Given how little most of my online friends have been updating lately, I guess I don’t feel quite so bad about not posting these past few days. Of course, they’re probably away on family vacations celebrating the holidays, whereas I’m still trying to shake the last of this bug off. I’m finally starting to feel like myself again, and I think I should be resuming normal activities here. I still have about two weeks of vacation, so I should have a good chunk of time here to handle the things I was hoping to handle over break, just not as much time as I would have liked. I really hope I feel well enough to start exercising again soon here, though, because I have put on a bit of weight these past couple of weeks (thanks to the combination of holiday food and going off my diet), and I want to get it off as quickly as possible.

I’m still kind of getting caught up on a lot of things, but I wanted to mention a couple of big changes in my life lately. I’m not sure if I said something about this earlier or not, but I was originally scheduled to teach two sections of composition next semester, which was going to be my first time ever teaching multiple classes in a term. Well, near the end of the semester I got an e-mail from my boss, and he asked if I could take an online section of introductory business writing. (The wait list for the online sections already offered was so big that they needed to create an extra section for the overflow.) I’ve never taught online before, and generally prefer to teach in the flesh where the students can interact with one another and I can help guide their conversations, and I’m definitely more at home teaching composition than business writing, but I took the assignment anyway because it’s going to be a challenge for me, and, well, I like challenges. It also means more money, and it’ll mean more stuff to put on my CV.

This does, however, mean that my reading load over vacation suddenly went sky-high since I have to familiarize myself with the text for the business writing class, and it’s a pretty darn big one. My book pile was getting high enough to start with, and of course it only got bigger after Christmas. (I asked for clothes and books for Christmas and wound up with more clothes than books, which under the circumstances may actually be a good thing. Oh, and none of you bought me anything off of my Amazon wishlist, so expect more whining when my birthday comes up in March.) In spite of that I still went out tonight and picked up Keith Olbermann’s new book, and there are still a lot of books I want to get as soon as I can. I have no idea where I’m going to find the time for all this reading, but maybe I can try to get caught up on it here before the next term starts.

The other bit of big news is that my sister and brother-in-law finally got their own apartment. They started moving things over today, and I’m guessing it will take them a few more days to get fully moved, but the house is about to get quieter, and given the antagonistic relationship I’ve had with them lately that’s kind of a good thing. The bad part, though, is that they’re taking Spyder to their apartment, and while we’ll be moving Skooter into the house after that, I don’t like that it’ll be that much harder to see Spyder now. I’m hoping that the fact that I’ve already been trusted with an extra class in just my second term at MCCC means that I’ll get a tenure-track position there soon, so I can start making enough money to live on my own as well.