• Just finished my lecture (I’m teaching in person, but folks might be traveling, so today’s lecture was online and recorded). The advances in videoconferencing and everyone’s comfort with various tools used for the purpose are a positive thing that has arisen from the last two years of craziness. 
• I am teaching a massive undergraduate class next semester. It’s twice the size of the same class that’s being offered right now, and I am puzzled and a little terrified. It would be great to think the overflow is because I’m a popular instructor, which I am, but it’s likely because of increasing enrollments and/or some student schedule conflicts. Still, it’s a lot. A LOT.  
• Which brings me to the fact that I am glad I will be mostly done with this season’s (many, many) proposals by the end of January. 
• Today I had a story accepted after a wait of 134 days. That’s a lot for a flash piece, and A LOT for someone as pathologically impatient as I am. It’s a story I really like, going to a market I really like. I should be jumping with joy, but I’m not. And it’s not that I am not happy, because I really am. It’s that the joy doesn’t break the surface, if that makes sense. Maybe because the surface is all business, thick and leathery from grownup concerns. Maybe it can’t because it’s such a tiny, niche, private joy, the kind that’s too small or too weird or too mine to share with most people. And if a joy can’t break the surface, you don’t really feel it, no matter how much it bubbles underneath.   
• Over the next four days, I need to: 

a) Grade one exam and a homework assignment (graduate class, so manageable) 

b) Write solutions for current homework and prep class for Monday

d) Polish an existing proposal and submit it to a new program on Monday

d) Review a paper

e) Editorially handle a bunch of papers at two journals

I’d also like to edit a couple of very short stories to a publishable form. 

Oh, and I’d like to watch some movies and read some novels. And cook. And hang out with kids. 

What are your plans over Thanksgiving break, American blogosphere? And for non-US folks, what are your plans for the rest of this week?