In which the semester begins

Ah, the reassuring blandness of the Hackett Classics cover

Tuesday, Epiphany of Our Lord

I have only one class this semester, so I'm less frantic than usual about the start of classes.

Mildly less frantic.

Word is that the heat is still not on in the office. so I work from home. This puts me in just the right place for my free personal training session at my new gym, which is physically in my building, though I do have to exit the condo part and walk the few steps to the gym part.

My meeting is with the director of personal training—this gym has a huge staff of trainers. He asks me what my goal weight is. I'm 5’9”, 151 pounds, right at 20% body fat. My goal is actually 165 pounds, but this seems laughably ambitious, so I don't say anything. He says 180 and genuinely seems to think that's possible within a couple of years. Likely, even, if I do all the right things.

Hey, if I’m jacked when I turn 60, I won't complain.

I try to place the guy's accent. I've decided on “Slavic but not Russian, maybe Croatian.” Turns out he's Serbian. When I tell him my guess, he says, “Yeah, same people.”

I hadn't planned to do any more personal training beyond the free session. It gets so expensive. But I'm really confident in this guy and at least want a few sessions to get on top of the new three-day-split approach. Plus, this gym is going to take some getting used to. I was really comfortable at the studio where I used to train: there were never more than three trainers and three clients in there, and often it was just me and my trainer. The new gym is often pretty crowded, and it's a very buff crowd. It's going to take a few sessions for me to feel at home there.

Fortunately, the new trainer costs only about half as much as the old one.

Wednesday, the first day of classes

I receive three emails over the course of the morning from students who want to add my medieval philosophy class, which is full at 20. We are under strict orders from our formidable director of undergraduate studies not to add anyone, so I reply with the bad news. At lunch I run into a former student who has been wanting to add the class but has had no luck.

I go to the departmental seminar room in plenty of time for the 12:30 class, carrying ten copies of Anselm: Oh So Very Much Anselm to give away to any student who might want one, “while supplies last.” And there’s my student from lunchtime. A spot had opened up and she grabbed it.

I’ve taught half of the students before, so I will have no excuse if I fail to learn names very quickly.

I’m pretty restrained—by my standards—but I do call Bernard of Clairvaux a dickwad. When I post about this later on Facebook, I receive spirited agreement from my medievalist colleagues. The man’s dickwaditude is legendary.

The free books are a huge hit and disappear very quickly.

Thursday, 8 January

So.

Many.

Errands.

I’m really glad I bought a place here in DC. My first two years at Georgetown I rented, and though the places were comfortable, they inevitably felt temporary. Now I have a place that will last me until I retire, where everything in it is something I have chosen for myself because I like it, not something generic selected by a corporate designer. But of course this means I’m buying a lot of stuff, which means a lot of errand-running and box-unpacking. It also means a lot of waiting. The sofa I ordered back in August won’t arrive until next month. My repeated pestering has yet to succeed in getting the Steinway Piano Gallery in Tampa to arrange delivery on the Roland digital piano I want.

I need a piano *stat*. Those m7♭5 chords are not going to overuse themselves.

I think there’s a reasonable chance that the place will be fully furnished by the end of the academic year, though I may need to crowdsource some decisions about what to put on the walls, beginning with the space over the headboard in my one fairly complete room. I keep looking over my Favorites list on one website and falling almost immediately into choice paralysis.