The fire.

Oh, wow, is what my grandson says when he's impressed with something, like the dinosaurs in Ice Age part One Million, or an extra large blueberry in his muffin. I am saying oh wow myself at all the stuff that must be done between now and when school starts. For instance,

1. I must get the shell and some of the content up for my two online or part-online courses.
2. I must make podcasts or basically some kind of multi-media online content for those courses, at least some of which needs to be in place when school starts.
3. I must continue to work on my manuscript, which on the one hand is in very good shape and on the other hand, likes to alert me to its flaws with each successive reading. Which, on the third hand, is very helpful of it, but on the other other other hand, this is the endlessness of this kind of writing: it will be finished when I'm dead.
4. I must make several more little videos in several different categories.
5. The historian and I are taking a small trip to Seattle to see loved ones.
6. There are meetings I have to attend.
7. I have to write my sabbatical report.
8. I'd like to have a strategy for doing my faculty leader work this year. Does someone have an extra strategy they'd like to let me use or adapt?

There are events unrelated to work:

1. I need to see people, such as my family for my dad's birthday, and the upcoming birthday of a niece, plus the birthday of some grandchildren, plus some other family birthdays I can't quite enumerate right now.
2. Events with friends, such as my writing group, a dinner, a lunch, a book group.
3. A concert.
4. I didn't go to my aunt's to play Rock Band tonight, but I could have, and it would have been fun.
5. My own birthday is coming up, which at this point appears to me to be most appropriately celebrated by a very quiet, extended nap.

I am not complaining. Repeat: I am not complaining. I am just saying. Maybe it looks all the more complicated by contrast with three weeks in one of the most peaceful places on earth.

Okay, with that off my chest: I think I need a novel to read. I read The Girl Who Played With Fire, which was a page-turner and a pot-boiler, and--in that vein--very good. I love the main character, in case you want to know. But now that it's finished, I feel that not having another story to fall into makes me even more anxious than I already am.

Oh the anxiety! The anxiety is a pain in my ass. The anxiety is why I took a sabbatical in the first place, to get rid of it and to come back all chilled out like the gesture I made last year when I said, "This will be my new mantra":

Right. Not that I'm cynical about my own self, but let's just see how long that lasts.