It's Research Paper Season

Yesterday and today brought in 75 research papers that took students weeks to write and which I will now read for the next several weeks.  I actually enjoy reading most research papers, especially when it's a topic I don't know very much about.  When I used to grade 9th grade research papers, there were always entertaining bloopers, like one student who was writing about breast cancer and advised that women should give themselves monthly pap smears in the shower.  Ah, young and innocent.  Another student waxed poetic in her paper when she wrote about, "soft, genital breezes".  That was in the early days of advanced word processing, when you could go oh-so-wrong by just blindly clicking your way through spell check.  The up side of my current paper avalanche is that when I am done with these, I'm really done with all major writing assignments for the year and I know that summer is just around the corner.

Gluten free cheeseballs are the current highlight of my life.

Okay, so I'm in the second full week of going gluten-free and I have to say that it is much more difficult than I ever thought it would be.  I really don't like lettuce.  But I feel better when I eat lettuce.  Hmm.    If only I could hire a full time cook who did nothing but make taste-good, feel-good food for me all the live long day.  But I can't.  So instead I eat turkey on lettuce, with string cheese.  And then, when I get home, I eat cheeseballs that are gluten free.  And then, I don't feel good.  Even though they are gluten-free, the other crap in them causes distress to my small, and then shortly later, large intestines.  Why don't I stop eating them?  Because they taste good and I'm so tired of everything in my life, that frankly, cheese balls are the main highlight.  I really need to work on finding something else.