Passive Voice! Verbs of Being! Oh, Hai. I Can Haz Vacation?

Still grading. Still. Grading. Gah.

But in other news, things are great. The sun shines in a blue, blue sky and my pile of papers shrinks every hour.

Oh, and I got this:

I KNOW, right?? Legend offers two stories for these tables (there are 2 of them in the building). According to some, when we bought this building (a lovely late-19th-century middle school) the tables were already here. Too big to move, they stayed. Another version insists that they originated in the old campus and moved here.

Either way: I wanted one. My colleague down the hall uses his as an all-purpose seminar space. When I observed his class last year the level of discourse in a seminar on European history stunned me. Meanwhile, upstairs the other table lived in an English classroom. Creative writers worked at it, freshmen learning about punctuation sat around it, and someone used a pencil to insist that "Big Brother is Watching." Which, of course, he is.

But last month I heard that the table needed a new home. I emailed. I wrote a note for the principal's desk. I trolled the halls looking for him. I stalked that table.

And now it's mine. We had to get a (female!) welder to break down the base, then reassemble it. Honestly, the thing's like an aircraft carrier - big and heavy. Then our guys had to re-build the top. But they did it. Once the burning smell dissipated and the metal shavings disappeared into the garbage...

Magic.