The essence of "Do Not Want."

(I almost titled this "Moar Catz" just to warn the non-cat-people, but what the heck - I think the other one is funnier).

There is a Flickr group called World's Heaviest Harness that is nothing but pictures of cats doing the non-violent resistance thing when their owners put harnesses on them.

The funniest one was posted on Cute Overload (I can't link to a specific post there; they seem to have disabled permalinks). It's this one.

I think we've all had days when we felt like that.

Awwwwwww!

Normally, I claim to be very very cynical about things like Valentine's Day.

Part of it is actually because deep down, I'm a real romantic, and I'm kind of repulsed at the apparent quid-pro-quo some of the ads present (like Pajamagram, which stops JUST SHORT of saying, "hey, you bought her something. And it's pajamas. You're gonna get a little of the ol' wink-wink, nudge-nudge, knowwhatImean?"). Or I'm disgusted by the sheer "buy buy buy" attitude. (And again I ask: most couples pool their incomes, no? So if you buy your significant other a $10,000 Valentine's gift, you're both taking the financial hit, if it's not something easily affordable, no? I mean, if I were part of a couple? I'd be happy with a silly card and ecstatic if I got lunch at the good Italian restaurant in town - which would set the chap back less than $30, total)

And I'm also a little bereft at how hard relationships seem to be - or at least how good the people around me seem to be at screwing them up.

But still - for Nightfly and his Ladybug (or Ladybug and her Nightfly), Ken and Sainted Bride, and all the others who are happily coupled, this LOLcat's for you:


moar funny pictures

Awwwwwwww!

You guys!

First off, I have to admit I'm a bit freaked out at how easily my email address (which I don't have up here, for some particular reasons) seems to zip around cyberspace when it wants to.

But that's fine.

Thank you all so much for the cards and notes of support (and Far Side cartoons.)

This week is going better.

Part of it is that in the academic world - or at least my corner of it - the first week of the month is often just nucking futs, and you just kind of have to grab on and ride it out.

And part of it is just that I got a bunch of crap dumped on me at a time when I was kind of at a low point to begin with, and so I was less cheerful about dealing.

But. The church window is now fixed, my department chair said that being temporarily denied graduate faculty status would NOT hurt me because it was a silly rule and she'd get me reinstated this fall, a colleague made me a semi-permanent loan of equipment to replace the missing equipment (semi-permanent until the missing stuff gets reordered).

The difficult people I have to deal with are still difficult, but, meh, whatever. The world is full of a-holes.

And it's Friday. Even though I have an on-campus commitment tomorrow morning, it's still Friday.

If it wasn't broken...

...when did I get the idea it needed fixing?

For years and years - gosh, since I was in fifth grade, I think - I had a particular way of doing the background research for a paper. I'd get my sources (whether they were check-out-able books at the library, or books my family owned* or books that didn't check out and had to be read in the library), grab a big packet of lined 3 x 5 cards, a pen or pencil, and start reading.

(*Yes, I am in that group-of-privilege, from that crazy survey making the rounds, of people who grew up with more than 500 books in the house. Which I think in the wealthy circles of the town I grew up in made my family seem not so much privileged as it made them seem batsh*t crazy. I learned early on that "being rich" and "caring about learning" are not necessarily an overlapping set)

The first card I'd make for a source was my "bibliographic" card, where I copied down all the information about the author, title, year of publication...yadda yadda fishcakes. The stuff that I would need to make my Bibliography or Literature Cited at the end.

Then I'd start reading. Any time I encountered a fact that I thought might be needed for my paper, I'd write it on a separate 3 x 5 card, with the author's name and year of publication at the top. (YES, even when I was a kid. I think my dad taught me this. My dad did a lot of research and wrote lots of journal articles). And I took the stuff down "in my own words" so I could be protected against even unintentional plagiarism.

And I'd just keep working, happily away, until I had digested all my sources.

Then I made an outline.

Then I took all my cards and I wrote the outline codes (like I. A. 2. ii.) on the card corresponding to where it would fit in the outline.

Then I lined up all the cards in outline order, and started writing.

This is how I wrote all the papers from, as I said, about 5th grade on. (I remember getting really high marks and really nice comments from teachers in the sixth grade on a long paper I wrote on cougars, partly, I think, because I made a real effort to find good background - read a whole book, a long one, on them, in addition to consulting the Usual Sources like National Geographic World and Ranger Rick and the various encylopediae.)

It is how I wrote both my thesis and my dissertation.

But recently, for some reason, I stopped. Laziness, maybe - it's easier, if you have a printout of a .pdf file of an article, or a journal that belongs to you and you alone, to just underline or make a note in the margin.

Or maybe it was lack-of-time.

Or maybe it was the effort of deciding whether to move or chunk the boxes and boxes of labeled and filed cards I had made over the years. (Just the ones from grad school. I'm not QUITE obsessive enough to have saved the cards from my cougar paper. Or the one I wrote on Shakespeare's England in high school. Or the one on William Purcell, also from high school).

But at any rate. I was working today on a new paper and I got to thinking. The last paper I had easily accepted for publication was, in fact, the last one I used the card system on. Since then, I've kind of foundered - haven't written as well, have banged my head against a figurative brick wall while revising, just haven't been as happy with what I'm writing.

So I pulled out a packet of cards, and a couple journal articles on my most recent research topic, and started making cards.

And you know what? It felt like coming HOME. It felt right. It felt like all those years of good-paper-juju are coming back to me. And even if that's all 100% psychological placebo effect, it will still make me write better. (And I don't think it is; I think the cards force more reflection and more organization, both of which are better). So I have two other papers I want to overhaul; I'm seriously considering doing the card-thing for them.

I wish I had figured this out earlier.

Sneezy

Today is going to be better. It just is. I have declared it to be so and with all the powers of denial and imagination I have in me, it will be better, even if it actually isn't.

Unfortunately my allergies have flared up. (Which is probably part of yesterday's distress as well - right before an allergy attack, I get kind of dysphoric and easily-overwhelmed and tired). I'm sneezing this morning and had a sore throat when I got up. (This is about the time of year when trees start flowering here, and even though it's kind of cold out, I suppose they could have. Also, we are having a lot of renovation done down at church and there are paint fumes EVERYWHERE - not bad enough to actually make a person sick, but I'm kind of sensitive to all those things and so it sets off my sinuses).

I will say youth group went fairly well last night. We had to have game time indoors (it was cold and it gets dark early enough that there really isn't a chance to play outdoors). One of the kids suggested charades (Charades!) and they all went for it, to my amazement (this is a fairly diverse-interest group so it surprises me to find a game they all like). The only disappointment was that some kids had a hard time coming up with things, and since the game was kind of on short notice, we didn't have a list to choose from. So I told them that for next week, I'll make up a bunch of slips of paper with things on it they can do, and they can draw one out of a coffee can or something if they can't come up with a thing to do.

(One of the kids last night did "roadkill" as his thing).

I'm still thinking about those "embroidered childhood heroes" things that I linked to the other day. I love that idea so so much. I got to thinking and came up with the idea of selecting a bunch of my favorite authors, doing embroidered portraits of them, and turning it into a quilt. That idea pleases me - sleeping under a quilt representing one's favorite authors. I'd have to have on there Madeline L'Engle, and Anthony Trollope, and M. F. K. Fisher, and C. S. Lewis, and Margery Sharp (who wrote some wonderful grown-up books, which she should probably be better known here for, as well as the Rescuers series), and maybe Kathleen Norris, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Agatha Christie....
Of course, it is one of those things that would be a lifetime project for me - I have so little time to work on anything like that, ever, and it takes me a long time to do embroidery, so I don't know if I'd actually do it, but the idea pleases me. And yes, it would specifically have to be embroidery, and my own sketched portraits of the author plus things indicative of him or her...like for Margery Sharp I'd have to put a white mouse in there (Miss Bianca) and for Lewis certainly his pipe and either a cup of good strong tea (how does one depict STRONG tea, I wonder, using embroidery) or a pint of ale, and for Fisher there would have to be vegetables and prawns and things like that. Cooking things.

Also, I can't draw very well, especially drawing recognizable likenesses of people, so that would be a stumbling block. (Though then again, I could enlarge-photocopy dustjacket pictures and trace them, I suppose).

But still, it's an idea that pleases me, and sometimes having an idea like that, even if I don't put it into practice, is good enough.

thanks guys

Thanks for the ecards and the messages and stuff. I'm doing some better.

Somedays you just have crap days, you know? I suppose it's so you appreciate the days when stuff doesn't go wrong.

One other thing you probably need to know about me is that kind of minorly freaking out in the blog is one way I deal with stuff. I react strongly and I react fast but I tend to get over stuff pretty fast. I'm actually fairly resilient.

Of course, the fact that some buttmunch swiped some of the Vital Lab Equipment I needed for today didn't help, but even that I managed to recover from. (But if I find out who said buttmunch is...they better watch out).

Now just have to write a quiz, eat my lunch, and teach an afternoon lab. Oh, and do youth group. (I hope the kids got to have recess today and ran off all their energy...)

well

I've done what I can.

If it's not good enough, screw 'em. Two of my colleagues agree it's sort of unreasonable, so at least I feel better about that.

I just get tired of all the HOOPS, ya'know? The fact that everything has to be so minutely documented. I had to re-submit a travel reimbursement claim 3 times this summer because they kept asking for more stuff - even though my name was on a list of "section moderators" they still needed a receipt for my registration, stuff like that.

It irritates me because it makes me feel like they don't trust me. And I know, they do that because there are people who can't be trusted. But it drives me up the wall that the lawabiding, rule-following people always wind up getting slapped with more hoops to jump through because of the few bad apples.

Frankly I work my ass off. Some days I meet myself coming and going. I take on extra responsibilities willingly, because I understand that sometimes stuff needs to be done, and it's stuff that's not fun to do and you don't get paid for it. But I don't appreciate people turning around and going, "Sorry, you didn't fill out form Double Secret Q-46, you need to go back and start all over."

oh cripes

I don't know what it is - probably just some dumb hormone related thing, or allergies, or some stupid thing messing with my head - but I'm having a really hard time this morning. I've actually shed a few tears and it's not 8 am yet, so that's not a good sign.

I got up, did my usual workout, washed up, and as I was digging through my dresser drawers, I idly thought, "So is this what I'm going to be doing for the next 30-odd years? Hauling my ass out of bed far earlier than I want to, doing what amounts to a forced-march for an hour to try to stave off weight gain and other health problems, and then have to spend time searching for socks that match?"

Brain, don't go there.

Because although I can take the thing one day at a time, thinking about the sheer weight - the day-in, day-out - of getting out of bed early, trying to find something I want to wear, preparing my sad little lunch, going through the day (and yesterday wasn't a good day), coming home, thinking, "yay, I have an hour and a half to do what I want," doing it for 30 minutes, realizing I'm too tired to keep going, and going to bed - just exhausts me.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know there are lots of people who have it worse. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I should be happy.

But there's one thing - well, more than one thing, really - eating at the edges of my consciousness. In another year or so I'm up for Full Professor. And I'm beginning to worry I've not done "enough." Because on my campus, "enough" can be a moving target. And we have a new president who'd bringing in new administrators, and I'm frankly scared they're going to change EVERYTHING and suddenly what looked like "enough" before is now "you've got to be kidding"

And it's not helped by the fact that, on my campus, you don't get to stay permanently on "graduate faculty" - you have to "prove" yourself every three years. And they changed the burden-of-proof, and made it a lot tougher. And I didn't do one of the five or six things on the list - at least not in the form that it's expected - in the past year. So I'm DENIED. Graduate faculty - NOT YOURS.

And I've done what I can to try to repair it, to try to ask to stay on, but they don't seem to want to hear it. (And the killer? I got the message after 3 pm yesterday. I teach pretty much from 8 'till 3 today, and then have afternoon responsibilities at church. And they want the information before tomorrow. This is very very very very typical of people from other departments - they assume we're all sitting on our butts just WAITING to jump up and provide them with documentation, so it's perfectly OK for them to ask the day before they need it).

I forwarded the e-mail to my department chair and kind of threw up my hands and said, "I can't deal with this right now; if it's essential to me making full professor someday, I will try to deal with it, but I don't think they've given me enough time"

And I know. I shouldn't be so tied to the desire to make Full Professor. But you know? I've not done much with my life. I've not married, not had a kid, not traveled much, not been in plays, not made a record, not published anything that people outside of a tiny narrow field would ever read. Everything I do is pretty intangible, and so it's kind of nice to have some sort of outside validation that I actually did something with my time here.

Some days I have to admit I feel like if I fell off the edge of the earth people would only notice because they'd start complaining: "What's up with ricki? Why hasn't she done those things she usually does for us? She OWES us! She's SUPPOSED to do those things!"

And yeah, I also know that's not true. But it kind of FEELS like it's true right now. I feel like someone's got a hold of each limb of my body, and they're all pulling, trying to get a piece of me. And there's no "me" left for me - I went to bed at 8:30 last night because I was so exhausted. And when you get home at 5, and have to fix dinner, and have to do the dishes, and have to go to the grocery...going to bed at 8:30 doesn't leave a person with a lot of mental recuperation time, and that's something I need.

Smiling

I saw this this morning (linked on another craft-blog I read) and it made me smile.

It's a woman who has done embroidery "portraits" of people she thought of as "heroes" when she was a child: Jacques Cousteau, Crystal Gayle (The hair! I love how she did the long hair!), Shel Silverstein, and Bob Ross.

That kind of thing just makes me laugh with delight - don't misunderstand, I'm not laughing AT the person for doing it. Not at all. I'm laughing because it's so wonderful, it makes me so HAPPY.

And it makes me think: who were my childhood heroes, that I would try to capture in embroidery? Mr. Rogers would have to be one; I'm inclined to think that Margery Sharp (although I've never even seen a picture of her) would be another. And Jim Henson. And maybe Marie Osmond (don't laugh, lots of kids looked up to her I bet)

(Margery Sharp is the person who wrote the "Rescuers" series of books, upon which Disney loosely based the 70s cartoon movie. The books are a lot better, though - they're almost little comedies-of-manners in some places and are very intelligently written.)

Yup

They were open. Third person in my district to vote.

And since the Nice Ladies at the Polling Place asked me to tell five people to vote, I'm going to say: if you're reading this, if you're in a state that's doing Super Tuesday, go and vote. Even if you don't particularly like the candidates. Even if you don't vote for the presidential candidate and just for any local seats (we had a person running for School Board).

I'm saying it here because I don't like to even breathe a word about politics at work, lest I become the audience for someone's ranting.

You would think...

The time the polls open on "Super Tuesday" in one's state would be a news story, no?

I cannot find it ANYWHERE. It was not in the 6-page-long local rag of a newspaper (2 pages devoted to local school sports, two pages devoted to classified ads). They have not mentioned it on Stupid Local Morning News. I tried going online and searching "poll opening times [MyState] [MyCounty]" Nothing. (I presume the county leadership, as is typical, think the Internet is Evil because it's New, and so, won't use it. But still I hoped).

And YES, I am 100% sure my state goes to the polls today. We are on the list.

I'm gonna ASSUME it's 7 am (it always has been before) and go down there then, but it irks me that this information seems to be hidden from us.

And a question: does ANYONE enjoy getting those taped phone calls from a candidate (or candidate's "good friend" or spouse) asking you to vote for them? I am SO Freaking Glad that is done with (for a while at least).

It offends me that I jump up from what I am doing in the evening (working, reading, trying to relax) to answer the phone (I have relatives who are unwell, I have a friend who doesn't drive and whom I have told can use me as an emergency driver if she needs me, so not answering the phone is not an option) to have it be "Hi! It's Mike Huckabee! Would you please vote for me tomorrow?" Not a chance in Hell, Mike-o.

(My vote, in part, is influenced by the fact that there is one candidate in particular - I'm registered R - that DIDN'T plague me with phone calls. I don't think he's the one who's going to win, and it's a holding-my-nose-and-voting thing anyway, and I don't think it's going to matter, but whatever.)

done in two ways.

Good done:

I am done for the day. After this I can power down, go home, put my feet up, and decompress.

Not so good done:

In lab this afternoon - which I set up as a self-paced lab because it does take a bit longer than the prescribed lab time, most of the students are free before the start of lab, and frankly, I'd rather be done before 5 pm as well, so I just told them in lecture, "Here's what you do. I'll be in my office writing an exam if you want some help."

Anyway - most of the students did the lab successfully on their own. A few came with minor questions which were easily taken care of.

One of the chaps, though - someone not known for his attention span or general interest in classes - came in late to lab. I asked him (I was in the room anyway, setting up for Wednesday's lab) if he wanted help. He said no, and then proceeded to wander aimlessly about for 20 minutes.

(this is one of my pet peeves. I realize it is petty and it is very much "my stuff" but it irks me when someone has something to do - especially when other people's time is impinged upon by their not doing the thing promptly - and they lollygag and procrastinate and generally fart around. Though fortunately, I later found out his lab partner - more diligent than he - had come in on his own and done the lab, so he might as well copy the data from him. So what if he doesn't know the procedure for the exam; he was warned.).

Well, next I looked over and I saw the guy copying the introduction and materials and methods - basically the first part of the lab write up - off of another guy. (They do lab books in this class; I have them do it like the standard chem lab book where you write out in your own words what you're doing, collect your data, and then write up the interpretation of the results at a later time)

I didn't say anything. I could have, but I didn't.

Because, you know? I am so done with that attitude. Done, done, done. Done with the "I don't want to work so I'll get someone else to do it" which is almost invariably followed by pouting or confrontation when I call them on it. Done with the "college isn't important, this class isn't important, I'll phone it in and then get a good job in the Real World when I graduate"

I am so done that I'm not going to fight it any more. I'm going to let the people make their own ropes to hang themselves with. (I did note down who it was who was copying; I'll check his book extra carefully when it comes in).

I have decided - I have limited energy. I am going to save it for the people who give a crap. The people who, like my genetics specialist who is taking a conservation class from me, who comes in and asks me questions about conservation genetics and things like genetic drift and I can see he's making the effort to form links between what he's doing in his lab and what he's doing in my class. Those people I have time for (even when I don't really, literally, have time, even when it means I need to take more work home with me because I took 45 minutes to talk with them), because they care. Because they actually want to do something with their lives.

I am not going to beat my head on the brick wall of people who don't give a crap and who wonder why I bother to give a crap (because that's the attitude I get from people: "Geez, it's only a single paper, why do you care so much that I plagiarized it?") Oh, I'll still give them 0s for plagiarizing. But I won't expend any of my limited energy on them.

I hate doing "triage" like that - letting the ones who MIGHT be savable if I expended a lot of effort and maybe somehow broke through the shell to show them that what they're learning really IS important, but it seems my success rate in that instance is SO low, that I'm better off devoting myself to the people who have already decided that what they're learning is important. Or the ones who may be on the fence, that I can pull over to the Light Side of the Force (or how I visualize it) with a little effort on my part. But the ones who have decided not to care - I'm not going to burn myself out over them.

And hell, they're like 20. Maybe I could justify killing myself to try to pull them back if they were, like, 8. But I think by 20 they've kind of made their bed and it's too much work - certainly work for someone more talented than I - to get them to care.

petty pet peeve

Or maybe not so petty.

One of my colleagues is ANGRY. It is, apparently (the best I can determine from his ranting) because he effed something up that is going to negatively impact one of the benefits he receives.

He is stamping up and down the hall, cursing, and saying stuff he probably is best advised not to be saying when students are around.

I've closed my door because I'm tired of it. He gets like this maybe once a month. And it's always the same: some little, potentially fixable thing becomes this GIANT MASSIVE HUGACIOUS PROBLEM that comes about SOLELY because the bureaucracy is doing it to SCREW HIM OVER. And him only.

Oh, I've told him: dude, it's BUREAUCRACY. Bureaucracy, by definition, is stupid. It has stupid rules. You just kind of have to roll with it sometimes.

But no. It's always someone's FAULT and it's always done to thwart his happiness and well being.

And the other thing I've done, that I'm tired of doing and will do no more: I offered a suggestion. Call the folks in HR, I said. They're happy to help, I said. I bet they can resolve this for you in two shakes of a lamb's tail. (Because the minor benefit-related issues I've had? HR HAS resolved them snappy fast. And they're pleasant about it. And they always act like it's no effort at all for them, and it's something I shouldn't have to deal with, that it's their job to fix it.)

But no, he won't listen. I guess he'd rather be angry, rather walk around cursing and suggesting this is somehow Bush's fault (but then, isn't everything, these days?). And how it will only get worse in the future.

And you know? Crap happens. This is extremely little crap, at least from what I've seen of it. And yeah, I realize, we're all carrying heavy loads and what is "roll with it" to me is "big massive unsolvable problem" to someone else (and perhaps sometimes vice versa), but I'm really tired of his TONE and his CURSING and his stomping around yelling while I'm trying to work.

(And no, saying "Dude, step off before you have an aneurysm," even said in the politest and gentlest of terms, does not help. He's one of those people who gets MAD and who can't be placated. So I just close my door.)

little kids

There's a young family that belongs to the same church as I do: the man, his wife, and their two kids, a girl of perhaps 4 and a boy who is not quite 2.

The man comes early every Sunday morning to check on the soundboard and make sure the mikes are all working right. His wife and the kids come a bit later, right before church. She sings in the choir and the little ones go to the nursery.

I saw something today that made me smile. The mom brought her kids in, and the dad came walking out of the sound-system room just to say hi to her and to make sure everything was right. The little girl saw him (they couldn't have been separated for more than an hour) and she said, "Daddy!" and ran up to him and grabbed him around the knee (he's a tall man). The little boy kept reaching out until his mom put him down, then he ran over to his dad and stretched up his arms, wanting to be picked up. His dad picked him up, and then said, "Okay....let's go to the nursery now" and led them out gently.

Those little simple moments, a family being a family. Oh, I'm sure there are times when the kids are cranky and the parents are tired and everyone wants to yell at everyone else, (But I don't see it in that family; they always seem to be content when I see them).

Seeing the little kids - the girl in particular - reminded me of my own early childhood. When you have good parents, how easy it is to trust. When I was little, I thought my mom was the most beautiful and the most talented woman in the whole world - she could sew and knit and crochet and make toys for me and bake and cook and grow a garden and she knew the names of the birds and the bugs and she could sing and she could make me feel better when I skinned my knees or the bigger kids in the neighborhood made fun of me. And I thought my dad was the smartest and strongest man in the world, that he could fix anything when it broke and he knew the answer to all of my questions.

And while I still esteem my parents highly, I don't have quite the same blind admiration I had as a kid. And while I realize it would be impossible to hang on to that as an adult - and it probably isn't even desirable to - still, I kind of miss that feeling, that feeling of being able to trust another person totally and 100%. Of them always living up to your image of them.

And I thought about two other things: when did this feeling change? I think, reflecting upon it, it changed after I went to school. Part of it being in and around other people, but a bigger part realizing that there were some things my parents just couldn't protect me from (I was teased a lot in school; I got knocked down a lot in the halls. And though the teachers were more attentive than what you hear in some of the horror stories from schools today, they still didn't always manage to stop things or prevent things). I began to learn that grownups were falliable - some played favorites, some pretended not to see stuff that happened, some even lied to you.

And I also got to thinking this morning: I wonder if about the time I learned that grownups weren't as perfect as I thought they were, if that was when my mental image of God started to change. When I was a kid, I had the typical kid mental image: the old, old man with the long white beard, sitting up in the clouds. But after some of my school experiences I began to realize that that image didn't work for me any more.

Now, if you asked me to describe an image of God, I'd be hard-pressed (well, at least for God the Father). I'd probably hem and haw and say I saw God as something like a Force (not The Force, although in the original Star Wars movies - the ones that came out when I was a kid - the description of the Force comes sort of close. I did not like that "midchlorian" thing they introduced in the "prequels that came later" movies. I liked the more non-material, mystical, non-reductionist version of the Force). But it's hard for me to really conjure up an image, while it would have been easy as a kid.

I don't know - just thinking out loud here. Sometimes when I see a little kid I'm briefly reminded of what it was like - the dim and shadowy memories of my own childhood, and I wonder a little at how I got here from there.

Just one little thing...

If I found a genie who offered me three wishes, I'd hand them over to Tracey and her husband to do with as they saw fit right now.

My crappy week (the crap of which is mostly OVER now) pales in comparison with what they're dealing with right now.

They're in my thoughts and prayers. Even though I've never met them "for reals."

*cackling*

Opened up my webmail box this morning. Full of spam.

But there was one message that turned out to be from a business I had bought from before, a quilt-fabric shop. But its subject line looked funny in the context of all the other spam:

"Hot batiks cure the winter blues!"

Now, of course, they mean "hot" as in "brightly colored" or "new and popular" and not in the sense of, well, "Hawwwwt," but a person gets so inured to the spam promising to "promote your love private to a big general" (and yes, I got that one once. Yuck.) and offering "hot bored housewives" (it seems to me 90% of spam must be directed at heterosexual males).

So I almost unintentionally deleted it as spam. (Well, it kind of IS spam, except that once in a while I've been notified of good sales on something I want by those quilt shop e-mails).


Incidentally, for those not into quilting, a "batik" is a fabric that's either been made using the batik process (where you have a light colored dye that is protected by a wax resist, and then is overdyed with a darker color so that you get a pretty two-toned print) or a fabric that is printed to LOOK like a batik (but doesn't use the process. They're very popular in quilting right now.

better

There are few things more gratifying to me as a teacher than these two:

1. Having a student stop me in the middle of class and ask a really good, really interesting question about the day's topic that then ties in something learned earlier.

2. Sharing a funny but topic-appropriate anecdote or joke and having the class laugh at it. I have a few "funny stories" that I like to share and it's always great when the students find them funny, too (or at least that they feel comfortable enough to laugh)

Both those things happened today, so I count that in the win column.

***

My aunt is doing better. It turns out it was what my mom thought, and they just put her in the hospital as a precaution. (Still, I wish my cousin would do the paperwork to allow my mom to get notification. She doesn't have to give up any of her power-of-attorney power; she just needs to make the information able to be shared).

Simple solution

In one of my classes, I give regular homework assignments. Most of these involve digesting and synthesizing material out of the textbook.

A distressing number of students leave at least one question blank on the assignment. Because I am a diligent person, and also because I don't like complaints of "I couldn't FIND that!" on things, I had been writing in the correct answer (or writing it in when people got the question wrong). And it took a lot of time, and it gave me hand cramps, and it frustrated me.

(Yes, I know, I could just mark a big X on the blank spaces and not do anything else, but I'm a little too nice for that).

This morning, I hit on an even better solution: the homework is based on textbook information, right? So I just write down "see page x" when someone leaves a question blank. That way, while I may not exactly teaching 'em to fish, at least I'm not completely handing 'em an already-fried-up slab o' perch.

But the thing is: these homework assignments are like five questions long. And the stuff is both stuff I go over in class and is in the textbook. And they count, all together, for 1/4 of the grade. And people get a week to complete them. How lazy do you have to be to not do that kind of a homework assignment?

(The other thing? I consider them as "fair game" for the tests I give - so doing the assignment, I tell the students, is essentially a bit of study time.)

This week

moar funny pictures

and that's all I have to say. Thank God tomorrow's Friday.

Better on some fronts, not on others

Well, I called the church as soon as it opened and the secretary didn't seem too concerned since we had done what we could to take care of the window.

And my class today went well; we started out on enzymes and enzyme inhibition and a couple people got interested and started asking about changes that happen in enzymes and natural selection and stuff so it kind of morphed into a discussion of "where does antibiotic resistance come from" which is good, because it tells me (a) the students are thinking about the topics and trying to apply them and (b) they give enough of a damn to ask questions, which is better than some semesters.

But.

My aunt, my 87-year-old, blind and disabled aunt, who had been in a nursing home, is in the hospital. And no one can tell us why. My mom called her nursing home for her regular chat and the person at the front desk was "She's not here. And I can't tell you where she is and why because of HIPAA."

Now, I'm all for medical-records-privacy, but my mom is her SISTER. And her BLOOD sister, as in came-from-the-same-mom-and-dad. And just because my cousin, who is the "medical contact person" can't be arsed to fill out the paperwork to allow the place to notify family members, we're all in the dark until she chooses to illuminate us.

My mom (at least over the phone) didn't seem too worried; she said, "I talked with her the other day and while she was complaining that the area around her [port involved with a medical procedure] hurt, she seemed in pretty good spirits and pretty with-it." Or it's possible she's putting on a good face to keep me from freaking out. I don't know.

But it irritates me that HIPAA makes us jump through these hoops. (Seriously? Once the gyn I see called my mom up [because they had the wrong number on file for me and couldn't reach me] and said, "ricki needs to call us" and they wouldn't tell her why and I was all freaked out that they had seen something bad in my tests and it turned out they just didn't get a good sample for the Pap smear and I needed to come back in...after that I filled out the paperwork and let the doctor know in no uncertain terms that anything that happened to me, my mom WOULD find out. From me. So they didn't need to hold stuff back in the name of "protection." Even including if I got pregnant out of wedlock. [though at that time - and now, as well, for that matter - that is just slightly more likely than my winning the lottery and getting hit by an asteroid in the same day])

It also irritates me that apparently my cousin LIKES having the power to disseminate or conceal information about my aunt as she sees fit. It's just a little power and attention play thing and that kind of mind**** that people do bugs me.


***

And I've decided that part of Eating a Healthy Diet is also knowing when a treat is good. So I'm going down the hall (as soon as I finish my $*%&$ plain lowfat yogurt) and getting a Hershey bar or some peanut butter cups out of the vendeteria if they have them.

Yes, that is the detestable "using food to soothe pain" but you know, for me? It kind of works. And I only need one Hershey bar for it to work, and then I'm like, "Okay, I'm good now." So it's not like I'm falling into a pool of dysfunction or anything.