Baby beneath the desk and other ramblings

There's a baby sleeping underneath my desk after spending a frenetic hour running up and down the halls of my workplace.

It's a no-daycare day. My parents are visiting Ontario, Oregon, and shoring up some business, and since it's finals week, we figured this was the week they'd be able to go.

Suffice it to say Meredith and I miss taking advantage of them.

***

As I mentioned, it's finals week, and I'm about to get 39 portfolios to grade. So much for my vacation. Although I've read and reread the poems the students are submitting, I'm always compelled to respond to the portfolios. I have friends and colleagues who do very little as far as feedback is concerned, but for my long poem portfolios, I feel I need to respond after I had subjected them to the torture of writing long poems.

Catholic guilt.

***

Nothing will be happening during my Spring Break. Nothing relaxing, anyway. I have to finish reading through a box of manuscripts, finish logging my half of the January persona poems, and then I have to prepare a whole bunch of press kits for Requiem for the Orchard. Books in. Books out. At least that's the approach I'm taking for this book. Yes, I'll lose money on the books, but perhaps on the back-end, I'll make that cost up with a reading here and there. Yes, it's the yucky talk about art, but it's a necessity.

***

I'm teaching my forms course again, and as always, it starts out under-enrolled. Students are afraid of forms.

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Big contrast in the noise-level, now that the toddler is asleep.

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Current Spin:

Lightning Dust.