How to survive an entire weekend of grading...

Step one: get two cats, preferably ones just like Bing and Wes. (Good luck with that.) Step two: laugh at the crazy things they do. Result: You will remember to take a break once in a while and thus stop yourself from throwing stacks of mediocre essays into the trash.

Here's an example: It's Saturday evening and I've been grading all day long. Seriously--even as I watch the Yankee game, I am grading. I notice that I haven't seen Bing or Wes in a while. This puts me on alert, because usually at least one of them is in my line of vision. Maybe they are sleeping upstairs or maybe the wind has blown a door shut upstairs, and one or both of them is stuck in a room. (Another likely scenario: one is indeed stuck in a room, and the other is on the other side of the door, providing a mixture of sympathetic identification and "Ha ha! You're trapped" torment for his brother.) Anyway, I grade another paper figuring they will show up eventually. But still no sign of them. So I start looking.

I don't have to look very far, though. There they both are, squeezed on top of the refrigerator, as if it were the most comfy seat in the house. It just cracked me up because they were both there. I've got some things up there, so trust me: there isn't that much room. Their body language told me that Bing got up there first. He likes it up there (I think) because he enjoys looking down on us little people. Then Wesley, who is such a follower, jumped up there, too. I am betting that Bing wasn't too happy about that and was probably considering jumping down, if only that didn't mean letting Wes have the space all to himself.

Anyway, here's the photographic evidence.



Can you see how crowded they are--how they are right up on the edge? Too funny. Anyway, finding them and having a good laugh was a welcome break. Then it was back to grading...