System Overload

We're still in the Cardboard Stonehenge phase of unpacking. Our house is more unsightly and awkward than eating a drippy plate of spaghetti on a first date.

Scott is making a valiant crack at un-cluster----ing it, but there's a long way to go. For instance, since this house is half the size of our Phoenix house, we had to tell the movers to put most of the 180 boxes into the garage. We've brought maybe a third of our belongings into the actual house and still we have to do bird calls to find one another. (Gomer Pyle: "Hootie hoot!")

Today was my first day of teaching orientation. Even though I've taught at this Big Giant University before, for 9 years, there is much new evil technology to learn. Becoming equipped to use a computer in the classroom in various multi-media acrobatics is something my brain takes to very slowly. But the guy teaching the course on it today shot instructions out of his mouth so hard and fast, he was like a frat boy doing his first projectile vomiting. All in technobabble.

His teaching style was a fireworks display, but I need to be treated like a tired old basset hound. Just put one Milkbone biscuit on the plate and let me look at it, smell it, walk away from it, come back, and lie down for a nap before I consider eating it.

The other thing I'm trying to do: come up with a syllabus for each of two classes I've never taught before. "Winging it" is an understatement here. When you have to go look up a word in the description of the class you're going to teach, it's evident that you will be a quarter of an inch in front of your students. And they're gaining speed.

My brain is riding a carousel, and it's going faster and faster and is doing its best to fling me off into the big bowl of the cotton candy stand. I will be pink-sugar-coated and left to turn into a river of sugar-sap by the 2 staples of midwest weather: humidity and rain.

But now my family is two hours away instead of a long flight away. I'm glad to be home.