the fog of war

[extemporanea]

It's Monday, time for a rant list! Things That Have Got Right Up My Nose, and which I require to be blasted by the Cosmic Wossnames forthwith:

• The weather. 39 degrees on Saturday, 37 yesterday. Today is only supposed to be 26, but my otherwise much appreciated little house tends to trap temperature extremes lovingly and recreate them for the next couple of days, so it's still like a cross between Durban and an inefficient oven cooking meringues up in here. I have adopted my mother's cunning recommendation, which is to waft around the house wrapped in a voluminous cotton scarf which I dip into cold water at approximately hourly intervals. But it melted my chocolate oranges on Saturday. Not cricket.
  
• My fucking fancy new bifocals, which do not focus on either the screen or anything for close reading, and moreover hurt my nose. I have had them remade once already (removed prisms, no dice), and am currently wearing the old ones (too weak, scratched to hell) in order to deal with Registration Meltdowns, while the long-suffering optometrists make up a new pair with a new prescription and new lenses. We have Ship of Theseused my new specs, in fact. If the new ones don't work I will, recking not the expense, be ordering a brand new pair of office specs, valid reading and computer screen only, and wearing the others, possibly alternately or, like Professor Branestawm, all at once, for distance. Phooey.
  
• Student reading comprehension, which is adding new levels of futility and despair to my tech support function, and today presented me with a student offering me a screenshot of the apparently opaque and incomprehensible final registration screen, with a big blue "Submit" button and an instruction to "Click submit to finalise your registration submission", and an innocent query about why their registration has not been finalised. Because, I patiently point out, they have clearly not clicked "Submit". Oh, they say, they didn't realise. Aargh.
  
• By the terms of my Ancient Treaty with Scroob, Parcelforce and all its works.

Things which have mitigated the rant-worthy list, above: the charmingly eccentric spelling tendencies of the student whose registration form specified yesterday, in cheerful all caps, a course called "ATHMORSPHERIC SCIENCE". This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.