Then I'll remember that fall break was basically three days of doing nothing, coming to the realization on Tuesday morning that I had a ton of stuff to do, and then a blur of work.
I had some vague idea of working ahead so that my future weekends wouldn't be so swamped, but that didn't happen. I did get my lesson plan templates set up for the rest of the academic year, though, which was tedious but will make my life easier going forward. And I also researched easier ways to do things I'm already doing, like making PowerPoint presentations from my Cornell notes (yes, PPT can import documents from Word, but only if they're in outline format - no problem!)
The offspring had very few desires: go to Zia, sleep as much as possible. My own list was similarly short: go to the Desert Botanical Garden, sleep, and catch up on work. Unfortunately achieving the last did, in the end, take a chunk out of the second, but we did make it to the garden.
It was already early afternoon when we arrived, and the boys were starving. We had a spectacular lunch at Gertrude's, out on the patio. I was completely charmed by the families of quail that wandered through periodically, and the one cottontail who snacked on a nearby aloe. All of them were un-photographable because of the interplay of light and shadow -- no fill-in flash I possess would've been enough to catch them. Never mind the fact that they never stood still.
So by the time we started walking the trails (my favorite trail was closed!), it was close to 3:30 and the afternoon sun was gorgeous. The cacti were glowing, and neither my little point-and-shoot (whose battery died about 30 minutes in) nor my iPhone camera could do it justice.
That was a high point, but not the only one. I made a number of nice dinners and we ate outside as often as we could, just enjoying the food, the wine, the weather, and the company, and it was lovely.
