I feel like I won the lottery or something

So, a couple of posts ago -- in this post -- I talked about how much out of pocket expense my summer travels might cost me. And in that post I mentioned I might get the internal grants I applied for.

Well, hot damn, I did! The big award gives me a month's salary plus about $3500 in additional expenses. And another travel award gave me an additional $700. And since NCS is in the next fiscal year, I can apply for regular faculty development travel funds for that.

Woo hoo!

Now I'm definitely going to make a big donation towards the cost of taking our cast and crew to the performance in Toronto, especially since my own costs there are now pretty much covered from a variety of sources and opportunities. I feel like I should pay if forward, you know? Especially since I've been saving frantically for the combined costs of summer travel and reduced salary for a full year's sabbatical next academic year.

Speaking of the latter, the board of trustees hasn't officially signed off on it yet, but my sabbatical application was approved up through the president. I'm a little superstitious about celebrating things that aren't finalized, but fingers crossed, I won't be teaching after this semester until Fall 2011.

I feel like with all this awesomeness something really terrible is around the corner -- more terrible than the jury summons (ugh) I got this week. What, me paranoid?

UPDATE: OK, now that I've done all the math, in terms of the "expenses" part of my London trip, it's still going to cost me over $2000 out of pocket, even with that $4200 in travel and expense money. And I know not all of the Siena trip will be covered, either. Damn, this is going to be expensive! But at least there's that extra month of salary, so that will cover it.