six miles.
(Yes, we had an emergency need for toothbrushes enough for me to buy some during my run.)
As I opened the back door from the crisp morning air at 7:40 a.m., I expected to smell coffee and to see Grace in the kitchen.
She must be running late, I thought as I headed toward the bedrooms and bathroom. But my nose didn't pick up the scent of her shampoo which usually emanated from the steamy bathroom.
I saw darkness in her room and I stuck my head in to see her still in bed.
"Grace, it's 7:40," I told her.
"What?" She looked up confused and stunned.
She got a new phone Friday night and apparently she didn't get the alarm set for Saturday morning.
As I'd left the house an hour before, I thought I heard her alarm going off. We later figured out it must have been from her old phone, which lay on the dining room table.
Oops.
Since she had only 20 minutes to get ready and drive to work, I fixed some coffee and an everything bagel that she could take with her.
She texted a few times about how gross she felt, but I told her to shake it off.
I spent the rest of the morning grading papers, but when I finished, I had a satisfying hot shower, unlike Grace this morning.
I feel like Grace might have given this look much of the morning.

She's appearing as Nancy in the show Oliver next weekend. She gets to sing the song "As Long As He Needs Me."  

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

How are you with change?
I'm pretty good with it. This may have something to do with me being shallow. In my adult life, I've moved from city to city about every five years. If we didn't move, I would get a little antsy, like I needed something new, something different.
That has faded some as I get older. We've been in Columbus now 15 years! But we have lived in three different  houses in three different parts of the city.

Grace is exhausted by change even at age 1.

My daughter Grace hates change, but she's working on it. The other day I had an epiphany and called to tell her why she hates change. We lived in four different houses before her 1st birthday. That's the year we moved from Sebring, Florida to Tampa, Florida then Jackson, Michigan where we lived in an apartment for a few months before closing on our first house and moving into it. Four houses and the chaos that goes with it probably led to her aversion to change.
Our household has dealt with recent changes as first Grace, then Spencer graduated high school and marched off to faraway colleges. Grace accepted change once again when she transferred to a college closer to home.
But in the coming year, we'll face an even bigger change, not just Tucker graduating and going off to college, but Earl's work schedule is changing.
Earl has been working evenings for nearly five years.
It was on Tucker's 13th birthday that we learned the newspaper would have layoffs. We held our breath to see if Earl would lose his job. Luckily, he didn't, but he did move jobs from assistant city editor to copy editor. We felt fortunate that he would have a job at all with the way the newspaper business was going. And the company left his salary the same. All he lost was a free parking space.

Tucker at age 13.

The new job as copy editor required Earl to work evenings rather than days. In his previous job, he'd go in to work at 10 a.m. and come home at 8 or 9 p.m.
When he switched, five years ago, he started to work 3-11 p.m. or 4-midnight, sometimes even 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.
From the time Tucker was 13, Earl has been absent in the evenings. Now as Tucker begins the downhill slide to 18 and his last semester of high school, Earl will switch to day times again and begin working as a reporter.
He's okay with moving to the reporter position. Working as a copy editor was good because he worked his eight hours then came home and put it behind him. As a reporter, the job won't go away quite that easily. He may work longer hours and he may continue to do work at home, but he will be here in the evenings.
That may mean I have to fight for the remote on the nights that The Bachelor or The Amazing Race air. That probably means I'm going to see a lot more old movies or specials on airplanes on television.

Hottie Juan-Pablo appears on The Bachelor
 starting in January.

I'll  probably need to start making dinner regularly too. Between me and Tucker, I sometimes make a pot of macaroni and cheese or bake a pizza that he can eat whenever he gets hungry. With my husband home, I'm probably going to feel obligated to cook real meals again.
Things will change for Tucker too. When he got old enough to drive, he started coming home from school for lunch. Since I teach college, sometimes I am home and sometimes not, but Earl is almost always home. He cooks grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for Tucker, or slathers peanut butter and jelly between slices of bread. Tucker then takes his lunch and turns on ESPN for his 30-minute lunch.
This Wednesday, I had a meeting at 11:30. Earl had a meeting too.
At 11:47, my phone rang.
"Where is everybody?" Tucker asked.
I explained the meeting situation and then told Tucker he'd better get used to it since Earl moved to days in January and I was scheduled to work at least 3 days during the week.
"Do you mean I'm going to have to make my own lunch?" Tucker asked.
"That's how it looks," I said.
I knew Earl never should have started making Tucker's lunch. Now he's just looking for a handout every day at noon.
I'm sure we'll all get through the changes coming our way. Until then, I'm keeping the remote and I'll probably make sure Tucker gets lunch through next week anyway.

Writing in November

Right now, I'm feeling very happy about my writing. Not that the writing is especially fabulous, but I'm meeting my schedule, so that makes me happy.
November is NaNoWriMo which stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is 50,000 words in a month.
I have a careful schedule that requires me to write 2000 words per day, along with editing my other novel.

Here's a book cover that I rejected for my next novel. But I'll reveal the new one soon. 

Of course, my family hasn't disappeared, so I also have some things to take care of there -- cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, talking to them, listening to them!
Plus, there are those pesky classes that need care and tending too. I've put grading on my schedule too. And, truthfully, that's the only place I've fallen behind.
But I gained an extra hour last night, so I'm going to try to catch up today.
It looks like my computer and I will be spending the day together.
How bout you? What does your Sunday look  like?

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?

Chewing My Leg Off to Escape...

I knew I might be hitting a wall when I woke up several times last night and went over what I should have said, what I should have emailed to the unsupportive dean, to the complaining student, to the full-time faculty member who stood me up for a meeting.
When work begins to infiltrate my sleep, it may be time to bail. I feel like I'm stuck though.
The University where I teach pays by contract. I get one pay check two weeks after the end of the 8-week session. My thought was that this would be a good way to save for college. Big checks that could be squirreled away for college. I'm not sure how much longer I can last.
Thanksgiving interrupted our class and things have been in turmoil. I've caught three students plagiarizing. The one immediately began to revise his ways. The other two, originally from Africa and with a bit of a language barrier, looked at me blankly. Yes, they submitted their essays to turnitin.com and it shows that 89% of the essay was not their work. Was there a problem with that? One went back and put 89% of his essay in quotation marks. Would that work? Not so much.
Then I had the student who sat through class with his arms folded across his chest and refused to join in any group activities. When I asked the students to evaluate their peer reviewers, he ended with the comment: "But what do I know? According to you, NOTHING." So now I'm afraid he's going to bring a gun into class and shoot us all down, especially me.
Last week, after class, about eight students waited for me to complain about the grades they'd gotten on their evaluative essays. Most of them had the same problem they had gone off topic. Rather than evaluating the articles, they ventured into their own lives. One student in particular (OCD) said, "I am very concerned about this class."
Now, I'm thinking, okay the class has jumped the shark. But I asked: "What do you mean exactly? That you're worried about your grade?"
"Well... yes," she said.
Oh, well. That's different. I explained again why she received the B rather than an A. Then yesterday, I had an email from the Dean and from a "Success Counselor" asking about her grades.
The grades are posted online. She can just click on it any time and see that she has 90% in class, which is an A. In this college, an A is an A, whether it's 99% or 90%. What about learning something? Does anyone care about that any more?
Meanwhile, I've spent the past three weeks working on a new training course that takes about five hours of work per week. I still have the final "exam" to take which is scheduled to take two and a half hours. I haven't even had time to think about grading finals for the other college where grades are due Monday.
I set up an appointment at the "University" with a full-time faculty member to discuss the plagiarism issue. I drove the 15 minutes to campus and she wasn't there. Knock, knock, knock. Nothing. I left a snarky note then found another faculty person to talk to about my frustrations. She told me another adjunct teacher had left, saying he couldn't put in the amount of hours they needed. His time was worth more.
I wonder now if my time is worth more. I know what the "University" is offering and it's my choice to accept it and shut up, or quit. I plan to avoid rash decisions while I am so stressed. I'm going to focus on getting all of my papers graded and giving a little speech in class tonight about the value of what they are learning. Then I may visit the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium because aquariums are supposed to lower the blood pressure, and I may need it.