March Madness

And, no, I don't mean the College Basketball kind of "March Madness."

No, what I mean is that thing I usually experience at work during the month of March. March is perhaps my busiest time of the year. In addition to my regular courses, I have lots and lots of very important administrative tasks that I must tend to. There's the whole graduate admissions process, where I coordinate all of the applications to our graduate program, coordinate our admissions committee meeting, and then parcel out the admissions decisions to our applicants. There are our summer grant programs, whose deadlines all arrive in March. There are three such programs and I coordinate the applications for all of them, arrange the committee meetings for all of them, and inform applicants of our decisions for all of them. And March (also leading into April) are the months of Conference Attendance and paper presentations. I have one paper to present at a National Conference at the end of March, and another one in April. The April Conference is one that my office is actually hosting and for which I am serving as the Local Arrangements Chair, since it is taking place in New Orleans. And we're talking about a Conference that attracts 150 or so attendees from all across the Southeastern United States. And then there are the undergraduate and graduate thesis defenses. On top of it all, I have committed to a pretty major role in the Spring production of my daughter's ballet dance company. (Yes, yes, I do a little bit of dancing myself, but mostly stage acting, so don't get too worked up about it.) And this means that my Saturday afternoons are pretty much eaten up by rehearsals. So, I am a bit crazy and generally tired during this one month out of the year.

All this is to say why I haven't been so attentive to the blog lately. But I try. I do try.