Catching up

Research and teaching take most of my time and when I get a few minutes off I find myself browsing through the images of my flickr contacts or reading other people's blogs. And then the guilt starts -- m.n.m.w. feels lonely, the camera is catching dust...
I love teaching and preparing my lectures, and I also enjoy reading my students' papers and grading them. What I dread is stapling all the course documents together in so many copies. It's tedious and I need to prepare plenty every day. Being a summer class (five weeks only), it meets daily and my students already have two exams in the first week of school. It's like eating vegetables: they might not like them, but they need to do it before getting to the really fun stuff, which is writing. I'll have them create a news blog soon -- to post their bios and stories for the class. The (one) student who knew the capital city of Romania received a book as a prize. I plan on giving a couple more to those who answer the (hard) questions I care especially about, just like one of my favorite professors used to do in his class. I still have the two books I received some good semesters ago.

Later edit: don't get me wrong, I love that research keeps me busy. I'm actually working on an exciting project for which I need to watch a lot of fine movies throughout the summer. So let the corn pop.