As I have a bit more time on my hands for the first time in over eight years, I have decided to spend a bit more of it outside.  Otherwise we have all been spending too much of our time either watching TV or playing computer games (especially now that Connor has caught the video game addiction).  And so for the past few days, my boys and I have been taking walks around our neighborhood and finishing with a few shots with the basketball.  

Connor is riding his new, but already too small, bike.  He's still getting the hang of the pedals, and today was the first day that he made it up the first hill by himself (I still had to push him up the second hill).  The training wheels are still on, but he needs a bit more practice with the steering and pedaling before they should come off.  Rowen, meanwhile, is learning to stay to the side of the road and is able to run for quite a while.  It is cute to see him bend a bit and rest his hands on his knees when he gets a bit winded.  Trevor still likes to prove that he can beat all of us home.

My basketball skills have certainly atrophied, but my boys make me look like a pro star.  Connor can nearly get the ball up to the basket, Rowen just throws the ball randomly, and Trevor thinks hitting the post makes his shot a "close one."  Today, a neighbor child came over with his football as well, and so I found myself juggling a football and basketball as I seemed to be the boys' favorite target.

I have also liked our walks and time outside as I've been seeing more of my neighbors these past few days than I have almost the entire time that we have lived here.  I truly did not realize how much my extra work was isolating me from ... well ... everything.  It is clear that I need to get us all out even more often.

For the first time in over eight years, I will not be teaching a class at Baker College of Jackson in a fall semester.  With my wife's broadening schedule and some changes in my school schedule this year, it was not practical to teach an evening class, and due to lower student enrollment, they are not offering the Saturday classes that I used to teach.

It did not fully hit me until I sent the email declining a class this fall, but I have been at Baker for quite a while now.  I have been teaching classes there nearly every term since only two months after we moved to Jackson.  I have been teaching there since almost a year before Connor was born, let alone Rowen.  When I first started working there, George W. Bush was still President, Jennifer Granholm was in her first term as Governor of Michigan, we had not hit the "great recession," and the first iPhone had not yet been introduced.

I am concerned about how this will affect our overall finances, but I hope that I will see an improvement in my health during this reprieve.  Last year at this time, I was teaching two classes (although one was independent study).  The issue with teaching extra classes during the school year isn't just the class time, but the number of hours that I spend every week preparing for class and grading assignments.  During weeks when papers are due, I often lose the entire weekend.

One way or another, this fall is going to be different than any other fall semester than I've had at Lincoln.  I hope that it works out for the best.

While I hope that I might start up before the school year starts, I was again not capable of generating the positive habit of writing a bit towards one of the many novels that I want to write.  With that in mind, I'm going to stop keeping a tally of where my writing for Vali's Tale is at the current moment (which is nowhere) each week.  It was not enough of an incentive.

Instead, I want to refocus on getting my novel Dragon Hunter polished and ready for e-publishing.  Hopefully, I can get more movement on getting an appropriate cover and make some mild edits on some parts that I know need polishing.  While I had hoped to get that done by August, I now need to get it going (in at least one form) before the school year starts.

I'm not going to let myself feel guilty about this (well, too much).  While there were plenty of distractions which I could blame, I just didn't feel the muse.  I need to find a way to tap into my creative well again.

I am now forty pages in the hole.  It's been four weeks and I've written a grand total of a paragraph.  There were three separate occasions that I sat down to write this week and just stared at the screen for a few minutes before getting distracted by something else.

Now, several days this week (and at least one more next week) were spent replacing a section of the drain field in our back yard, and I again spent a good portion of the week playing D&D with various groups of people.  While my summer has not been as productive as I would like in the writing department, it has been an enjoyable summer.

This next week is going to be busy as well, but I think that I've decided that if I don't get writing this week, I am going to stop the weekly updates on my lack of progress.  I don't like quitting.  We will see if that is incentive enough.

I have had a much busier summer than I had expected.  We recently passed the half-way point of my break, and I can't help but think of all the things that I haven't managed to accomplish.  This seems like a good place to take stock of what I've done and not done as I only have a little over a month before my life goes at break-neck speed again.

I finished (although I haven't polished) the Rosary section on this website.  Considering that I had been planning on doing this for a number of years now, I'm really glad that I got it up and running.

We cleaned out the garage from the garage sale and can now park our cars in it again.  Honestly, it had been long enough that I had trouble parking in the garage again.

I've been writing in this blog nearly every day.  Only on days like yesterday, where we end up busy until later than I expect, have I had to postpone writing the blog.  Still, I've managed to have a blog for every day since I've started.

I fixed and updated the character spreadsheets that I use for D&D (both 3.5 and my home-brewed 3.6), and made them available on Google Docs.

I've been playing tennis at least twice a week with my father.

I even fixed the slide and swing set at my parents' house, as well as set up the beginnings of a play area on the willow tree in their back yard.

And I've seen a lot more of my friends this summer than I have for the last several years.  While the lack of down-time is frustrating my wife a bit, I've been having a blast.

That said, there's still a lot on my list: repair the drain field (in progress), get a cover picture for Dragon Hunter and get the book e-published, write a new story (Vali's Tale), take a load or two to the dump and metal recycler, clean up the basement, go on a trip (currently planned), get Pool of Radiance stuff on this web site, finish converting DQ7 into a D&D adventure, and other things that aren't coming to mind.  I am avoiding working on school stuff even if the dreams have already started.  There will be time enough for that later.

At least I've been getting some stuff done.  This has already been a more productive summer than most of my previous one.  Still, I have some catching up to do.

A week ago I posted that my plan was to write ten pages a week on my story, Vali's Tale.  As of this moment I have written ... one paragraph.  Yep, not a productive week for me.  Now I could say that part of the reason was that I spent time this week getting my Rosary section running (I'm still working on two sets of Mysteries), or that it was because we were out of power for the entire day on Tuesday, or because of the several events we attended because this was the week of Independence Day, but the truth is that my lack of writing is because I downloaded the Legendary version of Skyrim to my computer and I have almost no self-control.

Instead of creating my own fantasy story, I have spent most of my week in Skyrim dealing with their Dawnguard expansion story (and no, I won't play as the vampire lord).  Again, I would like to blame external forces.  It has been difficult writing in the mornings now that my sons have rediscovered the gaming systems attached to the TV in our "office."  Listening to Mario or Zelda music is not that conducive to writing (yet I manage to play Skyrim through it).

Even when I forced myself to sit down with the document open for over an hour, I just stared at my writer's block.  The problem?  Vali doesn't have shoes (or undergarments for that matter) and he wouldn't want to steal in (them) front of Orean.  It's a ridiculous problem that can be easily solved, but all I could think of was Skyrim.

As my wife reminded me, I need to set Skyrim playing as a reward for having completed writing (and better writing than what the paragraph I wrote turned out to be).  We'll see how things go next week.

Normally, I have been reserving Saturday posts for short descriptions of various story ideas that I have been chewing on.  While I have not yet come close to exhausting the current store of ideas that I have, I am a little concerned about eventually running out or putting up just whatever came off the top of my head (although that might actually be pretty entertaining).  The idea came to me that, as long as I was going to start writing a larger creative story, that I could use Saturday's as a weekly update for how I've been progressing.  Then, my mind decided to up the ante even a little more.

What if I gave people access to my document as I was writing it?  Now, I am a little concerned that this might not work out, and I've nearly ran screaming from the idea, but I thought that it might be worth a try.  The background for the story, and the link to the Google Doc where I will be writing the main story can be found here.

While you can read the details there, I wanted to just let you know a little bit about my schedule.  I will try to avoid writing this story on Sundays.  I will have very little time to write the story on Saturdays and will have almost no time on Fridays.  I plan on writing during the morning hours on Monday and Wednesday, but other plans might get in the way.  I currently plan to write more in the afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I set Wednesdays as the main deadline for the summer because they are currently the most open of my days, and I might end up writing up until midnight to complete my self-imposed deadline.

I am setting this up as a motivation to keep writing a larger project.  However, I have several other irons in the fire that I also want to accomplish, so we will see how this goes.  I pray that it will be a positive experience for both me and anyone who wants to follow it.

Various sources that I have seen recommend that most adults need to receive seven to nine hours of sleep.  Anything less than that can reduce memory, increase stress, and lead to numerous health complications.  If I'm lucky, I get six.

It has not always been this way.  During my freshman year in college, I would try to go to bed between nine and ten even if I didn't have an early morning class.  Often this would even mean leaving a game or some other activity that my friends were doing.  Janelle often teased me that I would go to bed so soon.  Come to think of it, she doesn't like it when I go to bed before ten even now.

I remember reading an article at the time that talked about powerful and famous people who would only get about four hours of sleep a night.  Our newly elected President Clinton was one of them; Margaret Thatcher was another.  I remember thinking that so little sleep would kill me.  Now I understand it a little better.

Time is slipping away from me.  On days that I teach evening classes at Baker (which this semester is on Mondays and Tuesdays), I wake up around 5 am, go to Lincoln to teach, get back home around 4:30, leave for Baker around 5:30, get home again around 10:00 (this semester has been a bit earlier here), do something to decompile (usually a 45 minute show), write my blog (a new addition), get ready for the next day (lunch and pre-chosen clothes), and get to bed around eleven.  Considering that I'm often doubling up (my decompiling often goes hand-in-hand with grading), there really aren't places for me to cut, except sleep.  Even days without Baker are often filled to the brim with one thing or another.

I know that this is affecting me.  I can feel my memory slipping away.  I've gotten shakier lately, and my right eye likes to start twitching on its own.  I am often tired and run down, making my temper flair when even the slightest extra task is asked of me.  I know that this is taking years off of my life, but I don't see another way around it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get to bed.

My life is undergoing some minor changes right now, and they mostly seem to be for the better.

About a month ago, a new special education teacher was hired at Lincoln.  We hit it off from the first day he teamed in my classroom.  We quickly learned that, not only do we like many of the same things, but we live less than fifteen minutes away from each other.  The carpool that formed from this chance meeting has been a Godsend for me.  I don't think that I have been as disgusted with teaching as a profession since my last year in Colon.  I was tired of being beaten up, beaten down, and just plain beaten.  Until the carpool, I was coming into work full of venom.  And then my new carpool buddy arrived, glowing with pleasantness.  His last job had also left him bitter, and he decided that he wanted to start this job as a new man (or, at least, the man he was before he soured).  He was on a crusade of pleasantness, and I have not felt this good in a while.  My encounters with students and staff have been tremendously more enjoyable, and I truly look forward to coming to work every day.  Put all of the politics and external crap aside, I have one of the greatest jobs in the world.  Who else gets to spend all day talking about something they love and gets to inspire that love in others?

Unfortunately, I might not be at the high school next year.  I received my lay off notice (again), but was told not to worry because the middle school will probably have openings.  I am not happy with the arrangement.  I know that I can teach middle school (I have done so before), but I've spent the past two years training for and creating AP Literature and World History classes.  I already had to watch as someone else was given the Lit course; I don't think I'm ready to lose the World History one as well.  Still, I was encouraged this year by how optimistic my students were after this year's test.  I am eager to see their results in July.

This will be my last term at Baker's Writing Center.  I have been tutoring students here for the past six years, and I want my evenings back.  I still plan on teaching a course each term at Baker for the time being, but I've missed too much with my family and been stretched too thin for too long.  Today, this Thursday, and next Thursday should be the last three evenings that I spend at the Writing Center desk.

Katrina made WMU's vocal performance program.  While other people are warning her to hedge her bets, get a second major, and not count on this playing out as a career, I respectfully disagree.  She has an outstanding God-given talent, and the drive to make something out of it.  It will be a hard road, but I believe she can make it, and not just succeed, but thrive.  That said, having Alex gone this past year has been devastating to me.  I don't know how I am going to handle having both of my baby girls gone next school year.  They grew up too fast.  While seeing them as the gorgeous, independent and talented women they have become, I can't help but think of them as the baby girls who bounced into my arms, who played games as princesses with squeaky voices, and who let me be their hero.  At least I have this summer with both of them home.

Life is all about change.  I worry that some day I will not be able to handle the changes that life throws my way.  These, at least, I believe I can handle and, hopefully, will be better for them.