Last Monday marked my fifty-first first day of school.  Some of those years were as a student, some have been as a professor, and the years in graduate school were both as a student and a teaching fellow.  That is a lot of years of school!  Most days I still love it.But, having not taught summer school for the first time in many years and thus having a peek at what retirement might look and feel like, I have to admit that I had a hard time wrapping my head around getting back into the work routine.  While most people were anticipating and were excited about the “Great Eclipse of 2017” on Monday the 21st of August, on my mind was the reality that it was back to school day and work was going to eclipse my freedom!  As I write this however, I am happy to say that “re-entry” was not as tough as I thought it was going to be.  I’m excited about heading in to another academic year.  One and a half weeks of the semester down…fourteen and a half  to go!  But who’s counting?

When the spring semester ended back in May, I made a list of goals for my summer break.  Now that summer has come and gone, I am revisiting those goals and seeing how many I met and how many will remain on the perpetual To-Do list.  For those of us living on an academic calendar rather than a January to December calendar, this is the beginning of a new year, a time to asses the successes and failures of the last year and set new goals for the coming year.

One of the things that I have wanted to do for a while now was to move my blogging platform from Blogger to WordPress.  My primary reason for this is because I always seem to have problems posting remotely to Blogger.  And unfortunately, some of my more interesting posts happen while I’m away from home.  I wanted to make this move without losing ten years of my previous posts.  Admittedly, I have zero patience for technology when it doesn’t do what I think it should do how I think it should do it; so, I was not looking forward to this migration.  Fortunately, my husband has the requisite patience needed with machines, with people is still questionable, but definitely with computers so he made the move happen painlessly for me.  All I have to do is write the stuff to go on the blog.  He does all of the behind the scenes stuff.  It’s a win-win situation; he likes the computer and not so much the words.  I like the words and most certainly not so much the computer.  It took us most of the summer to make this transition to WordPress, mostly because I kept dragging my feet with regard to some of the necessary tasks that only I could do.  And because of this, I didn’t write as much as I had hoped that I would.  That is my one big disappointment of the summer.

Now it’s done and here it is!  It is still a work in progress, but aren’t all things in life?

Since I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t doing much over the summer to exercise my brain, unless you count a ridiculous obsession with doing Sudoku puzzles.  That left me time to address another of my summer goals.  Exercise.  Real exercise for my body. Though that is something that has been absent from my routine for way too long,  I did pretty well with it all summer long, logging lots of miles on the treadmill.  I had hoped to lose a few more pounds than I did, but I am proud of myself for not getting frustrated and keeping it up.  My problem with the pounds coming off may be that I like to stream episodes of The Chew while on the treadmill.  That kind of works.  I burn enough calories on the treadmill to go home and cook or bake the recipe of the day and not feel guilty!  The rest of my exercise goal is that I wanted to make it a true habit, one that would not be easily broken once I went back to school.  Last week I managed three days at the gym.  It wasn’t the five or six of the summer, but at least I didn’t abandon it totally!  I can do this!

Then there were the truly boring goals…cleaning out closets and drawers.  I was only partially successful there.  Several of those tasks earned themselves a spot on the Christmas break list of to-dos.  Something to look forward to! 🙂

That’s it for my rather wonderfully boring summer.  Now it’s back to school.  The truth is that the more I have to do, the more I get done.  I’m definitely a person that needs to work to a deadline.  Over the summer it was too easy for me to “readjust” my personal deadlines and ultimately not get things done.  That will change with the rigidity of my school schedule.  And, that is a good thing.  I’m looking forward to writing more regularly…and continuing to exercise.  I don’t want to foget that!  I hope that you will stop by every now and then for a glimpse at my always random and sometimes wacky thoughts on life.