Well, it's here at last--the end of the fall trimester. I get this week off, except for the little matter of grading my exams, calculating my students' grades, writing comments, and prepping for the winter trimester. Oh, and I've got 18,000 words left to write on my novel by midnight Sunday. Piece o'cake.

I'm working at about a thousand words an hour, so I'll need to spend around three hours a day on the novel over this next stretch--feasible? Possibly. We'll see.

Today I was going to knock off quite a bit of novel this morning, but you know how it goes on your first day of vacation. I slept late, lingered over breakfast, re-read a bit of Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's Inferno, picked out some CDs to load into my laptop, checked in on my fantasy football team, agreed to meet Kelly for lunch... the usual. But with luck, I'll have a shot at writing tonight and/or tomorrow, though with the kids home from school tomorrow, that may be easier said than done.

In the meantime, I'm aghast at my fantasy football status. In the Number Crushers league, I'm still gamely fighting for the regular-season championship, but I lost this weekend and dropped to second place by a game. At least it wasn't one of those "If only I'd played Player X..." contests. I played all the right guys, but they simply didn't score as many points as my opponent's guys did. The good news is that I get to meet the current league leaders, Super Donkey Kram, this week. If I can beat them, we'll have the same record, but I'll be 2-0 against them, which would give me the tiebreaker. I'm feeling fairly good about things in the NC league.

No, it's FLOGG, the Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen, that boggles my mind. I'm currently 7-5, with one more regular season game to play. I'm guaranteed a playoff spot, which is good, but my team is behaving in a baffling manner. At the moment, my record is 6-0 in my own division and 1-5 outside it. In our ten-team league, I'm 8th in scoring--but I'm 2nd in points scored against me. In overall league rankings, I'm currently in 8th place, but I can earn second place in the South Division with a win this week. Hell, I could still end up winning the division. Last year I dominated the FLOGG regular season and then went belly-up in the first round of the playoffs. Maybe this year's bizarre regular season means a good long playoff run. Who knows?

I'm loading Earth Wind & Fire's "That's the Way of the World" into my computer right now. My, my, my, that's nice stuff.

And now it's time for lunch. I could get used to this day off thing.
9:51 AM

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