Sprummertime (And The Hangin' Is Easy)

It's that weird time of year again, when the days are still like spring (i.e. I have to teach my full load) but the nights are like summer (meaning that friends from all aspects of academia start having lighter days a little bit before I do, so a lot of things tend to go on at night). So yeah, it's a spring/summer hybrid; I guess you could call it "sprummer," and the result means this: Not much sleep, but I'm having a great time.

This means that on a day like yesterday, when I had a concert with the college jazz band at a local high school (this after a full day of public school teaching and college teaching already), I thought nothing of having dinner out afterwards (with Jordan in town, this place becomes a regular stop again), and then letting dinner morph into Starbucks. I didn't get back to Casa de Kev until after 11:00 at night--that's sixteen hours from departure to return--but I felt strangely energized, and twelve hours of teaching today hardly affected me at all. Sure, it makes me somewhat of a slacker in other areas of my life: newspapers and magazines go unread, recorded TV shows go unwatched...and blog posts go unwritten (d'oh!). It's as if this college professor has become like a college student again. (But wait...I get paid decent money for what I do, especially compared to when I was in college. Maybe this setup isn't so bad after all...)

So there are now less than three weeks of public school teaching, and the college has but a week and a half, with the big concert after finals. Even though the summertime is often lighter in the wallet for me, I'm looking forward to the extra downtime (as well as the 15-step commute and the whole starting-at-9 a.m. thing). I plan on being really productive in terms of practicing, transcribing and maybe even (*shudder*) arranging, and I'm hoping for quite a few gigs for TD/D and/or Kev and Friends. All in all, it should be a great time...so there's no reason not to go ahead and start the fun part now.

I'm not too hungry right now; let's just eat some finger foods: A diner at a Bloomington, Indiana restaurant was accidentally served part of a human finger after a worker lost it in a food-preparation accident. Unlike the Wendy's chili lady of a while back, this situation wasn't manufactured, and the customer and the restaurant are trying to solve the problem amicably (at least after the customer found out that the police couldn't help him).