Dawn Is Me

I’m still in school and its still running my life.

I’m got used to thinking in terms of my kids and school, so college semesters (where you cover in three and a half months what they take nine and a half months to cover) always seem to take me by surprise at the speed with which they gallop by.

I’m about a week away from Thanksgiving break. When that’s over, there will only be another two weeks of classes before finals.

I’ve got a crap-ton of work to do.

I’m taking six classes this semester. I have huge, colossal papers to write for two of them, papers we’ve kind of been working on all semester, plus another, minor paper in a third course. Fortunately, I don’t have finals in any of those courses.

I do have finals in the other three courses, though. They are things like Spanish I and Statistics, where you kind of can’t write papers. And the only reason we’re not having a paper and a final in Fundamentals of Archaeology is because my professor has been unwell and probably won’t have the energy to grade them.

All of which reduces to the fact that I’m not exactly going to be vacating during my Thanksgiving vacation.

But that doesn’t matter. I expect to be doing a lot of homework and housework during those five days but I also am very much looking forward to the holiday. Gina gets home from Ithaca on Friday. We’ll all be together for a week.

And we have more to be thankful for than we have in a long time.

Some days, you really just want to be brain dead. This is turning out to be one of those days.

I’ve lost track of the number of things I need to be doing right now but I suspect that it’s enough stuff to keep at least half a dozen clones busy.

A lot of them involve writing.

I have a paper due on Monday. It’s about Ancient Egyptian pyramids. Um … yeah.

I also need to trot over the The Journal Blog and explain to my readers why I appear to have abandoned them.

Oh, yeah, and to let them know that I’m not dead or anything like that.

I also have any number of stories I could be writing and any number of pieces of electronic correspondence to which I could be responding.

Instead, I’m having an internal debate on the relative merits of The Sims versus Diablo, Lord of Destruction.

Sometimes, I’ll admit that I display no evidence whatsoever of intellect — overpowering or otherwise.

I guess I should probably mention what I have successfully avoided talking about here for months and months and months.

My marriage is over. It’s been over for quite some time now, really. All that’s left is the formalities.

Gino and I have stopped carefully stepping around each other and finally had the talk. We’re getting divorced; I’ll be filing right after New York’s new no-fault divorce law takes effect next month.

He is okay with me living here until I can get my fiscal act together to move — and that is going to take several months, unless I win Lotto or something — and he is okay with me having custody of Kimmie and Ricky. He’ll keep the house (I wouldn’t touch it with a barge poll); I’ll probably rent a place uptown.

So, that’s that. I suspect that his reasons for being agreeable to this are not the same as my reasons for wanting it in the first place but I guess that’s not really important. What I do know is that I will soon be free.

For the record, there is no “other man” in my life right now. I’m not longing for my freedom so that a can dash into somebody else arms. In fact, I’m thinking I might feel greatly relieved if I give myself a bit of time to be entirely unencumbered.

September, like January (new year) and March (spring) has always felt like a time of new beginnings to me.

And so it is.

And now, on to other news.

They call Oneonta, NY “the city of the hills.” I don’t know if anybody has ever counted to know how many hills — I seem to remember hearing the number 7 but I don’t remember where I think I might have heard that.

In any event, however many hills there are in Oneonta, Hartwick College sits proudly atop one of them.

This makes for some breathtaking views when you stand on campus and look out across the foothills of the Catskills. I can only imagine what that view will be like during leaf-peeping season in October, or later in the year after it snows.

(See, Gina? Ithaca isn’t the only campus with lovely vistas to behold!)

It also makes for some strenuous walks between the classroom buildings and the freshman parking lots, which also sit proudly atop the top of said hills. I foresee much step aerobics and possibly some weight loss in my future.

Yesterday was matriculation. I did everything I needed to do on campus except to actually matriculation. The lines were too long and the whole thing was interrupted by Convocation and then I had to go home. So, I guess I’ll do that on Monday.

I did get a bunch of other stuff taken care of, though. I checked in and (finally) got my parking sticker and picked up the textbooks I ordered and got my student ID card sat through an orientation meeting for commuter students. It was a productive day on campus.

It was a productive day at home, too. Yesterday was Kimmie’s 16th birthday. So, I went home from school and baked a birthday cake and made Kimmie’s birthday dinner. And then I drove over to Ithaca to pick up Gina, who is sick as a dog and came home for the weekend because she didn’t want to get her roomies sick, too.

Overall, it was a good day.