No time ...

Life has become much more hectic around Rhosgobel recently. The semester will be over in just about 15 days (nope, nobody's counting here), and like Pharyngula I have far too much student work being handed in that I need to grade (two lab reports, a lecture paper, and a lab exam across two weeks), as well as final exams to write (lab final is next week, lecture final is the week after), grades to compute, and final lectures to plan (how does one summarize all of sensory system physiology, reproduction, growth, and locomotion in two lectures ... oh, that's right, one doesn't).

Course work is not all that I have to do in the next few weeks. The chair of my tenure committee is retiring at the end of this semester, so I've been asked to write my self-evaluation by the end of the semester (I normally have until February to write it). The good news, however, is that all of my faculty evaluation visits are now over (the final one was Tuesday), and they all went well. In the past few months I've managed to get myself on two committees (and I'm now the chair of one of them), both of which are trying to meet before the end of the semester. Oh yes, and the department website needs updating before the end of the semester as well.

I'm also starting to plan a student field research trip to a site in Canada for the summer of 2005, and since I want my students from this semester to participate, I've been working on getting the details of the trip drafted out. I just gave my students a presentation about the trip today, to gauge their interest, and more than 20 of them are interested, which made my day. Of course, this means that I now need to get them more information by the end of the semester, as well as start working on officially planning the trip (which will include getting our community college district board's approval).

But, of course, that's not everything. The publisher I'm working with needs me to get some work done by the end of the semester, so that will suck up a few hours. On the home front, my SO and I are starting to seriously plan for the remodeling work that we're going to do over winter break; we hope to finish our master bathroom and make significant progress on our hall bath. We absolutely have to start ordering supplies and scheduling contractors now if we're going to make progress in the six-week break, so it can't wait. We also just learned that my SO's brother, who is currently living in England, will likely be moving back to the US soon, so we may try to schedule a quick trip over there to see London before he leaves (neither of us has ever been to England).

So, in summary, I'm insanely busy right now, and thus if you're a regular reader who has noticed that my posting frequency and length have both decreased recently, you now know why. I'm going to officially stop trying to post on a regular basis until my current workload decreases, which will probably be in a few weeks. There's a lot of interesting stuff I'd love to write about, but I just don't have time right now. Sorry :(