This title kind of strikes me as a name for a band. If I were in the band, there would be a bassoon featured prominently (hey, did you know that I used to moonlight as the 2nd chair bassoonist in the orchestra at my college?).
I'm sacrificing achy wrists to write this tonight. I feel that strongly about blogging. (Tear.) Not really. Instead, I wanted to throw this down and get it out of my head, and I wanted to do something else for a few minutes other than the grading that I had been working on. AND, I have Pandora on, and sometimes when I get groovy with that, I don't want to stop. Imagine me grooving with achy wrists.
I just completed my first 5-week session as an adjunct with a new university. For this session, I've been driving about 2 hours each way, which is pretty ludicrous for a couple of reasons.
***There's a satellite campus literally 2 miles from my house.
***I told "them" during the interview process that I wouldn't drive farther than 45 minutes from my house.
***the class runs from 6-10 at night, which puts me home a few ticks shy of midnight and it requires the boy to rush home as soon as he can so that we can high five in the entryway as I leave immediately.
But there were also some compelling reasons to agree to teach this course.
***The boy wasn't back at school yet/didn't have students yet for the first 3 weeks of this course, which seemed easier somehow.
***The boy encouraged me to do it. And, you know, I'm a sucker for him and his wheedling ways.
***I get compensated for mileage & meals. This literally added an additional $300+ to what I am getting paid once you take what I am getting reimbursed for gas - the measly 20 gallons of gas it (Whoa...sorry...I lost my train of thought. A good song came on & I started jamming.) took for me to make the roundtrip 5 times. Hybrids rock. Like, a lot. Irony: we actually bought this particular car with the mindset that the boy was going to begin his grad studies and was going to have to drive an hour each way because of program availability and that we were going to make the money back pretty quickly with that factored in. We did the math. Instead, it's always been my car since we bought it (again, we did the math and figured who drives the most...curses, mommy chauffeuring duties), and I'm the one who's using it to drive extensive amounts.
Alllll of this is to say that I have been driving a lot lately. And that has led me to explore the audio book section of the library, a place I only hit up once before, pre kids, when we did something as foolish as take a vacation. Then, Harry Potter helped us cross the interminable Ohio/Pennsylvannia wilderness. Now, I hit up a saucy little chic lit action, which literally took me 1 1/2 trips to complete. It was shorter than I realized it would be. And I'm glad that I listened to that one by myself. It wouldn't have been a problem to watch it as a movie with the boy, but the descriptive passages can be much more direct than a visual passage and blush worthy. Still it was quick and made the time FLY.
My second foray into audio books this month is Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior. I don't classify myself as a Kingsolver groupie, by any stretch of the imagination. I have friends who are, and I don't share their zeal for The Poisonwood Bible among her other works. Perhaps its because I'm listening to this and the voices are "alive" to me that way (the author's reading the text as well...interesting), but I'm digging this one. I'm also on the last CD, so I'm going to have to find another book to pop in the old car's sound system. But bless the boy for suggesting I do this cause it has literally taken the 3 1/2 hour drive (I said it was a touch under 2 hours...I'm not driving like a maniac) from something of a chore (think Indy around the end of the work day) to a calm luxury.
Imagine this: reading a book for more than 20 minutes at a time with no kids. I don't say this about much, but I'll take this over chocolate basically always.
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