T he end is nigh! The autumn semester/term approaches. And while we still have almost two months of summer left according to the calendar, "Summer is over and gone," as the crickets sang in Charlotte's Web . At least for those of us who head back to the classroom in less than a month. In advance of a meeting with my program director late Monday morning, I spent about 40 minutes total during the weekend to jot down several ideas about planned workshops and related activities for the coming 2024-2025 academic year. At an opportune moment, I mentioned "I have a few ideas," and opened my leather portfolio. My director was highly receptive to almost everything I suggested, and we had a very productive planning session for just over 90 minutes. Just about everything I sketched out on Sunday aligns with his own ideas. It's nice when meetings go that well, and two related things occur to me in hindsight. One, it pays to exercise...
Here's a seasonal tune by the late Julie London (yep, Nurse Dixie on the old NBC TV series Emergency) from 1957. This is a song I had never heard before until my first December in Minneapolis (late 2000 saw a particularly frigid and snowy start to winter that year) at the University of Minnesota. During the last two weeks o the semester after Thanksgiving and Final Exam Week, I used to listen to the ex-KLBB on the radio, which had a nostalgia format (artists from the 1930s-1970s), and each December played nothing but old Christmas tunes for the entire month. This song turned up several times a day and in the evenings as I wrote my own final graduate papers, a final exam for my Norwegian 1001 students, and then graded everything. Anyway, whenever this tune came on the radio, it always brought to mind this crazy chick in my teaching assistant office who was preparing to defend her doctoral dissertation. She sat just two desks away and had the bluest eyes, freckles, and an intoxicating laugh. We spent that entire semester chatting about nothing much whenever we were in the office that we shared with six or seven other grad students. We later went skiing together one cold Saturday morning in February 2001 right before Valentine's Day (she invited me), spent the entire afternoon and evening talking at my place over hot tea and then Ukrainian food from Kramarczuk's Deli nearby until she had to go home late that night. We eventually got married in June 2006. So, this one is especially for my wife. . . The Grand Duchess. Here's I'd Like You for Christmas!
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