I don’t know if it pays much, but it certainly doesn’t take too much effort. I’m talking about being an instructor who “teaches” online courses. If the one I’m taking is any indication, all the instructor has to do is hand out the textbook he wrote 15 years ago, put everybody into work groups and tell them to get busy on the assignments. The idea, of course, is that we’re learning from each other, which is valid, and I’m still enjoying it (although group work takes on a whole new dimension when people are scattered around the country and discussions are all online). But the instructor has been a non-entity from the get-go. Must be a nice life.

So things are humming along. Justin came down with a cold this week and the school actually sent him home sick just after lunch on Monday — although by the time he got home he was laughing and running around, so it seemed like a bit of a scam. Brayden has been coughing again and is back on his inhalers, but I think overall everybody’s OK now. Thanks to a couple of PD days and the Thanksgiving holiday, the next three weeks are four-day school weeks for Justin…sigh.

My parents were here for a quick visit this past week — now that Mom’s retired, they have all the time in the world, so they took advantage of the beautiful weather and decided to do one last big road trip before packing the RV away for the winter. Call me selfish, but it was nice to have them here while the kids were in school. We got more kid-free visiting time than ever before, so that was a bonus. And they got a taste of the schedule they’ll be dealing with when they babysit for us while we’re on our cruise next June.

Speaking of the cruise…we just arranged our flights, so things are really getting exciting. We paid an extra premium to get a really good flight schedule — some (like my dad) would say we’re crazy, that we should just take the cheapest option, but we wanted to make sure we wouldn’t have to overnight anywhere en route. We’re already going to be gone 18 days. I’m sure Dad will see the wisdom of it by about his tenth day of babysitting.

Time to start thinking about turkeys, pumpkins and costumes, I guess…