S. Worthen | Weblog

This past weekend was Labor Day weekend in the states and Canada. (Okay, it was Labour Day weekend in Canada.) Continent-wide there were picnics and social visits. In Atlanta, Dragoncon happened. Meanwhile, airplanes danced over Toronto for the annual air show, while half the city emptied out to head north to close up their cottages at summer's end. Stressed Latin students madly reviewed their flashcards in preparation for Wednesday's and Friday's Latin exams. Give or take the scheduling of Dragoncon, these are yearly rituals for the weekend of summer's end, one last fling before school begins again.*

The UK doesn't have Labor Day, and its late summer bank holiday was last weekend. Nevertheless, even if I didn't know plenty of stressed Latin students, I could still tell that today was the day after Labor Day weekend: an above average number of semi-solicited commercial emails arrived in my inbox to advertise fall schedules of classes and autumnal bargains at me. (In Toronto, cooking school class schedules are posted. Also in Toronto, Cirque de Soleil has last-minute tickets for its show Corteo. I'd like to blame the weekend for the Amazon mailing, but I doubt there's a connection since it was from the .co.uk branch of the company.)

I yielded to commercial blandishments and indulged my compulsion for filing and computer wrist rests, in between working on my dissertation's conclusion, chatting with the last of the mold people, and boggling over having garnered over a hundred comments** on yesterday's post starting the Humiliation game.

Good luck to everyone taking the MA Latin exam tomorrow.

* Except for all of those people for whom it began a week or two ago.
** Comments, not entrants. Don't worry, the competition isn't quite that bad.