Long time, no see!

Protracted absences from this space usually mean that I've had the kind of week (or weeks) when even sitting in front of the blog to describe anything about them is basically impossible. Either I really don't have a single minute to sit and reflect, or I'm too exhausted to do so.

It's taken me a while to figure it out, but I've finally realized why many colleagues prefer to teach their two-course semester in spring. For the past five years, however, I've taught three courses each spring, a streak I hope will end the next time I return to the classroom in 2012-13. The spring is much harder because, on top of having three classes and 55 students (a few less than I had in spring 2009, which was 62, and significantly less than some of my friends who have 75 students in intro classes for other departments), there are senior projects to read, comment on and grade, in addition to honors theses to read and honors defenses to attend. There's also campus visits by candidates for different positions, reviews for other colleagues, recommendation letters to write for graduating seniors, and so on.

I guess the good thing, if there is such, is that this spring has been so wet and cold and gray that at least I haven't felt worse that I'm so uber-busy when the nice weather has started and I want to enjoy the long afternoons before night falls. Hopefully, the nice weather will be here by the time the semester ends in May and then all is well that ends well.

One really cool thing I did do this semester (as if I needed any more!) was a staged reading in Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes' El retablo de las maravillas. Last year, a Spanish professor and I got the idea to get money from the community events fund at our small college on the hill and we staged a bilingual dramatic reading of Fuenteovejuna, which was a lot of fun but sparsely attended. This year, we put on Cervantes and we had a nearly packed house, so to speak. I gave the introduction in English and then the student "actors" read and acted their parts in Spanish, with different levels of proficiency. That went from a native speaker from Mexico, who had one of the main parts, to first-year students taking 100-level Spanish, who had secondary roles. I had a ball and while it took chunks of my time that could have been devoted to other pressing tasks, I enjoyed every minute of it and it was the highlight of my week.

There was also a lot of fun in collaborating with the Spanish professor and with a newly hired professor of Drama, who directed the play, and did a terrific job. So much so, that while we never did get a chance to have one rehearsal where we ran the play from beginning to end, the director had framed the scenes so well that, on the performance day, everything went on almost without a hitch even though he couldn't be there. Ironically, given what I said before about the added pressures of spring on everyone, he had a meeting of his department to go over senior comps and couldn't make it. We've now decided that we'll try again for something else to stage next year and even though I will be on leave thanks to a one-year fellowship I received, I most certainly will participate. Not only do these efforts diversify the drama offerings available to students at my small college on the hill but watching those students, most of them second-language speakers of Spanish, read and act in their second language was inspiring.

In the home front, my husband is simply biding time until my semester is over and I become human again and am actually able to get home and enjoy being home instead of spending about 15 minutes with him and then running upstairs to my office to grade, or plan classes, or write letters, or answer e-mails, or a combination of all those and more.

One member of our household whose life has changed even before the weather finally improves is Darwin. For reasons unknown, except that male cats who mark territory after being neutered tend to do so out of anxiety, Darwin likes to pee on the walls. While I've heard of other people who either medicate their cats with Prozac to zonk them out or put the cats down because of this negative behavior, I'm not going to consider either one of those options. I'd rather just clean up after him each and every day.

However, I heard of someone in the college who had a cat doing that and then started letting the cat outside and the cat stopped marking inside the house. Thus, we're letting Darwin out now for stretches of time and he seems to like it. I haven't noticed as much marking recently so, perhaps, we've found the perfect cure. We'll have to see.

The only thing that worries me is that he may want to imitate Hamlet (see him on top of the fence) and start running to the front of the house, where the issue of a road and the cars makes an rookie outdoor-indoor cat's presence tricky. We may also have to get Darwin his own collar with a bell to help the birds, mice, etc., escape before he's upon them. We'll have to see how this experiment goes.