20130820.1721

It has been a while, it seems, and it has been quite a busy while.  Since I last posted, I have moved from the urban crush of The City to the open plains town of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where stands Oklahoma State University, and I have taken up my duties as Visiting Assistant Professor of English there.  I know that I have written a fair bit about doing this very thing, but I also know that there is a substantial difference between writing about a thing in anticipation of it and actually doing the thing.

And it is not completely done yet.

My beloved wife is working hard to tie up the many loose ends I was obliged to leave because of the timing of the new job starting versus that of the old job ending.  She also, to my shame, has to tie up ends that I was not obliged to leave, but left anyway--I am not always the best of people, as I well know and as many of you who read this can guess.  It is fortunate that she is so marvelous as she is (but I said such things before moving, and not always where she could hear them).

While she finishes things in The City, I am getting things well and truly started in this place where the winds are amply be-sung.  On an earlier trip, I was able to find a place to move into (a little place my most excellent wife and I have taken to calling Sherwood Cottage), and now that I am moved into it, there is the work of getting it set to rights to do.  I have the distinct impression that it sat empty for a while before I took possession of it, and I think its previous inhabitants were not wholly kind to it. 

Cleaning it and making it fit to receive my wife is going well enough,  but it is having to go amidst my preparation for my teaching duties.  Those are less than I have had in the past; I only have four sections, two each of first-year composition and technical writing.  Each is smaller than I am used to having, too, and that means I am able to spend more time with individual students and more time focusing on how best to teach them.  This bodes well for my ability to do the work that I am to do in the classroom.

It also bodes well for what I have to do outside of the classroom.  While teaching in The City, despite the demanding course load, I was able to put together pieces for presentations and the occasional submission for print publication.  Now, given that my teaching load is reduced and my commute is also far less (and of better exercise!), I ought to be able to give more time to doing the scholarship for which I am trained and which I view as necessary to make me better in the classroom.

I know that it is affording me more time to read for the sake and pleasure of reading than I have been accustomed to having.  I am taking the opportunity to catch up on some things that I had left slip--I am in the midst of reading Don Quixote, which somehow escaped my attention these many years.  It is good to be able to correct some mistakes...