Trenchwork

Mary reminded me that I hadn’t included an English translation of the previous post. Clever me, eh? Honestly, I hadn’t expected my English-speaking readers to worry about it (rather short-sighted of me)—in part because it wouldn’t apply to most of them—and I intended to post about it much more fully after I unbury myself from work this weekend or early next week. However, I’ll cheat and do it now. Here’s what’s on the weekend’s schedule:

• My stateside students need grades for their final exams and term papers, and evaluation of their latest work on the discussion boards and blogs. Then I’ve got to calculate term grades and get those turned in on Monday.

• I need to read and reply to a handful of essays from the participants of a short academic writing course/seminar, and have to do a drastic revamping of the lesson plan for the last class on Monday since we were supposed to handle it as a workshop—and only a quarter of the class has turned in writing. This is typically a problem for this course because of the irregular schedule, but it doesn’t help that another academic unit has sabotaged these students for two out of four class sessions with incorrect meeting information or schedule conflicts. Sigh.

• There are nearly 200 Norwegian student (English proficiency) essays which need to be read, evaluated, and responded to—by Monday. Then those results need to be uploaded to the online system—also on Monday—so that they’ll know whether they have to reaccomplish that essay before they can take the final exam at the end of the course.

• And have I mentioned that those same students start a rather hectic schedule of student conferences at 8am Monday morning, running 1 every 20 minutes until just after 5pm? And that that schedule will run through Thursday evening of week after next? I’ve given myself a 40 minute break for lunch and a short interval in the morning and afternoon so that I can at least have a chance get something to drink (or get rid of it!), but it’s going to be tiring.

• And while I have no other classes than the academic writing group this week, I do need to use *next* weekend to get settled with the lesson plans for the following 2 weeks of class meetings with the literature groups . . .

• I’m in denial about how backed up my e-mail is. We’re just not going to talk about that, and if I owe you a mail, keep the faith—I’ll catch up as soon as I can, but don’t fret if it takes me a week.

With all that happening, I felt like I deserved a break. I’ve not been able to touch the wheel except for the few hours when Wenche came over for a spinning visit, and I’ve given up carrying the spindle in my bag since I never have a chance to use it. I’m having serious withdrawal pains!  (Note to self:  If you ever decide to quit spinning, don’t try to do it cold turkey!)  So, I thought that I’d schedule myself for a small spinning course. Here’s the translation of that previous post:

I’ve decided to reward myself with a spinning weekend in Lillehammer when all the hard work is finished. It’s an intermediate-level course in spinning on 16-18 November. I’m honestly looking forward to just being able to *sit* with other spinners for a couple of days—and looking forward to it terribly. I’ll pick up a Babe wheel as well, and it’ll be good to get away for a couple of days.

The course still has some openings for those who are interested. The price is very reasonable, and runs over Friday evening, most of Saturday, and part of Sunday. Anyone else interested?

Spinnvilt is the only proper spinning shop I know of in the country. They’re fairly new, but have gotten off to a good start, and I truly hope they not only survive, but thrive. The course is a small one with up to six participants, and at the moment, Tove mentioned that there were just two of us: myself and one other. She expects that there will be more participants registering closer to the program date, but we’re still talking about a small group. So for those of you who thought this might be a good opportunity to meet a large group of experienced spinners such as happens with SOAR or some of the other US fiber events, well, think again. However, two is clearly better than none, and I’d still be ecstatic even if it were just Tove and me.

And in the meantime, I’m working on plans to pull some of those invisible spinners out into the light (more on that later), and some of the local knitting group with Hobbyboden is waiting for me to clear my schedule and set them up with an introduction to spinning.

I just have to survive the weekend and next week first.