Sorry for not posting anything yesterday, but overwhelmed is just how it is around here. Naturally I'm glad to be working, but being a freelance editor can feel like being a schizophrenic alarm clock, and I have five separate jobs to juggle, a book review to write, plus a giant unfinished manuscript of my own with a looming deadline. To add to the frenzy, yesterday was the first day of preseason soccer, meaning that I have to spend a chunk of every day driving the boy 140 miles back and forth and back and forth to school and/or cooling my heels in a parking lot as his coach spontaneously decides to run an extra-long practice.

[Some clichés are better than others. I love that phrase cooling my heels.]

I'm also beginning to plan for the 2014 Conference on Poetry and Teaching. I'm delighted to say that the Frost Place administration has decided to dedicate extra resources to marketing and promoting our program, but this also means that Teresa and I have numbers of rapid decisions to make. Do not think I am complaining; I adore this conference. But those rapid decisions are pressing, and some of them involve sorting through research loaded with educational jargon, and you know how I feel about educational jargon.

[Implementation. Modalities. You see my dilemma?]

Anyway, at the end of this week I go on vacation for two days . . . even though one of those so-called vacation days does involve a big reading that I still haven't finished organizing. Gah. I need a helpmeet.

[Helpmeet is a smarmy, eye-rolling, Patient-Griselda word; but even though John Milton and I argue about it constantly, we could both use one today. We just don't want to be one. He thinks that's fine, and I think that's morally incontinent, and our arguments always devolve into grouchy one-liners, and that's why I don't spend Christmas with him.]