Hi.

It is day two of Schmooblins' Band Camp Week, otherwise known as The Week Where He Has To Work For 23.95 hours Every Day And I Become SO BORED.

I've already taken BB on long extended walks three days in a row.

Also, I spent about 6 hours in the kitchen yesterday doing productive, delicious things. Yesterday, I walked to the farmer's market with BB to pick up some radishes, pickled said radishes along with some carrots, marinated some chicken to prepare for making banh mi sandwiches, and made a big batch of split pea and lentil soup.

I guess Band Camp is a good thing, after all.

Anyway. In addition, when I am not a) walking BB around the neighborhood, b) cooking dishes for which there is nobody here except for me to eat, c) spinning in circles on my side in a corner of the living room chanting repeatedly, "bored bored bored bored...", I am also preparing materials for the upcoming semester of teaching. I think I've mentioned that I have a desire to completely overhaul how I teach my Introduction to Music classes this year. Less lecture, more class participation and current cultural and social relevance, etc. etc.

Part of what I'm toying with is the idea of no tests or quizzes this semester.

WHAT THE EFF, CAN I EVEN DO THAT?

Well, it's my class, so I think, technically, I can. We'll see how it goes. Last year it just became so much of me droning ooooon and ooooooooon for the entire hour while I watched most of the class not listen to a word I said and just robotically write down word for word what I had up on the Powerpoint slides just so that they could spit back verbatim what I had projected onto the slide in order to collect the A they were felt entitled to at the end of the semester. Bleah. Over it.

So, I have a little over a week to get everything mapped out and planned and ready to go.

Regardless, it should be an interesting experiment. If it fails like the Hindenburg, I will no doubt write about it here. So...win win.