Waiting....

It's my mother's 86th birthday today, so I called her, all wheezy with a nasty spring cold that crept up on me unawares. I still have one more term paper to do for a course where our instructor abandoned us two-thirds of the way through the winter-spring term. Another professor - who is quite good - has taken over and has given us until the end of May to get our final papers done. I was slammed with lots of work for my other three courses, so I'm grateful for the reprieve.Things are coming down to the wire on my job search. I'm on a short list for several positions, which has been gratifying. I'm now waiting, waiting, waiting for committees to make their deliberations while at the same time preparing my house to go on the market. There are so many Ph.Ds available. So I have to work double hard to persuade folks that a person like me with two master's degrees and a ton of newsroom experience and bylines in top publications is just as good. I was looking at the resume of a friend who's getting his doctorate this year and it was so discouraging to see how thin his newsroom experience is. But - he will probably do better than I because he has the right degree. A friend told me just today that a major university in Tennessee is laying off its adjuncts, so there's more people out of work. Here's an essay comparing the use of adjuncts to slave labor.One new thing with us is that Veeka finally learned how to ride her bike without training wheels! So she and I have been riding in the evenings, visiting the place where new homes are going up a few blocks away. I'd been trying to get her to learn how to balance herself on a bike and it wasn't happening and then oneday she just went outside and did it. Her bike is way too small for her so now I have to look into getting another one. Her school wraps up next week but even now I have serious questions as to whether anything academic is going on in her class. She doesn't have homework any longer and it sounds like little is being taught. I've already reserved her for several camps (one has to do that around here) in the summer. We've also discovered two boys about her age who live just down the street from us, so lately she's actually had playmates; something she's lacked for the past two years.