Sunday Walk

We took our long walk through Mountain View after our weekly brunch at the Piedmont Avenue Cafe under a brisk blue bowl of sky, red maple and yellow ginkgo leaves shimmering in the light cold autumnal breath like elven magic. Nearly fifty final papers and projects and reading notebooks and peer editing workshop worksheets are done, stacked in piles like the monolith from 2001... Ten students have yet to hand in their final projects and so it is the usual fraught waiting game -- do they submit before my grading deadline and pass or nah? Fingers crossed: I want every single student to do well this year, for once! As happens most years I've got a bit of a cold, and was probably deferring it the last few weeks through by means of straight-up dumb grim grit-teethed denial, and so have spent no small part of my grading marathon sessions these last few days under blankets and amidst mounds of wadded kleenix.