Recover and Recharge

The weekend always strikes me as a time of recovery. This may be reflective of my day job, but this week there seems to be a lot to recover from.

Valentine's Day being yesterday means today my students will be crashing from their sugar high, and I'll still be finding candy wrappers in the strangest nooks and crannies of my classroom.

Yesterday was also our inaugural PAPfest. We're recovering from running it. Some of our participants are recovering from the excitement. Others are recovering from the disappointment. (For the latter, be sure to check my post from Wednesday if you haven't already.)

Today is mid-term, so I have a ton of grading to do. I don't get to recover from that until it's done. My back hurts just thinking about it. (I'm more likely to actually get grading done at school than at home, but if at school, it means being hunched over a desk while doing it. Definite dilemma there.)

One the plus side, it's a three-day weekend. On the minus side, parent-teacher conference is coming up on Thursday. I actually like the chatting-with-the-parents part. The be-at-school-until-8pm part isn't my favorite.

So the plan for the weekend is to do more than recover. It's to recharge. And I think I'll best accomplish that by engaging the writer-side a little more. Do a little reading for once. Do some work on either a revision or a rewrite of one project or another. Things that are a little less frustrating than grading quizzes where some kids did great, and others ... still didn't.

If you're looking for something happy to get your recovery going this weekend, keep an eye on Young Adult Books Central today. They'll be revealing the cover for Mindy McGinnis's debut Not a Drop to Drink, which is less than seven months away from publication.

And that right there makes up for the empty cotton candy bag shoved between books on my shelf.