Is the School Year Almost Over?

Hello All:
Welcome back to the blog and to September. Kim and I are both "all ahead, full" while everything, and everyone, else seems to be more than keeping pace.
Kim started her classwork about ten days ago now and has had two full days of classes now, plenty of work to take up every hour of every day, AND...finally figured out her work situation. Kim's taking five classes this semester and has to take them all on Thursday because she's working full time as part of this graduate program (8-6 M, T, W, and F). Her homework load is unbelievable by any standard and she has to plan ahead as much as possible because she and I are headed to a wedding in Maine this upcoming weekend.
As for me, it's "School days, school days, dear old golden...," well, you get it. Things are "as they should be," in many ways, though I'm never able to start a school year without wondering: "Why am I doing this?", "Am I sure this is the career for me?", and "Maybe I should be doing something else?" Fortunately, I won't have much time to consider my insecurities because of the frenetic pace of the year. For those of you I haven't yet told, I'm now split between my school's "Upper" and "Middle" divisions. In other words, I'm teaching two sections of the middle school course I've taught for the previous two years, Ancient Civilizations, and two sections of an high school course that's new to me: 11th grade American History (basically, it's 1491 to as far as I can get...hopefully, the 1990's). Things are going well on both fronts, but I need to take a somewhat precautionary approach to much of the year because this "crossover" position has the unique demands of requiring me to attend two "Open House" nights, two sets of "Parent-Teacher Conferences," complete two sets of written reports on different deadlines, etc. At the same time, I still hope to put good work into an article I'd like to try and publish in January (though I've not done nearly the work I should have done to date) and I'm supposed to present at the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) annual conference in Houston this upcoming November. The scheduling, then, is fraught with angst and uncertainty, but the challenges are valuable to my growth as an educator.
Other than that, Kim and I are still following the Red Sox, who are the recent benefactors of the Yankees's surprising two victories of the Tampa Bay Rays (Sox are now 2.5 games back and maintain their 7.5 game lead over the "Spanks"), we're back to following Notre Dame football, and we're excited to see the Pats get their new season started today (though they're facing the new problem of Brady's injured knee in the first half of their game against the Chiefs--check out the pic). But we have the upcoming wedding to attend on September 13th and are excited to make one more trip to Maine before settling more fully into Brooklyn for the Fall.
Hope all is well and enjoy the pics. They include my "banners" (essentially, it's the image my students see when they first log onto my class websites) for both Ancient Civilization and American History and there's a picture of Tom Brady getting injured (ouch!). In case you're wondering, the bent knee you'll be looking at in the Brady picture is his left knee.