I've traveled all this way for something

So, guess what? It's been six weeks! HI!

Here is the quick update. Remember the three classes I was going to teach this fall? First time ever teaching English classes? The first one got cancelled because not enough people signed up. I finished the second one last Friday, and what do you know, it went pretty well. The students were so enthusiastic at our last meeting that I actually caught myself wondering, "wait, were we in the same class? it wasn't that good," but maybe that is just grumpy me. You will hear more about it later. The third one starts next Monday. I'll keep you, um, posted.

Also under the heading "not as bad as it could have been," I took a 6-week online grammar course because I'm always worried about my Texas roots. Communicating grammatically was not our top priority back in the piney woods of East Texas. I was a bit surprised to realize that I'm actually not bad at grammar. I didn't learn anything new until about halfway through, and that was about the only new thing I learned. It was mostly learning names for things that I instinctively know/do. It was kind of boring.

It's occurring to me that I started this off with two not-so-subtle pats on my own back, so apologies for that. I've read two facebook posts recently smacking people down for doing exactly that, so I feel properly chastened but not enough to delete those two paragraphs, because I haven't been exciting enough to have anything else to talk about.

PellMel seems to be doing just fine at her first year of med school and MadMax is counting down the days till ski season starts. We still have five chickens. Jazz is more arthritic and Sadie is .... Sadie. My mom, who has raised half a dozen black labs over the years, says she will start to calm down a bit when she hits 18 months, and not a moment too soon. She has enough energy for any eight humans.

So that's about it, minus about 47 little dramas that I'm leaving out, as well as one near-nuclear-meltdown crisis of confidence the day of my first class, some gorgeous fall weather (and a few rainy days), a nasty cold, and a surprisingly good pan of whole-grain brownies, the last of which I'm eating right now.

When I typed the previous post and said I was taking a six-week break, it was completely spontaneous. I didn't know I was going to take a break until I was typing along and it occurred to me. It ended up being a good thing, because it spared you an awful lot of angst (remember that cancelled class?). And now I have six half-written posts waiting to be finished and published.

But I think I'm going to take another week-ish off and post them in November. November is NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month, you're supposed to post every day)(I've always suspected that Debbie made it up, but I just looked and apparently it is a real thing). I'm going to do it again this year. Although I may bend the rules a bit and only post on weekdays, not the weekends. So I'm saving up all my posts, because last year I ran out of things to talk about toward the end of the month.

Oh, and one errata (erratum?)(yes, google reports that a single error is erratum): On my list of A.A. Milne quotes, I included one that wasn't Milne (“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”) I'm usually pretty good about fact-checking things I find on the internet, but that one came from a relatively reliable source--Goodreads, where several hundred people had voted for it as their favorite A.A. Milne quote. I didn't find out it was bogus until I finished reading The House at Pooh Corner and realized that I hadn't seen it, so did further research. Mea culpa.