Com-stating: an observational form of description akin to complaint, but more redolent with banal indifference; often marked by the utterance, “Oh…huh…”

I had to stay late tonight at work, putting the finishing touches on a monster final exam that I am giving tomorrow. The evening’s basketball game had already started by the time I was leaving, around six, so I bought my dinner from the concessions booth – a cheeseburger and an RC cola – two bucks.

I left home at five thirty in the morning today and got back here around seven thirty. As I walked up to the back door of our apartment I caught myself trying to fit my classroom key into the backdoor’s lock. Sometimes your work life just takes over. Last night, as I was falling asleep on the couch before six, I told Jes that as of Thursday she’d have me for thirteen days. That’s the length of my “vacation”. If we are required to give finals in all of our classes it stands to reason that we are also required to grade them. Thusly, I have a ton of grading to do over the break, but I am generally up several hours before Jes is, so I can get my work done while she is here in body only. When consciousness is un I must needs be on.

I see a fair amount of nature on my treks to and from work. Today a massive owl flew across the road in front of me during my return trip. Sometimes hawks or other birds will fly alongside the car and actually keep pace with me for longer then you would think likely. A few days ago I had a blue jay dive bomb my windshield. I actually ducked inside the car, instinctively dodging what was coming right for me. He bounced off the glass in a depressing arc and disappeared into the roadside ditch with a stunned finality. If you add him to the squirrel that I clipped last month, evidenced by the rear view mirror flip flop, it puts the probable body count for our new car at two.

I have had three deer sightings that involved a great deal of white knuckled/white tailed breaking, and tens of sightings that didn’t. I also had a very close shave with a bunch of wild turkeys. What do you call that? Gaggle? Pride? Bunch? The main group of them went right, so I veered left and missed the lone statistical outlier by inches. Odd, I just gave you directions from their perspective. From my perspectives the turkeys went left and I went right. I’m not sure I’ve ever linguistically identified with wild potential road kill like that before; it must be guilt over the blue jay.