Blessings and Curses of Summer Break

Summer break brings an interesting mix of blessings and curses. There a lot of great things about summer, not the least of which is the flexible schedule. I love the fact that I can work from home, a number of days a week, especially since I am almost to the point of selling internal organs to pay for gas (one tank for an appendix, anyone?). One of my goals for this summer has been to finish up a number of projects from this past year, and I’ve done a lot of that. I also intend on working on some of the lessons for this coming year (I’ve got one new prep and two old preps that need some fine-tuning). And I’m spearheading a curriculum revision in my department (“that’ll teach the new kid to make creative suggestions in faculty meetings.”). It’s really nice to have larger chunks of time to deal with larger projects.

But it’s not all vacations and bathrobes. I think, because of the availability of more time, I tend to overload that time, which ends up putting more pressure on me. “So yeah, let’s try to send off a gazillion manuscripts to journals and plan a research program for the next five years—I’ve finally got the time to do it.” I think this past weekend, I kind of hit a wall as far as feeling the stress of having to get things done. I know that I need to relax and understand my limitations, but the idea of all of this wonderful “free” time and the realization that it will be gone during the regular school year goads me into putting more and more on my to-do list. So it seems one has to accept the curses of summer along with its blessings. I wonder how others do it. In the meantime, I’m going to try to whittle down my list of things I need to do.

I still haven’t figured out the 3 columns yet on this blog template, but it’s summer so I’ll probably have some free time this week. :)