Enough Is Never Quite Enough. What's Enough?

This week has reminded me just how full my life and schedule become during the academic year. I'm taking two graduate courses at SIUE, teaching three courses at LCCC, pulling shots at 222 Artisan Bakery, tending bar at the Rotten Apple, and for some reason I decided to start tutoring at the Study Skills Desk that opened up this semester. I can see my time at the Apple coming to a rather abrupt end, especially after the night I had last Saturday. The only reason I'm still there is because it's just too hard to pass up the opportunity to make a couple hundred dollars in a night while drinking great beer for free and socializing.

Tonight was also the reinstatement of Family Fun Night. Family Fun Night is on Thursdays, and it is something Tara and I do with the kids during the school year. Basically we set aside time to do some fun activity (whether it's inside or outside the home). This makes sure we get some quality recreational time in while we are all so busy. Skylar has a lot going on during the school year too with piano, violin, Girl Scouts, etc., and Tara is always busy with the house and the kids. Tonight we just went to the Mills to do some clothes shopping. We got Skylar some things, and she rode the carousel in the food court. We also managed to pick up both kids' Halloween costumes two months early. This is incredibly uncharacteristic of us. Normally we spend the week or two before the holiday scrambling for ideas. The girls ate Hibachi-San, and I saved myself for Lion's Choice. Typically we try to spend more time emphasizing the "fun" in Family Fun Night. Tonight might seem ho-hum to an outside party, but it is mostly about spending time together--something we don't get the opportunity to do nearly as often as we would like.

I have a lot to do this evening, but I have a feeling that I will spend the rest of my short time awake watching horrible television programming such as Jersey Shore while reading my latest acquisition from the library: Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker. I was going to jump into the Mistborn trilogy, but I have little enough time for recreational reading as it is. I don't need to start a trilogy, especially when Towers of Midnight and Way of Kings are coming out so soon. I'll get to Mistborn soon enough. As for now, I will be wearing out multiple highlighters on composition and rhetoric scholarship with the occasional welcome foray into Sanderson's most recent fantasy world. If you couldn't tell, I'm kind of a fanboy.