Summer Break is Here!

A few odds and ends from this week.

A week ago I completed my 30th year of teaching (or, as I like to think of it, 2 more years until retirement). AS I have the past few years, I ended the year with a decent amount of gas in the tank. Still, there’s nothing quite like turning off the alarm and settling in to that first Monday where you can go about the day at a leisurely pace.

I discovered there are a few more things I won’t miss when I retire. They are fairly trivial, I admit. One is Spirit Weeks. While I enjoy pajama day Monday as much as the next person, I don’t like having to figure out what to do with the rest of the days. I also won’t miss signing copies of Oh Places You’ll Go.

Something cool happened at graduation this year, though. We had to move our graduation up a day because Bruno Mars scheduled a concert at Ohio Stadium for the same night. Parking would have been a nightmare for Grandma and Grandpa heading down 315, so luckily we were about to secure the Schottenstein Center for the night before. Our senior class officers decided Bruno owed them something and began posting like crazy on social media to get him to show up to graduation.

Well, that didn’t happen. But Bruno did hook up the senior class with free ice cream from the Little Ladies’ Soft Serve Ice Cream truck. He even wrapped it to! I can only imagine what it was like to take that call.

And now it’s time to work on my new book, which as of now still remains a secret. I like to get into a new rhythm for the day: wake up and have a cup of tea and read a bit, go to daily Mass, work from 9-12, go to the gym, come back and work from 3-5ish. I can see why the 9-5 job is appealing to people.

One of the things I messed around with is the Turntable feature in Adobe Illustrator. In a nutshell, it allows you to take a 2D sketch and rotate it around so you can see it from different angles.

I think if I had done the sketch in Illustrator to begin with, it might have worked better. But it helped me visualize the tricky over the shoulder shot I can never figure out.

Finally, I saved The Essential Peanuts collection for the first week of break so I could savor it. Who needs another Peanuts book? I did, and you do too. To say I was impressed would be an understatement. I’ll do a longer post about it later, but here’s a video of me unboxing all the goodies that came with it. I’ll warn you, though—I say “pretty cool” a lot. I’ll work on my delivery.

And finally, here’s a pic of my dog Bennet. Does any picture say “it’s summer” better than this one?

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