i try to leave a little time for blogging or writing every night. some nights i tip over and fall asleep, or fall asleep right at the keyboard. or fall deeply asleep while trying to put the 5-year-old to bed. he's a cute little fellow, but when he starts fading it's all i can do to stay awake.

a gruelling schedule includes 4 1/2-hr teaching marathons, batches of 30 high-level, medium-quality papers, on top of routine stuff like supervising, dealing with a blind student who has trouble with blogs, and pressure to attend social events. let's just say the needle has gone way past "don't have a life" and 'can't do laundry or car maintenance" to "getting angry about being unable to carry on routine conversations for lack of time" which is on the threshold of "feeling like i might be endangering kids' lives driving them around town on so little sleep"...this is my view of dante's circles.

let's just say, some really cool blogging ideas and other projects are being shelved for the moment: including, organization of folk tales on the web; cesl history archiving, pictures of old faculty to keep memories alive; travel stories; krashen project; language as a self-organized system project; cleaning out garage; bicycle repair; wal-mart stories; and a few others.

the above list shows that i am somewhat overextended anyway, having bitten off far more than i could have chewed, even with time for a life, and only a view of the circles. but, at least naming them keeps the dreams alive.

my son now has quite a collection of reviews in the daily egyptian; i am slowly becoming educated about the movies i'm not seeing, cd's i don't have time to listen to. i'm very proud of him, though he's backing off from review-writing as a career, and journalism in general- he now at least has a collection, some of them in the paper, all of them good, and they reflect his personality and range of tastes. i have to say that, as much as i enjoy the media and writing as a hobby, i haven't gone as far as this, even though i also passed through journalism as a major at one stage of my life. so i am now living vicariously, to some degree, watching him pursue this, though knowing he probably won't stay in it. and encouraging him to save them all (don't know if he will) for a scrapbook or portfolio. and watching him get nervous about an upcoming semester in france, where he'll have to stew about his major conundrum (it's a major conundrum, trying to figure out what major one should take)...

his younger brother, 15, returned from camp w/ gf - w00t w00t...if you know what i'm talking about, or can guess, i congratulate you on a remarkable ability to surf the cultural tides. the five year old is into superheroes, which the two-year-old calls, soo-da-man. has a ring to it. finally, i'm due in court, early monday morning, to testify in a theft case. involves a blue parking sticker. i may be bound not to reveal too much- i probably already have, so i'll hang it up for the night. bless you all, my faithful readers, if you've got this far- a good summer 2-ya.