Cleaning Out

another wonderful painting  by Christian Schloe... I believe it's titled "Annabelle Lee"

Besides schoolwork,  my time away from this blog has , as usual, been frittered away with listening to audiobooks, none of them inspirational.

The only TV programs  I watch are the 6:30PM National News, the 9PM MSNBC Rachel Maddow,
and, when it's on,  PBS'  "Midsomer Murders."

What else has transpired is that the students signed up for their Spring semester courses at the beginning of November.
The only course I was scheduled to teach was Modernity In Literature, Tuesdays and Thursdays 2-3:15 PM.   No one signed up for it.
Last year I had a full class and a wait list, but then the class was scheduled for 11-12:15.
Athletes can't take a course at 2PM.... practices and games and all.  And most of the students took the course in the Fall.   The early scheduled sections are all full, but mine, and my colleague who was going to teach from 3-4:15,  have no  one. So it goes.
First time in 18 years that I haven't had a course in the Spring.
I'm already on for a Theology elective in the Fall, but for now...

So I am planning to do volunteer work in the Spring at the Frederick Literacy Center. I've signed up for the training sessions for early January.

But what I think will happen is I might lose my office, or at least have to share it with another professor.  Or, that newly hired tenure track person will have to share it with me. I'm the contingent one.
So I've been cleaning it out.
Not that I have even 1% of the number of books and papers that my tenured colleagues - scholars that they are-  have.  But I had about twelve feet of bookcase space filled.  So now it's down to two feet.

Which means I had to reshuffle the books and papers I had at home.  So I have filled four large black trash bags with "stuff" -  not generally books.  And I have given away many books.

Those trash bags have received about six photograph albums, too.... photos of all the places Mom and Dad had visited, mostly, and plenty of not-so-great snapshots of the three of us, too. I have been sorting through and plan to give all the Kauffman family photos to my cousins on that side, and the same with the Higgins family photos.

It's a real detachment, but not a wrenching one.  My pathological  numbness helps.