And a chaser of Apple Jacks.

There's a box of Apple Jacks in my cupboard, hanging out with the more sober cereals, as well as a slumped bag of frosted flakes that are out the door, come to think of it, as soon as I write this blog post. The Apple Jacks have almost concluded their performance. Which is to say, when I had a small bowl tonight, dessert-like, after dinner, and then a judicious sprinkling more to finish up the milk, I thought, they're almost gone, thank God, and then felt a small pang because they're almost gone.

But let me start at the beginning.

Tonight, I had my first two online orientation sessions of the semester. I logged in, clicked Share My Screen and let Adobe Connect do its fiddly little thing, uploaded my pdfs, and waited. I waited, and went to the inbox and refreshed it to see if there were messages--none--and went back to the chatroom. No one. So I checked this and that, read a great article about Serena Williams by Claudia Rankine, and another great article from The Guardian about the North Coast 500, a road along the northerly coast of Scotland, which sounds like I better do it. And another article about how if you eat late at night--which they defined, variously, as after 3 p.m. (! what?) and 4:30 p.m. (come on!)--you are basically doomed. Well, anyway, that's what I got out of it.

I refreshed. Nothing. Chatroom? No one.

Until about halfway through the putative session at which no one was in attendance, or so I thought. Then, I got two messages from different students that were all, Hey, we're in the chatroom--where are you?

Adobe Connect! Your fiddly business!

I should have closed and reloaded. Live and learn. Anyway, I hustled over to the chatroom where the students were, and we had a highly efficient orientation. I scrolled back through the chat--they had been talking about the favorite authors! What good students!

While I was refreshing and checking on the no one that was in my chatroom, whilst the everyone was elsewhere, that was when I got up and got that bowl of Apple Jacks. I finished it before I realized what was what with my chatroom fail, which, good thing, because once I had to hustle to the real chatroom and start orienting, I needed both of my hands and also my mouth. I had no time for Apple Jacks!

Why do I have Apple Jacks at my house? Because when my son and his family were here this summer, we had some Apple Jacks. I bought a box because it would remind me of summer and childhood and the mornings when children at breakfast at my table, when sweet cereal tasted like freedom.