Happy New Year!

Okay, so it's not January 1 or the New Year according to any other calendar that I'm aware of (yet...Rosh Hashanah is coming up soon), but it is back to school and even though I am not really going back to school, it still feels like the start of the year to me.

So many of our activities are marked by the school year...it doesn't help that I work for an educational institution, but yesterday, it all felt new.

It probably helped that there were all those fresh faced students with lost looks on their faces, crisp new jeans, white white runner and very tidy hair cuts (and no roots) wandering around campus all day.

We spent part of the weekend clearing the bedroom closet of unwanted/unneeded *stuff*, deep cleaning the kitchen and removing junk, dust and cobwebs from one corner of the basement.

And yesterday morning when I left the house, that crisp September air had replaced the warm August mornings I had been used to. Sure, the cooler weather had been around for a few weeks, but there was an edge to it yesterday and there was extremely thick fall dew on the patio table and the windshield of the car.

Aside from the obvious return of the students, the University seemed to wake up from its summer slumber. We're all still here during the summer, and we're all still working, but the email and phone volume increased yesterday as did the urgency of getting things scheduled and booked and having people meet with other people. And I don't even work for an academic office...

For me, even though the calendar still says 2006, a new year just started....I guess I could make some new year's resolutions...somehow the September resolutions always seemed to stick for a day or two longer than the January ones ever did. Maybe it's because the weather's nicer!