It’s May and the academic year is over, but here I am — back from sabbatical and teaching a graduate class. Fortunately for me, my grad class is also a distance education course, so I can do a lot of my work from home while eating breakfast and sitting around in my jammies until noon.
Today will be a typical Wednesday in May.
The dogs started stirring around 8 a.m. You probably know how that goes: I try to get them to quiet down, then I put a pillow over my head and moan softly into the mattress. Resistance, however, is futile, so I end up dragging my sorry butt out of bed, pick up the old dog and cary him down the stairs with the young dog yipping at my heels. I open the back door, let Birdie dash for the yard, then shove old man Clancy out the door. I grab a drink, go out in the backyard and turn on the sprinklers so that the lettuce won’t wilt in the heat scheduled to arrive in the afternoon.
Thankfully, on this day, the rat is in hiding.
Watering the garden is a pain in the butt in this old house. Our water pressure inside the house is zilch when the sprinkler is on. So, basically, I end up spending about 30 minutes sitting on the broken a$$ stoop watching Lady Bird play in the sprinkler while trying to force Clancy to do something other than sit on the top step. Clancy used to love the backyard, but the older he gets, the crankier he gets. And, for the sake of full disclosure, he is having some problems with his back legs giving out, so I suspect that the stairs are a bit of a problem for him. Seriously, he has to be desperate to pee before he will even consider making his way into the actual yard.
Once the garden is wet enough, I’ll let Clancy back into the house and then I’ll bribe Birdie to come back in. I’m afraid to leave her out there while I’m working upstairs because she’s a mad digger — and one of these days, she’ll figure out that she can dig her way to freedom. Although I have her chipped, she’s not the brightest dog in the world. The last time she made a break for it, The Coach spent a good hour chasing her around the ‘hood and trying to keep her from running across the busy road out front.
But she’s smart enough to only come in a Kraft American Cheese slice.
Now that the morning watering | dog pooping is out of the way, I can start on the rest of my Wednesday. First, grading discussion boards for the grad class — and then grading the rest of their topic proposals. I’ll eat my Aldi-branded “homemade pretzel” for breakfast (not typical) because it tastes more like a biscuit than a pretzel. Once the grading is done, it will be noonish. At that point, it will be hot upstairs (the AC is set to 80 during the day) so I’ll take a shower and go downstairs to make lunch. Today’s offering? Salad with cranberries, almonds, and shaved Parmesan cheese. Maybe I’ll watch an episode of a TV show (there’s a Smash and an Eureka on the DVR) or read for fun until about 1:30 or 2 — because that’s when the AC will start its incremental path towards our nighttime setting of 74.
Finally, I will be able to write upstairs. Today, I hope to crank out a couple more sections of my conference paper — the one that’s also a first draft for a huge chunk of one of my book chapters.* I can usually crank out ~2,500 words in a sitting. That’s not a super fast pace, considering I have written whole papers in 48 hours** but my cats and dogs tend to interrupt me. Okay, well, not so much the dogs. Or Carson and Clara. It always seems to be the Trio of Terror — Patton wraps himself around the back of the computer and tries to scratch me, Pyewacket tries to walk across the keyboard when he’s not getting enough attention, and Sheldon Cooper, well, he doesn’t always appreciate the social sciences.
Now that summer is here — and The Coach will soon be free on Wednesday nights — we’ll end up doing something fun. Tonight, we were invited to eat sushi with some friends. Next week, it might be bowling or miniature golf or a movie or something. Eventually, we’ll spend our evenings floating in the backyard pool (but first, The Coach needs to give me the forms to order new parts).
Not all summer days are like this. The grading, for example, only crops up on Wednesdays — and then only for six weeks. Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays are writing days. Tuesdays are office days. And, really, I need to start writing in the mornings once The Coach is truly done with his academic year because there are all sorts of things on the Honey Do-List for this summer. But that’s a blog entry for another day.
Right now, I must grade.
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It has been almost three months since my poor sweet dog Chessie 
