Truckin' on into the mist

It's nearly the end of October. I am relegated to teaching at the college and have an impossibly large class of good young girls and a few boys mostly from the Middle Kingdom ... they are there ostensibly to prepare themselves linguistically and with academic and professional knowledge to go straight into second year of their UC degree. It is a well-nigh impossible task – there are 24 of them. For god's sake. The college is supposed to be a place where small classes of mostly linguistically challenged international students can get intensive tuition to bring them up to speed at the university proper. *Big sigh*

I haven't finished Drusilla, gnome of the desert, and Floriade is over. But she is still awaiting finishing touches, which may or may not happen one day ...

Barak fights on, McCain says truly inexplicable things, Palin amazes and horrifies the rest of the world ... the world economy is going to hell in a handbasket (as they say), and do I care? No. I selfishly care about my too-big class of children whose parents are paying through the nose for their beautiful only-children's future. I care about my colleagues who are despairing of their future at UC. I care about my poor, frail, diminishing mother. And I now firmly believe that if I develop some killing disease or condition, I will let it take me over that bourne from which no traveller returns. I fear old age, not death.