Where has the time gone?

I feel as though I've been standing in water as high as my mouth, with only a few inches of breathable air, for the past month.

And it's only going to get worse.

It's all good, though. Despite being chronically fatigued from lack of sleep and constantly behind in my reading, I'm enjoying myself here. I'm still waiting for someone to come up to me and say, "We've been thinking, and we've decided we made a mistake in admitting you," but I don't think that feeling will ever go away. It's part and parcel of my psyche.

One thing I prefer about this place to UAZ is the seminar on research techniques in medieval history I'm taking this term. Although the professor spends most of the class time rambling about God-knows-what (and bears an eerie resemblance to my dad in both appearance and personality), I have come away with a much better awareness of available sources to mine for my thesis. In fact, the final project for this class is a draft proposal/prospectus for what we think we might write our thesis on. My motley collection of book titles, article citations and Web pages has expanded quite a bit as a result, and while the lack of primary source evidence may force me to revise my general topic, I do feel closer to pinpointing an actual topic as opposed to "Something about the church in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria".

Two things I dislike about this place as opposed to UAZ are both related to the library. No, scratch that. I hate the library in general. The physical layout is a nightmare to navigate, the online catalog is just as bad, and the hours? Don't get me started. Eight o'clock is ridiculously late to be opening on weekdays. All I can say is that I'm glad I had a year at UAZ to familiarize myself with how to locate journals and articles, because otherwise I wouldn't have the first clue about OCLC, WorldCat and JSTOR.

In other news, my class on medieval France has stirred my creative impulses. As if there were any doubt that I'm insane, I've even signed up for NaNoWriMo again. I've got an idea for a semi-romance set in 11th-century France that just won't leave me alone. Odds are, though, I won't get more than 5,000 words written, what with everything else I'll be doing in November. I'll just add it to my ever-growing stack of WIPs.

In other news, we get to pick up our dog from my dad this weekend. I'm very excited to have Clara back with us. I've missed her these past 2 years.

Where to from here?

I've survived... so far. I'm now into my second week of classes and haven't broken down yet, though I suspect that's due more to determined denial and simple stubbornness on my part than anything else. Between a full load of classes -- 2 history seminars, plus a 2nd-year Latin reading course I'm taking pass/fail (or so I hope, provided the registration was handled correctly) -- and my TA responsibilities, not to mention the challenge of raising a teenage boy on my own, I suspect by Halloween I will be in full-on Medusa mode. As I told a friend the other day, I anticipate some serious butt-kicking (my butt, that is) this fall.

Good thing I'm a masochist.

I'm really enjoying my classes so far. Latin is always a pleasure, even if my brain is not as elastic as it once was, and rote memorization is increasingly difficult to achieve. More particularly, I'm loving the reading (and reading and reading and...) for the 2 seminars. Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages has been especially delightful; his cynicism and disdain for the Annaliste school had me laughing more than once this weekend.

Today's the first time I've come in for office hours; I'll be here every Tuesday, 8:30-10:30 a.m. Since it's the start of term and I have yet to hold my first discussion section, I don't anticipate any students stopping by. It's been a good time to do one of my seminar assignments for this week, which is to find 10 monographs and review the primary sources they used. I can access the library catalog from here, so I've got a nice long list of books to look at, with titles like England Before the Norman Conquest and The Golden Age of Northumbria and Church and Society in the Medieval North of England.

*wallows in geekiness*

I think my son is enjoying his new school, but since he spent all last week going over policies and procedures until his eyes glazed over, it's hard to say. He does like taking the bus, though we were a bit worried when it never picked him up the first morning. He's signed up for the after-school program, which hopefully will provide him with opportunities for sports and other extracurricular activities.

He told me the other day that many of the other students in his classes tend to talk amongst themselves even while the teacher is talking, so I've had to reinforce the importance of paying attention and not following their lead. I hope the advanced math and English classes I signed him up for will challenge him. I've also registered him to take the Midwestern equivalent of the Johns Hopkins CTY exam he took last winter, in the hopes he will do well enough that I can get him in a program that will encourage his interest in math.

Beyond all that, we still like K'zoo, though the wet weather the past few days has been a bit of a damper. :-)

As the page turns

Wow. I can't believe how quickly things are coming together. We've been in K'zoo for two weeks now and are settling in nicely in our new home. My son has made friends with a boy across the street, and they spend hours together playing D&D. It's been ages since my son had a kid his age he could hang out with, so this has made the change all the easier on both of us.

Schools starts for both of us on Tuesday. I've had to come up to campus every day this week for various orientation sessions and meetings. My feet are killing me, mostly from walking to or from the bus stop and then waiting around for the bus to come (only one of the various places I go to catch a bus have anyplace to sit while waiting). I've applied for a parking sticker, and as a TA I'm guaranteed one, but I haven't been able to get to the parking office to pick it up.

I'm very nervous about my TA assignment, which will involve leading 2 weekly discussion groups for a class not in my major field. I hope my age will give me a slight edge -- unlike most TAs, I am old enough to be a parent of most, if not all, of my students.

This weekend, while driving back to K'zoo from a weekend spent at my dad's, a story idea came to me. I'm still mulling it over, letting it ferment, but I hope to put it down on paper soon. Maybe this weekend will be a good time to set up my writing desk.

Next chapter

About 36 hours from now, the movers will be loading the last of our furniture and boxes upon boxes of books on to the truck. By this time next week we will be in K'zoo and getting acquainted with our new home; if we're lucky, our furniture will have just arrived as well. In less than a month, both of us will be heading off for our first day of classes -- him in middle school, and me in graduate school.

It's a new chapter in a story that seems to have taken a bit of a dogleg recently, as though the author decided to engage in some stream of consciousness in the middle of an otherwise straightforward narrative, and is now returning to a more conventional means of story-telling. At least, I hope that's the case. I'm not keen to put myself, or my son, through any more upheaval for a while. If all goes well, we can count on at least 2 years in K'zoo; I hope it will turn out to be more.

First post

I'll write a proper post later.