Sunday 23 June 2013

Work and Vacation Plans

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The deadline for my students' grades to be entered onto the university's network was Sunday evening. I worked all through Saturday night to finish grading exam papers and went to my office early Sunday morning where I continued finalizing grades until around 1pm the afternoon. Exhausted I came home and slept from around 2pm until 8pm. Of course, having slept the whole afternoon I am not tired and now, at 2:30am I'm still wide awake.

On Tuesday I have to submit two reports for one of my PhD classes. While I'm not sleepy, my brain is not in a state to write philosophical reports on the views of the body and soul dilemma (topic of the first report) or the body-schema concept as understood in Phenomenology (topic of the other report). I hope I have more psychic energy tomorrow to tackle these reports and write the two 2000 word papers.

There is still a week of admin left before I can go on vacation next Monday. I haven't yet decided if I will travel anywhere or not. I have quite a lot to do actually.

First, I need to compose the syllabi for some classes, then there are two classes which I'm basically creating from scratch, which will take time too. Then there is a class that I did teach last year (Creative Writing), but which I need to give a make-over, having learned some things from the previous time I tought it.

Second, I'm the creative director for a magazine and need to do the page layout for it. I hope to finish it within the next three weeks, if possible.

Third, I have four ideas for books that I hope to at least do the outlines of during the vacation. Two are textbook style books, one concerns a specific topic on ITF Taekwon-Do, and the last one is an attempt at reworking my anthology of love poems.

Fourth, there are also two academic articles I've been contemplating. I did some brain storming on both long ago, but maybe I can get a formal outline finished.

Lastly, something that is not work related ("all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy") but which I've been hoping to do for three years now -- I want to get a paragliding licence. I went paragliding the first time in 2011 and it was really quite a highlight. It is definitely something I hope to do more often and the best way to do that is if I can get a license.

If I will have time or money to do any traveling I'm not yet sure, but I'm staying open to that possibility in August. I will definitely try and do some travelling in Korea though. There are still many places I am yet to visit.

On another note, I went to see Brad Pitt's World War Z on Friday. Quite good. Two other SF movies I watched recently are Star Trek: Into Darkness and Super-Man: Man of Steel. Of the two I highly recommend the Star Trek movie. With regards to Man of Steel, if you must see it, go watch it in 3D and only watch the first 15-30 minutes then walk out. Apart from the very well done Krypton setup towards the rest of the movie, the movie is generally very bad in my opinion.

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