off stride

I'm off my stride, in all sorts of ways. Here we are four weeks into the semester, & I haven't really settled into my classes, nor have I settled into the rhythm of the school week. (This time around it's front-loaded; my long day is Monday, which means there's a kind of anticipatory nervousness through the whole weekend.) The girls are just settling into their own extracurricular activities, which means backing-&-forthing all round. Dance classes, acting classes, violin lessons, orchestra... Even on the weekend, the four of us pile into the car & drive up to West Palm Beach for art classes. (I'm learning some of the basics of oil painting I never took the trouble to learn back in the day – back, well, three decades ago.)

Plus, this whole business of department administration weighs heavily. It's not like it's a job that takes hours upon hours every day. Rather, it's a job where there are always a half-dozen emails to give attention to, & where there's always a deadline looming in the middle distance to revise some document or prepare for some change of affairs. Just enough to keep me nervous.

What's suffered? Well, my writing has suffered, for one thing. I still have a handful of book reviews owed various people (if you're checking in, editor-types, I apologize). I haven't set pen to paper on the biography book I hoped to crank out this summer; that will have to wait for another year, I suspect, at the very least. Right now, I'm desperately at work on a conference paper, for next month's Blackfriars Shakespeare do up in the Virginia hills. And after that some reviews get written. Poems happen – or bits of poems happen – in the interstices.

I am trying, however, as the above indicates (and as my latest little entry in the "poem-books" noting series indicates), to get back into the swing of blogging, if at shorter length than before perhaps. Bear with me.