In Grading Jail.............

will surface sometime mid-next-week. ACK this semester has been a doozy!! I'm ALMOST done grading the 70ish research papers. NOW I have to start grading the 100ish portfolio/reading journals. Then I'll have final exams to grade.

With Great Power comes Great Responsibility....

I know. That's a pretentious title. :)

I have been doing my Women Writers academic journal/webzine for ten years. It started off as a summer project and now is basically a full time job for which I am paid in the occasional good book. I complain about it sometimes and rarely have the time to devote to it that it deserves. I've looked for grants in the past, and maybe I need to see if I can find something again. BUT. That's not the point of this entry. It sometimes feels like a huge burden and responsibility, but it's also really cool. Sometimes, I have been the first place a budding author sees their work "in print" and sometimes we're the first book review, too. So it's exciting!

I get review copies of books. An awful lot of them are icky, and I read a few pages and go looking for something else. But recently I got one that I quite liked. The cover art was awesome & I liked the premise. So I started reading it and I really, really, really like it. I'm going to write a real review of it on the website, but I have to say that this is my greatest compliment: I wish I had written it. It's the kind of book I long to write.

Perhaps if I get the new "grown up job" I'll have time to do my own writing instead of merely grading other people's writing all the time and I can finally write my own "paranormal romance" that has a few little (awesome) pages done. Here's hoping.

Holly-Days

When I was 17, the marching band (yay Vikings!) that I was a superb member of went to Arizona for a band competition & parade. We also had a day trip to the Grand Canyon. During that trip, one of the blond girls named Holly made some crazy stupid remark about cows and vacations. She was totally serious, and it was a "blond moment." We all teased her about having a "Holly day"-- a day when you get to vacay from being smart.

Well, Thursday & Friday are Hollydays for my campus. We have what they call a "Fall Break." So I've got "no class," as Rodney Dangerfield would have said. Yay!

I have SO many things to do and probably will not get half of them done but I am going to try. Mostly I'd like to just loll around on my couch, read some kind of stupid addictive vampire book and eat pistachios. Sigh. I guess that's for December. Counting down the days. 'Til every day is a Holly Day.

Accomplishing...stuff

So today, a student who I had in the first semester comp course a couple of semester ago, who is in my second semester class this time, came by all happy because he had made such a good grade on an essay which he ROCKED. It was so nice to see the energy and light on his face. And honestly, he really worked hard to get that good grade and it SHOWED. It was the best of all 75 papers I graded this week, and the best reading of that particular story I've seen, probably ever. I was waaaay impressed, and said paper will join my stack of "examples of students who rock" for future classes. They probably won't believe it was a real student, it's written so well.

And it just really was cool to see how happy he was, how much he enjoyed the paper and doing well, and how he could very well be someone who, if in a class with a prof who didn't "get" him, wouldn't do as well. On the whole, in the past, he has tended to over write his essays and he really worked hard to fix that. I was soooo happy to see him. So that feels great.

Then I got stuff done that I've been trying to do for weeks. Cleared out about half of my inbox for email (something really hard to catch up on, too). Picked up kids and we went for a ride and then had a good dinner and now they're vegging out with Winnie the Pooh while I look to see what movies are shooting in Shreveport.

Apparently, the horrible traffic we got stuck in was the result of a movie that's filming here with Edward Norton called Leaves of Grass. It makes me wonder if it has anything at all to do with the Walt Whitman poem, but given the car and traffic issue, I suspect it doesn't. But it was still super cool! We saw this car on the bridge and it was literally on its back end, standing straight in the air. I thought "holy crap how did someone manage to do that?!" Well, apparently, it was the movie set! Cool. It makes sitting in that ridiculous traffic jam a little bit less of a pain in the butt. We got to daydream about buying and restoring these really cool industrial loft-style buildings that are near the freeway. They're these cool brick buildings and they'd make really cool places, but they'd cost TWO arms and two legs. But it's a nice daydream. We also drove past the other movie shooting here, accidentally, on the way home. It's a Bruce Willis directed (I don't know if he's acting in it) movie, and it's really fun to see those things. Shreveport doesn't have a million of those like some big cities and so I find it very interesting when it happens. It's not that I'm starstruck (although I think I once saw Jack Black at Target... and didn't say hi because I just thought "Hey, that dude looks just like Jack Black".... never entered my mind it might BE him). But it's just kind of fun.

And I had the chance to possibly have our house used in a location filming for the movie Queen Sized about a year ago. It was in the middle of a crazy time in our lives and I didn't pursue the "note on the door" scouting us. But I kind of wish I had! Maybe we'll get another chance one day.

Anyway. This has turned into a fangirl rant and I gotta get over it. Maia wants to know "what I'm doin?" Writing, sweetie. And now, hugging you. :)