This is the last week before school, or at least orientation for faculty, starts. Normally I spend this week doing planning for school. Yet, as of Friday, I have relatively little idea what I’m teaching, much less how.
So. I’m going to spend the week getting my apartment ready, and getting the curriculum for Rhetoric in order, so that I can limit my involvement with that class should I have to. I also want to do my own writing exercise with 5,000 words for Orien.
Here’s the cleanup list of tasks for my apartment. (E) stands for Easy, (M) stands for medium, and (H) stands for hard levels of difficulty. This is only relative to this list; one should not assume that my bedroom is a pigsty just because it has an H next to it.
1. ___ Clean Bedroom (H)
2. ___ Clear Dining Room Table (M)
3. ___ Put away clean laundry (E)
4. ___ Organize linen closet (H)
5. ___ Organize art closet (H)
6. ___ Set up filing cabinet (M)
7. ___ Set up digital scanner (E)
8. ___ Re-set books on bookshelves (M)
9. ___ Reorganize roller cart; make it useful (M)
10. ___ put “church” box and chairs in basement (E)
11. ___ clear stairwell (E)
12. ___ Organize & neaten living room (M)
13. ___ Organize and neaten office (H)
14. ___ Clean bathroom (M)
15. ___ Clean kitchen floor (E)
16. ___ Straighten laundry room (M)
17. ___ Organize desk (E)
18. ___ Get Apple order in to fix delete key and
microphone. (E)
19. ___ Write some e-mails to people I’ve not chatted with in a
while. (M)
20. ___ Write and memorize some poetry (E-M-H?)
So… I have four tasks a day, in addition to whatever else comes my way. I usually start the school year in a state of total disorder in my apartment. I’d like for that to change this year if I possibly can.
In theory, Ben (http://loquaciousmusic.blogspot.com) and and I are going to have breakfast together in the morning. And , and and I are having dinner together tomorrow night, as well. Tuesday I have pottery, Wednesday I have to go in and fix some pieces and glaze them, and Thursday or Friday I have to do grocery shopping for the dinner I’m having with my parents…
Saturday is the Woodstock Agricultural Fair. If you want to see tractor pulls, prize-winning chickens and sheep and goats, and suchlike marvels, you really ought to come down to northeast connecticut. If you let us know you’re planning on coming, we might even save you a space at the family barbeque on saturday night.
In other news, I am making progress on my ambitious project to listen to all of my iTunes music. I’m not actually listening to most of it, just letting it play in the background. Anything that I haven’t yet listened to, is fair game. So far, I’ve listened to about two-thirds of it, which means somewhere between eleven and thirteen days of sound, in practice. If I keep it going continuously, I might listen to the rest of it before faculty orientation.
The reasons for doing so are not entirely disinterested. On the one hand, I want to be able to say at an earful, oh, that’s Freedy Johnston, or That’s the Indigo Girls. or I think that’s the buddhist chant stuff that gave me. And so on. But Michael, our friend from New York that we see maybe three times a year, urged me to look into using my iTunes and my laptop as a DJiing station. He said that the more people who know how to DJ will change the state of music in the world, and that being a DJ is really about bringing change to people’s lives — he argued, coherently, for DJing being another way to teach. And the more ways I know how to teach, the happier I will be. Plus, it’s something new to learn.
