It is now that time of year with me that makes me very anxious: the week before I leave for GHP.

My anxiety is based largely on the idea that time is running out, that I have a limited number of days to “get things done.” A corollary anxiety is the idea that I have to make sure that I know what those “things” are that need to “get done.” A third anxiety is the fear that I will identify a “thing” that I cannot get done before I leave, like a doctor’s appointment or something like that.

I have to think about tidying up my presence here in Newnan, picking up stuff around the house and putting it away. Getting my study in some kind of order. Deciding what stuff I take with me: music? drawing? painting? What do I leave behind?

What needs fixing around here that I need to get to? (For example, yesterday I found our yard guy kneeling over the lawnmower, trying to put a wheel back on. How does he do these things?? I just told him to leave it. So now fixing that is a thing that needs to get done.)

What kind of social items do I need to take care of? I need to go see Lucky Stiff at the theatre this afternoon, plus make a cheesecake to take to the faculty “meeting” tomorrow. How many family meals do I need to plan to cook, which something I love doing and will miss all summer? Is there an evening for the Lichtenbergians to gather one more time? There’s a Shubian shoot on Thursday night.

Haircut? Check. Prescriptions? Semi-check. Laundry? Anything I wear all week has to be laundered before I leave. I have been known to drive into Valdosta with dirty clothes. Things I can wash: have I made time to wash them?

Is there time to go see the Monet waterlilies exhibit at the High on Sunday and still get everything packed? How will the arrival of the child’s girlfriend and her roommate on Saturday impact all of the above?

I have a database that tells me what to pack, so I don’t worry about forgetting something essential. Every year I try to take less. But you can whittle the essentials only so far and you still have a van full of plastic storage tubs. Then you start adding stuff that’s not on the database list, like the books I want to read, or the poetry books for the 24 hour challenge.

I’ve decided not to take my paints, but I will take my sketchbook and pencils. Do I take my drawing books? That’s another small load right there.

Things are a little extra complicated this year. For the first time, I have the labyrinth. I have to make sure that it’s taken care of for the summer. (I’m paying the child to maintain it.)

GHP itself has complicated the run-up period, in that I have to redesign a small sheaf of documents before I get there next week, so that time has to be figured in.

And you can tell how rattled I am by all of this just by looking at how disjointed this post is. I don’t know that writing it all down has assuaged any of my anxiety at all. I need to go make a cheesecake.

I traveled down to Valdosta for our annual administrative meeting, and this post is more for those with an interest in GHP business than for the general readership.

Look at all the pretty construction! I’ll chat about these in the order in which I took them.

This is looking along the new ginormous Hopper Hall, down what used to be Hopper Circle towards what used to be the University Union. That is the new Union rising upon the ashes of the old one.

This is the new Georgia Hall, rising from the ashes of the old one. You can see Langdale to the left. Georgia has gone from three floors to five, extended itself over onto the old infirmary, and sprouted a wing out into what used to be Langdale Circle.

Here’s another shot of Georgia, from Georgia Avenue.

This is the new Student Health Center, across Georgia Avenue from Georgia Hall. Apparently it’s stunning. It’s certainly larger. It can do its own x-rays now, which will save many a daytrip to the ER. (In an added note, Parking is now way over in a new office in the Sustella Parking Deck.) The old infirmary was called the Farber Health Center; I don’t know why the new one didn’t carry the name over. Perhaps the Farbers didn’t donate enough to retain the honor?

Here’s another shot of the Union, taken at the end of the pedestrian mall in front of the library. Yes, it will have a big ol’ atrium.

Trudging over the pedestrian bridge, here’s a shot of the new Oak Street Parking Deck. Very nice, and even nicer are the Auxiliary offices on the Education Building end of the thing. They are spacious and beautifully appointed. The team is very proud of their new large multipurpose room, which is a Starfleet Command meeting room, along with an enormous catering kitchen attached. Very very nice. The additional parking is handy as well. The University Police occupy new digs on the other side, but I didn’t see them.

Looking back towards campus, here’s the Union again. It’s huge. It sits where the old Union, pool, and Old Gym used to be.

Finally, here’s a shot at the end of Baytree. You can see the old smokestack doing its phallic thing on the right. Last year, you would have been looking at the back end of the Old Gym. The new Union will have meeting rooms, a food court, offices, and way up there at the top of this wing (the other wing runs along Hopper Used-To-Be-Circle) my ballroom.

In addition to this new construction, Nevins will be undergoing renovation by the time we get there, as will Ashley Hall. (IT has moved into University Police’s old quarters in Pine Hall.) Traffic up and down the campus will essentially be between construction sites.

All of this will be over and done with by next summer, and then we will be safe from construction/renovation for some time to come. It’s part of the strategic plan, and the construction part of all of that has played itself out. No new Fine Arts Building in our future, I’m afraid.

On the way home, I avoided I-75 and took US 41 up to Tifton. There’s this building in Sparks, right north of Adel, that has astounded me for years, and I finally took a picture of it:

This is driving north, just as you get to it.

And here’s rounding the curve, right in front of it.

What the hell is it? It’s enormous, and it’s been abandoned for as many years as I’ve been driving through there. It’s obviously a patchwork kind of place, and it gives off vibes of both commercial and residential. If this were in Houston or Peach County, I’d say it was a former peach farm kind of thing, where migrant workers bunked in the background and peaches were sold to tourists up front. And that would make sense before I-75 came through: US 41 was the old 75. But I’m not aware of Cook County being a big peach area.

I’m going to have to stop and ask this June.

The end of GHP is always heartbreaking. Even though I’ve done it for 24 years, it’s still the first time for each year’s group of students and the loss is devastating to them. It gets to me every year.

Things that make me sad:

• just watching the kids the last few days, in the dining hall, across the campus, in their classes
• the last afternoon, with all the kids going back to the dorms to pack
• the final performances, especially Friday night’s Prism concert
• Saturday morning’s Convocation, with students breaking down all around me because the loss is too much to bear
• the absolute emptiness of campus after they’re gone
• saying goodbye to my staff, knowing that I may never see some of my best friends again because they may not be returning next summer
• packing up all the faculty dorm stuff, and packing up my stuff to go home
• in doing that, unclipping all the minors registration forms that I save from the first week; I’m putting them into a box to take them to school to print on the backs of, all year, and they represent students who are still fresh in my memory
• remembering the intensity of the entire experience, and despairing that “real life” is not like that

Here I am in Valdosta, prepping for the 2008 Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. It is always a very strange mise en scene: I arrive, alone in the dorm, with three other administrators, who are in other dorms. The campus is nearly empty between semesters; the very sidewalks have an unreal quality, as if carved out of someone’s imagination for the occasion and witnessed by me in some kind of hallucination.

It is my job to begin the incantations to bring this place to life, to begin generating the lists and pieces of paper and keys and classrooms and bedtime stories that make it possible for this place to rise from the haze of the Valdosta heat every June.

I have a script I follow: over the years I have put together a step-by-step How to Start GHP kind of document. I have come to rely on it and am consequently startled by some of the steps. Because I’ve written them into a document, a booke of magyck, I don’t have to remember them, and sometimes I don’t.

My competence is comforting to me. A couple of years ago I found myself in charge of the keys to the classrooms. They were just handed to me, in a tangled mess from previous years, and I had to hammer out the truth of who needed what and what we had to give them and what we had to squeeze from Key Services. In accordance with the Lyles Theorem of Process Development, it is the third summer of my being in charge and I have perfected it. Tonight I hit a button in my database, printed out a sheet of paper for each instructor, and pulled keys from this super-organized key box I made them buy me last summer.

What took me weeks of agony the first summer was done, and accurately, in about 40 minutes. I have two people who need completely new sets of keys, but I know who they are and what they need. By the time they get here tomorrow, their keys will already have been requested.

There are always glitches, of course. This year it’s the fact that VSU’s semester just ended on Friday, so they’re scrambling nobly to switch our classrooms out from their rows of desks to our tables and chairs, and to deliver the hundreds of boxes of stuff to all the rooms. My problem is that the sixteen or so crates of stuff for the faculty dorm have not been delivered. I usually am through unpacking all of that by now. However, that’s kind of minor. I can work around not having my office supplies for the most part, although I wish I had my bathmat and my martini glasses. Let’s get our priorities straight here!

I’ve even had time to exercise, if you can call a brisk stroll around the Magic Square exercise. No time to work on anybody’s music, of course. That probably is not going to happen until next week, after I get the minors sorted out on Thursday.

Tomorrow the faculty arrives. Sunday the kids arrive. And so it begins again.

The only work I’ve done on the symphony is to listen to it on the way to Valdosta and back. More about that in a minute.

Imagine, because although I took several photos I have no way of getting them off my phone: if your phone can email, send me your phone number, please!, a large, glamorous resort hotel. Tall, white, red-tile roofing, sweeping majestically around a huge courtyard filled with trees and fountains, open at one corner, which is flanked by two imposing towers. It’s a lovely, elegant place.

Now imagine poor, poky Hopper Hall.

Where the courtyard is, is where Hopper Hall used to be.

Welcome to the new Hopper Hall. When I got to Valdosta, I drove by the campus first just to see what was in progress this year. Oak Street parking lot is now half under construction, meeting its destiny as a parking deck. But the shocker was Hopper.

It’s huge. It takes up the entire Hopper Circle footprint, all the way to the sidewalk, all the way to the Palms’ north wing. It fills the air like Hagrid is described as doing.

It is, as I’ve said, quite lovely, and it’s enormous. I’m sure we’ll get used to it, but it made me very sad.

I know most people will say good riddance to nasty old Hopper, but there is something about losing that small space, with its lawns and trees, and especially the large lobby where we all used to gather. You would think that the new bodacious building would have a magnificent lobby, but you would be wrong. All commons areas are small and on the floors.

Even though I only spent eight of my nineteen summers in Hopper, it still looms large in my memories. I guess that’s because it was the longest single stretch of summers, and the most recent. It might also be because I’ve formed some of my most enduring friendships in it, had some of the most entertaining times, photocopied some of the most interesting tattoos. I’ve celebrated people’s triumphs there and comforted them through some of their worst times. Nasty though it was, it was a kind of home.

It’s gone now, though.

In other news, we are also losing Georgia hall this summer: they’re replacing it with a six-story version, and with it we’ll lose the actual Langdale Circle. There will be effectively no vehicle access to the campus. So, you might ask, how the hell are we going to manage load-in? VSU is eagerly awaiting our solution, because they have no idea how they’re going to manage it either.

The kids, by the way, are going to be in Langdale and Patterson, the dorm next to Brown facing Patterson Street. I knew you were wondering.

In other, other news, the Old Gym will be closed down three weeks into the program, and work will begin on the massive new University Union. No, I don’t know where theatre is going to go.

So, lots to see and do in Valdosta this trip.

On the way home, there were several moments when I wished I had my camera with me. One was an interesting column, of all things, on an old corner bank building. On the corner entrance, there was a single columned portico, and the column was an oddly rusticated design: about a dozen roughly shaped blocks of marble or granite, simply stacked up. It was actually striking, and I couldn’t figure out the artistic impulse that would have placed it on this building in the middle of nowhere. (Probably the same impulse that has the aggressively nouveau/deco building plopped down in Adel.)

Another moment that I really wished I had a camera came in Lenox, Georgia. (I was traveling up Hwy 41 to avoid the traffic on I-75, as is my wont.) Imagine a small sandwich shoppe (and I do mean shoppe) across from the Coastal Plains RESA. It has rainbow umbrellas on its sidewalk tables, and the words on the building describing the fare are in colorful letters. Hmm, one is thinking to oneself, and then one sees the name of the shoppe: Sub Conscious.

Mercy.

This post is long enough. I’ll talk about the symphony some other time.