July 15, 2024

Ends

Man, I wish this COVID would finish. I’m still coughing; still have a stuffy head; still have a headache, especially when I cough; still feel like ass. I’m better this morning than I was yesterday, but this thing is lingering like an unwelcome guest. Enough already. Fortunately, Max is feeling better. He’s been sleeping the last couple of nights, so that’s a good thing.

I started reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson after finishing Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The latter is OK, but it took me a while to get through it. I’ve been in a reading slump lately; maybe my time in Austin and COVID have something to do with that. There was some good world-building in the Tchaikovsky, but it felt like it would be a better television series than it was a novel. I guess it felt underdeveloped for a novel, and a bit too episodic. Again, it would probably make a cool tv show. So far, I’ve only read part one of the Robinson, but it did not begin as I expected. Knowing his work, I felt it would be more cerebral and staid, but it started almost like a western—which seems appropriate for a frontier novel—Mars as the Wild West. I’ll see how it goes.

My summer course finishes up this week. I hope to have grades in by Friday, but we’ll see. So far, no one has turned in anything early, so I’ll have more to do later in the week. I also have to get to work on my fall classes, since it looks as if my current schedule will actually be the one I’m teaching. So much for getting to that book. I’ve asked the chair several times now for some flexibility, emphasizing the fact that I’m not objecting to teaching, but being there everyday. At this point in my career, I thought I would have more opportunity for research and scholarship. As the capitalist logic goes: I guess I should be grateful to have a job, right?