Work (for Esme - with love and squalor)

My life these days occurs between meetings. Here's today:

* an hour and a half School of Music administrative meeting, which took place immediately following my
* one on one meeting to bring the new Graduate Director up to speed; then
* a Staff Development Committee meeting across campus to discuss, among other things, allocation of funds by the
* Scholarship Committee, for which I 'volunteered' today. As always, there were
* sundry impromptu meetings with troubled (yet ever charming) music students; and
* one more sit down later this evening with my financial advisor to discuss the pecuniary implications of my impending resignation.

And since I'm on about work, I'll mention that I sit on several new committees, viz.

* I was recently elected to the Staff Council;
* as mentioned above, I sit on both the Staff Development Committee and
* the Scholarship Committee; and also, for kicks, I'm on the
* Green Issues Committee. It's not easy being green . . .

This, in addition to my ongoing work within the School of Music itself, which was amped up to eleven when my boss went on sabbatical in Spring and wasn't made any easier when he resigned upon returning in Summer. I've been doing virtually all of his academic and administrative work since January. His replacement will take over in a few weeks and hopefully share the load, though he'll need some time to get up and running.

And it's hot here. It's a fucking heat wave. Almost unbearable. Looking back, I don't know how A. and I made it through our first summer here in the deep south without air-conditioning, migrating, as we were, from the middle of a deep, cold winter in Maine. We tried everything we could think of to stay cool, including sleeping on our apartment's porch, which would sometimes catch a cross-breeze through the bullet holes in the windows when the wind was right.