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The last week has been one of massive scheduling upheaval. I was a good girl and made up a pretty little chart with my schedule and office hours last week so that DH would know what was going on. Then the phone calls started. Every day for the next four days one or more aspects of my schedule changed. As I told the department secretary, the amusing bit is that each phone call made the schedule more and more agreeable. The end result is that I'm teaching three sections of Frosh Comp II MWF at 10 am, 11 am and 2 pm and one section of Frosh Comp I MWF at 4 pm. By itself, that's an 80% teaching load! :)

On Valentine's Day the Japanese students arrive and I'll pick up an hour and a half block from 12:30 to 2 pm on T/R of American Culture, Politics, and Society and Basic English Reading. Two classes for the price of one. I figure it'll all be the same material anyway, so this way I can just be more efficient about it.

Although this means I'm teaching 100%, I still don't qualify for full-time benefits because the last 20% (the Japanese stuff) is considered extra-duty. It's not part of my main contract.

I'm also required by contract to have at least 10 office hours a week. Twenty-five onsite hours a week, and four composition courses worth of papers to read whenever I can. Yup. I signed up for this.

In addition, the department has hired two new lecturers this spring, so I'm no longer bottom of the stack seniority wise. One of the new hires was placed in the office I use, which means I now have two officemates I've never met.

Classes start tomorrow and I'm down to the procrastination/panic stage. I need to produce a syllabus for Comp II by 9:00 am tomorrow (gotta leave an hour to photocopy it). Fortunately, I already have one for Comp I, tho it's going to need a little tweaking.

Otherwise, winter break has been filled with reading. Lots and lots of reading. Of the book list I posted yesterday, I finished six yesterday. There's still a huge stack to get started on my coffee table, and the local library calls me every other day or so with yet more books that have finally come in.

Besides adventures in inter-library loan, winter break was filled with adventures in heating. The furnace died on (probably) Christmas day. We were out of town; fortunately, we'd taken the cats with us. It was out for several days before we arrived home. Somehow the pipes did not freeze. We managed to get the furnace restarted, and limped along with it occasionally going out and needing restarting until last week when it died for real. We were able to get it fixed, but it's temporary. We're going to have to replace the whole system this summer, if this one can hold out that long.

It's shaping up to be an interesting year.