The trouble I'm in

All righty--I see it's been nearly a month since I've posted. But you know what? I'm not going to apologize because dammit, I'm in over my head in so many ways and I have to let something drop. Here's what I've been up to:

At work:

• Overseeing a graduate fellowship program (i.e. selection committee recruitment and meeting, application sorting, notifications to recipients, Chancellor's award luncheon planning--thank god I could delegate this bit--and more)
• Overseeing the year's second round of grants for undergraduate instructional improvement (selection committee meeting--how the heck am I supposed to get 10 faculty in a room together?, and all the other stuff that attends grants)
• Co-teaching a first-year seminar called "writing on the wiki"
• Planning a teaching symposium for about 100 faculty
• Putting together (and leading) workshops on digital storytelling and teaching with Flickr
• Helping with my program's website overhaul and revision, including setting up a test WordPress site
• Learning all about program evaluation as we embark on a multi-year evaluation of three of our graduate student instructor/TA programs
• Taking on much responsibility for a grant my university received to help faculty think through the intersection of teaching and visual literacy--which means starting a workgroup of faculty and collaborating with other grant-funded institutions. Last week I flew to Durham, NC for a seven-hour meeting. Giant carbon footprint, anyone?
  
• Answering an RFP to host 5-6 faculty from Japan for three weeks late this summer
• Just starting to think about our 2008 Summer Institute for Teaching and Technology
• Performing individual faculty consultations
• On the fringes (thankfully!) for planning a major conference on computers and writing at my institution in 2009
• Creating a new certificate series on teaching undergraduates
• Heading up (in theory more than in practice at this point), a documentary studies research interest group at my university
• Writing (and illustrating) a new monthly newsletter (issue 1, issue 2) for the teaching resources program
  
• Overseeing a (thank goodness very self-directed) graduate student researcher on instructional technology, and possibly taking on supervision of a summer graduate student instructor consultant
  
• Putting together (ever so slowly) best practices mini-sites featuring some innovating uses of teaching with technology at my institution
• Trying not to get too involved in some impending program mergers that, yes, will definitely affect me (though not as much as they affect others)
  
• Some other stuff my brain is too full to remember at the moment

Extracurriculars:

• Blogging for BlogHer.com
• Trying to keep up with my instructional technology/pedagogy colleagues on Twitter
• Revising (almost done!) an article conditionally accepted over a year ago to a history journal
• Revising the dissertation into a book for an interested university press, with scattered local research trips (even though the libraries and archives I need to use keep closing for renovation--grrrrrrr)
• Writing a 7,000-word entry on "museums" for a new information sciences encyclopedia
• Collaborating with four colleagues from other institutions on a proposal for a book (a very nascent one) on Fear 2.0
• Cooking up an idea for an entrepreneurial venture; right now I'm researching my audience/niche: progressive parents of K-8 students. If I can pull off what I'm hoping to do, it would be awesome.
  

Essentials:

• Cooked, cleaned, and entertained for Fang's 46th birthday yesterday; because Fang also was involved, much hilarity ensued.
  
• Nursing very sick 2.5-year-old
• Remaining sane

Oddly, I don't feel overwhelmed (yet)--just kind of overcommitted. I think things will be better in a couple of months when the school year is over and some deadlines have passed. But until then, I may not be around here as much as I'd like.

Know, however, that I'm still reading (if not always commenting on) the blogs of many of my readers. I appreciate your thoughtfulness, humor, and wisdom. Keep up the good work.