Mid-Semester Life Goes On

While in some respects this is not proving to be one of my better weeks, I suppose everything will turn out all right in the end on all fronts. At least one of the journal articles is bound to be finished and sent off, for instance. And I will probably not make a complete mess of the three pieces the gamelan is performing next week for potential donors.
I can also contemplate the positive aspects of teaching. I have begun to grade the American Art midterms and thus far (5 down, about 35 to go, so there could be a rude shock later down the line) everyone has done a very good job. The exams range from some sort of B to the definite A. They are really impressing me with the attention paid to (as requested) form, content, and context, and often reveal surprisingly good writing under pressure. I can see that I will need to get a little further into how today we use the term "beauty" differently and more loosely than it was used 200 years ago, so that the sublime could not also be beautiful even if today we would regard it thus, but I can hardly complain that students might not quite get this distinction on first acquaintance. I am very happy with what I'm reading.
Both classes, I think, are working hard and doing their best to learn the material and understand the larger concepts. So I can't complain about them at all yet, only about myself.