Up for air

Summer, and the wonderful indolence that goes with it, is emphatically over. Both Meltem and I are exceedingly busy now. I myself have extra responsibilities this year, because I'm now "academic coordinator" for our Humanities course (whose skeletal but well-intentioned web page you can see here). So over the past two weeks I have been dealing not only with beginning teaching, but also with registration and the insanity that goes with it. Prime example: The Registrar somehow neglected to put the requested 25-student-per-section quota on the class sections, with the result that – since word of our coolness got out and 350 students showed up – one section alone had 100 students! I had to herd students from overcrowded sections into undercrowded ones, often in the teeth of conflicts and complaints. Thank heaven that's over now, and things should settle into the normal semesterly grind. I'm also teaching at TIPPS, of course, as many as 30 hours a week (which reminds me, today's SAT day). So my aforementioned summer indolence is but a fading memory, and I have to cram as much personal stuff into my one day off per week as I can.

Another aspect of our overly full lives right now is our ongoing apartment hunt. After getting burned twice (once with a place that turned out to have been built illegally, once with a place whose seller chickened out at the last minute), we've decided that it's a pipe dream to think we're going to get a place in our current neighborhood, and we're going to suck it up and accept commuting as an ugly necessity of life in the big city. Last week we looked at a few places in a developing neighborhood called Göktürk, about a 25-minute drive from here. Next week we'll look (again) in the neighborhood on the Asian side where Meltem's brother lives. Our right to stay in faculty housing doesn't run out until February, and Meltem has filed a request for an extension, so it's not like we have to grab a place right now, but it sure would be nice to have this end on a successful note.

Anyway, that's how things are here. Now, since you're more interested in the doings of His Majesty than in those of his parents, I have finally put up new pictures of Ozan on the Picasa page, mostly from our recent trip to Polonezköy where we took him to an open-air zoo. Enjoy!