Officially, there are still a couple of weeks of summer left, at least if you define the seasons by the solstices and equinoxes. But it’s Labor Day weekend, classes have started, and the temperatures are cooler (less than 100 degrees). So here’s what I did on my Summer Not-Vacation.

The spring semester ended the second week of May. For six out of seven consecutive weekends from the middle of May until July 4, I was on the road. I’ve written about a few of those trips, including the ERB Dum-Dum and Robert E Howard Days. Follow the links for more details.  Other trips included some family visits as well as attending the “retirement” party for my Ph.D. advisor. (He retired from faculty and administrative responsibilities, not research).

On that trip, I hit seven used bookstores, five of them Half Price Books. I scored some titles I’ve been trying to find for a while.  Only one of the Half Price locations was a bust;I didn’t buy anything there, so it doesn’t count. Will Oliver (waves at Will) said in the latest REHUPA mailing that he had hit Recycled Books in Denton on his way to Howard Days, a couple of weeks before I was there. Which explains why the pickings were so slim. Actually, it wasn’t Will’s fault the sff section was a shadow of its former glory. I’ll try to post pictures of some of the treasures I found at some point.

After that I was back to teach a class in the second summer session.  During July, not only did I teach, we also sold a house on the other side of the state and my wife had knee replacement surgery.

Yes, I am now married to a cyborg. She’s doing well, and only needs a cane to walk. (The cane she has isn’t very good. It doesn’t have a sword in it, and it’s not hollow, so you can’t put booze in it.) She was back at the gym about a week after the surgery, sitting on a stool and doing light dumbbells and ropes. It was great watching the expressions on the faces of the people on the treadmills when this white-haired lady hobbles in on a walker and starts working out. Our trainer is using her as an example when other clients whine.

I experimented with my class by giving lab quizzes on Blackboard instead of lab homework. This is to cut down on cheating. In the past, I could email the students a brand-new lab homework on Friday and an answer (frequently wrong) would be posted online before Monday. These quizzes must be taken within 24 hours of the lab ending, have randomized questions pulled from a quiz bank with the order of the answers randomized, and the questions are shown one at a time with no going back to change an answer. There is a 15 minute time limit on the quizzes. It seemed to work quite well. The bitching and moaning was epic. All the labs will have that this semester. I’ll be buying cheese trays to go with all the whine the students will give me.

On the writing front, I submitted a number of short stories. Most have come back, but they’ve gotten personal rejections rather than form rejections. I’m going to send them back out over the next few days.Any that don’t sell, I’ll put in a collections myself. I got about 20k into a dark fantasy novel when I realized I needed to know the backstory better, so I’ve been writing a prequel story that will fill in those gaps in my mind.The I’ll get back to the novel, the first of a projected trilogy.

I’ve signed up for a couple of online writing classes for the rest of the year. The first should start tomorrow, and at the end I’ll have written enough PI stories for a collection. The class after that will be on time travel.

So what’s up with ya’ll?