just label me profoundly disappointed

Back to school here, which comes accompanied by a flurry of cleaning, and organizing, and new posts up on the job board, and new preps, and lots of fun self-doubt regarding career, work, professional life, hair style, etc. Sometimes, when times like this feel overwhelming, I get out a labelmaker and make sure that our grains and sugars are very clearly organized, just in case a stranger decides to break in and make something and can't tell the difference between the regular and steel-cut oats.

No! Things are fine! But Auguseptember is, for teachers, January. There are new vows to make (repeat after me: I will not bitch every single day about the online courses that I got roped into teaching, even though the courses are not of my own design, even though the instructions and assignments and organizational hierarchies are confusing and in desperate need of revision, even though most students who enroll in an online course are not ideal candidates for self-directed writing and study, no, I will not bitch about any of that, especially not on the internet where anyone can see it), new rosters to fill in, new faces.

This year, I have a new office, one with a window (la tee da!), a rarity in our building. Whoever designed our building seemed to be of the persuasion that people would do their best work in non-ventilated, hot little boxes with no windows. Last year, I had one of those little hot boxes. But then I got moved around, and now I can look out at some trees, whereas most tenured faculty cannot. That makes me feel special.

What else is new?

I went to the Decatur Book Festival and palled around with my old serving friend E, and we listened to poetry and drank beer in a former jail and ate yummy sandwiches.

I am reading David Kirby's Talking About Movies with Jesus and Barbara Hamby's All-Night Lingo Tango and Ryan Teitman's Litany for the City and they are all excellent.

My tomato plant is just now growing ... tomatoes.

I bought a tortilla press and some masa harina.

I also bought a fiddle-leaf fig because I READ DESIGN BLOGS, DID YOU KNOW THAT I READ DESIGN BLOGS?

I am ready for the humidity to roll back and to open the windows again, one day soon.

I like my new label maker, because while I like the old-school punch one better, this one has yet to break three days after I bought it.

I have been listening to a lot of Dawes, which in turn makes me listen to a lot of Jackson Browne.

I didn't even place as a semi-semi-semi finalist in a book contest that I thought I had a shot at and that fact has set me back a lot more than I would like to admit. 

The ever-amazing Suz made me this yesterday and it rocks my world:

That seems like a good place to end.