poster child
Thank FSM that week is over. It was moderately hellish, but also full of the tiny moments of vindication best exemplified by the dilly young first-year yesterday who, after a half-hour consult during which I patiently redesigned her disasterous curriculum and explained why half the rules she thought she was following are actually undergrad urban myth, looked at me all starry-eyed and said "Wow! Curriculum advice really can make a difference!" I feel like an inspirational poster.
Now all I have to do is give an orientation workshop this afternoon, watch Pan's Labyrinth again, write two lectures, give them on Monday and Tuesday, deal with the fallout from last week (i.e. all the students who missed the course change deadline and feel it's my job to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away), and I can actually relax.
Today's moment of weirdness: I had a pottery jug of cut roses on the living room table, and they've done magnificiently for two weeks, but finally died. When I tried to move the jug, I couldn't. Literally couldn't - full strength pull was insufficient to budge it, as though it had been bolted to the table. Oops, I thought, strangely bloody-minded poltergeist activity? I called in my secret weapon, viz. the Evil Landlord, and we eventually managed to pry the jug loose with a knife-blade. The pottery was obviously not entirely watertight, and had been slowly leaching through, to create a solid layer of mould which had effectively welded the jug to the table. Scary stuff. I think I might almost rather have had the poltergeist, there's something creepy in micro-organisms pitting their will against yours like that. At least the supernatural is explicable in terms of it being supernatural.
In entirely unrelated news, the speakers which came (free) with this new computer have a subwoofer, which is giving David Bowie a hitherto unsuspected level of bass which I can feel through the soles of my feet.
Now all I have to do is give an orientation workshop this afternoon, watch Pan's Labyrinth again, write two lectures, give them on Monday and Tuesday, deal with the fallout from last week (i.e. all the students who missed the course change deadline and feel it's my job to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away), and I can actually relax.
Today's moment of weirdness: I had a pottery jug of cut roses on the living room table, and they've done magnificiently for two weeks, but finally died. When I tried to move the jug, I couldn't. Literally couldn't - full strength pull was insufficient to budge it, as though it had been bolted to the table. Oops, I thought, strangely bloody-minded poltergeist activity? I called in my secret weapon, viz. the Evil Landlord, and we eventually managed to pry the jug loose with a knife-blade. The pottery was obviously not entirely watertight, and had been slowly leaching through, to create a solid layer of mould which had effectively welded the jug to the table. Scary stuff. I think I might almost rather have had the poltergeist, there's something creepy in micro-organisms pitting their will against yours like that. At least the supernatural is explicable in terms of it being supernatural.
In entirely unrelated news, the speakers which came (free) with this new computer have a subwoofer, which is giving David Bowie a hitherto unsuspected level of bass which I can feel through the soles of my feet.