Hoping for a Zoom-free break

An unfortunate side effect of my year of pandemic teaching is an inability to see beyond commencement. Just get through the semester, I've been telling myself, and don't worry about what comes next.

But now it's time to figure out what comes next. Fun!

Today I cleared up a few items still dangling from the spring semester, including a long meeting that made me want to poke out my own eyeballs with a rusty fork. Tomorrow I'll hit the road for a long-delayed trip to North Carolina to visit my father, whose assisted-living facility is no longer on lockdown. When I get home a week from now, I'll face a full slate of summer projects:

1. The collection of essays I'm editing on teaching comedy. After a bundle of pandemic-induced delays, the full manuscript got approval (with suggested revisions) from the editorial board, but my work is far from done. I'll need to revise my introduction, notify contributors whose essays need revision, solicit abstracts and permissions, and polish up the whole thing for final submission by the end of the summer. That's my kind of work! Deadlines are highly motivational and I'm really enjoying working with the contributors to this volume, so this will be a fun project.

2. A new essay that's been rumbling around in my head about some poems by Natasha Trethewey. So far I have some interesting metaphors and a nebulous idea about how they might come together, and I'm eager to see what develops.

3. A course proposal for the interdisciplinary sophomore seminar I'm teaching next spring on the topic of what connects people to places. Once again nebulous is the operative term: I've been making notes about possible readings and assignments for the class, but those notes must be assembled into a formal proposal accompanied by a full syllabus, which will be a challenge. I could write the syllabus in my sleep if the class didn't have to be interdisciplinary, but the need to move beyond literary sources is stretching me outside my comfort zone. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

4. Revising syllabi for my fall courses. I have no new classes this fall but I am switching to a different textbook for composition, and of course there are the usual revisions to my other syllabi. No new courses! That's a gift.

5. Gardening. Our itinerant lifestyle has made it impossible to plant a full vegetable garden for the past couple of years, but this year I'm determined to rehabilitate the herb garden and get a pollinator garden going at one end of the lower meadow. I could have started planting the herb garden already, but the utility guys replacing the power poles kept parking their massive equipment right where I needed to work. I keep thinking they're done, but there they were again today. Maybe they'll be done by the time we get back from our road trip. 

6. Home maintenance: Paint the front door and the trim around the window; get the porch slab replaced; keep up with the mowing. Not particularly exciting but rewarding all the same.

Anything else? Oh, spending time with the grandkids, of course, and getting out in the canoe again. The usual summer excursions. There's really nothing particularly spectacular on my list of summer goals, but every day I spend away from Zoom feels like a vacation.

Speaking of which, time to pack!