Exit Summer Semester 2009

The summer 2009 semester is over, and I’m happy to say it was quite a success. Or, at least it felt like a success. Final grades won’t be in until tomorrow, but I felt very good about the only paper I had to write. When I spoke to my professor about my paper idea, he thought it sounded like something that might be worth publishing, which is quite a nice thing to hear. We’ll see what he thinks now that I’ve written it. But, part of the reason I think this semester was such a success is that it was so much more manageable than I ever expected. As I’d mentioned on here before, I was only taking one class and TA’ing for one class, but because they were both six-week summer courses, the responsibilities for each class was rather intense—grading 25-30 essay exams a week as a TA, plus reading quite a bit of material and writing several short reading responses per week for my own class. It kept me busy, for sure, but it wasn’t quite the headache I’d expected. I thought this weekend would be especially terrible, with final exams to grade on top of writing a paper, all of which had to be completed at pretty much the same time. But it worked out. I even got done earlier than I thought I would. Very cool.

So what’s on the horizon for the next 14 days, until I’m right back at it? I’ll tell you what I’d like to do. Watch a bunch of TV and movies, read for pleasure (which I’ve actually done a decent job of lately), sleep. Some of this might happen. More likely than not, I’ll be doing productive things. I should. One thing I absolutely have to do is register myself as a Florida state resident with the school. They make you live here for a year before they allow it, but the philosophy department also will not fund me as an out-of-state student after the first year. So, there’s a really narrow window in which I have to file some papers showing that I’ve lived here for a year, but before my tuition bill comes due. I don’t remember what all has to be done, but it involves going to the courthouse downtown, etc. It will probably be a bigger pain than it should be. But I’m not trying to complain. I’ll also have some fun, and it will be nice to be involved with my family. We’re already planning to take a weekend trip up to see Melanie’s good friend who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. We’ll pass Melanie’s brother in small-town Georgia along the way, so we’ll see his family too. Not too shabby. We’ll take two days getting to Raleigh, even though it’s only 9 hours away, just to make it easy on us and the kids. Still, it’s been a very long time since we’ve done a road trip of this proportion, so it should be interesting.

That’s life for me at the moment. Adieu.