News and Updates

1. The first two weeks of the semester are basically madness for advisors, as we try to get all of our students in to see us at least once before the deadline for adding classes passes. My whole calendar is “Outlook blue” until at least the 19th. But that’s good, really. It means my students are coming in and getting what they need.

2. The first two weeks are generally pretty light for faculty, though, as things ramp up. And then everything switches: advising gets calmer as schedules are set and financial aid issues get resolved, while teaching gets more stressful as assignments start coming in and classes start in on more substantive material rather than just going over the syllabus and getting the foundations laid. Good thing I get to have both kinds of stress!

3. It’s a cool autumn day here in Baja Canada, grey and rainy and perfect. This is the weather I live for.

4. Oliver’s boyfriend Dustin is visiting us for the next week or so. There was a moment of panic when Oliver realized that he had misremembered the landing time for Dustin’s flight and we had to go hurtling out the door to get to the airport, but all ended well. It’s nice to have him here. Midgie has decided that Dustin is an acceptable person to sit on, which for a cat as cowardly as this one is quite an endorsement.

5. I’m not sure how both of my children ended up dating Texans, but there you have it. It seems to be working out just fine so far.

6. The Queen of England died the other day and so far I can’t figure out who is annoying me more – the raving royalists who insist that the world come to a halt until proper obeisance is made or the screeching grievance choir insisting that she was personally to blame for every evil of imperialism going back to James I. We had an entire revolution to allow me to be not overly concerned by what happens to the British royal family, for one thing, and for another if I wanted to listen to a screeching grievance choir I’d head over to the latest fabrications vomited forth by our unlamented former president and his lunatic cult. I’m sorry to see her go – she was a calm and dignified presence in a world sorely lacking in such things, and by all accounts had a fairly sharp sense of humor – and really that ought to be enough.

7. There is a fine line between a literary biography and a fanzine.

8. The more we hear about what stolen documents were retrieved – and not retrieved – from der Sturmtrumper’s lair, the worse it gets. This is a Category 5 national security disaster that will take a generation and probably tens of billions of dollars to recover from if it can be recovered from at all, and it is extremely illuminating to see who finds this troubling and wants it thoroughly and properly investigated and who is doing their absolute best to make sure that doesn’t happen. Makes you wonder what each group is thinking, really. Remind me, what is the penalty for stealing secrets and imperiling national security? Let’s look at historical precedent and find out, shall we?

9. One of the joys of autumn weather is that you can cook slow-simmered dinners without worrying about making the entire house into an oven. Red beans and rice, here we come.

10. Now is the point where all of the things that I meant to do over the summer come home to roost and I spend the next two weeks trying to figure out how many of them I can move to the fall and how many of them will just have to get tossed onto the large and ever-growing pile of things labeled “Oh well.”