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 ( Read more... )

Exam committee season, that is, not necessarily the jolly holly bit, which seems somewhat subdued this year, mercifully: the supermarket music selection has, for some reason, given me Walk Like An Egyptian two weekends running rather than syrupy Xmas carols, which is about a million times preferable and causes the traditional outbreaks of bopping ( Read more... )

oh gods we have a new COVID variant, and various apparently science-heavy sources, including this one seem to suggest that its jolly little spike proteins have mutated madly enough that current vaccines may not, in fact, slow it down any. Which is creating a horrible, leaden, despairing sense of déja vu: the advice quoted in that article is "go ( Read more... )

oooh, yes, this blog thing, yes. *blows dust off it in the traditional fashion*. I knew I was forgetting something. Well, probably I'm forgetting lots of things, on account of how it's been a hellish couple of months and I am exhausted enough to have a small, limp, cheesy sort of thing in place of a functional memory. But it's more or less over bar ( Read more... )

There is a student in my inbox with whom I have had an email exchange lasting (counts them...) NINE emails, during which I have tried patiently and unavailingly to get him to tell me a single, simple fact: what exact curriculum change is he trying to make? He has managed, over the repeated emails, to completely ignore this, sending me cheerful two- ( Read more... )

Oh thank fuck, that was The Pivotal Point. The moment, in this whole registration/orientation clusterfuck, where I have created and made accessible pretty much everything that will allow both registration and orientation to function, at least after a fashion. Guidelines are written and uploaded to a shared drive, people are recruited and trained, ( Read more... )

Not my favourite moment in completely not my favourite time of year in a completely ungodly horrible year in anyone's terms anyway.

We are
(a) running remote registration too slowly, because students don't follow instructions, so we have processed a third of our returning student cohort in three weeks and have only a week left to process the other ( Read more... )

• No matter how organised you are and how much forethought and planning you show, the bulk of your time will be spent waiting for other people to do their necessary bit.
  
  • Corollary: my Cherished Institution is a particularly slow and inefficient bureaucracy with, at present, really poor leadership, I am beyond tired at negotiating Academic Life Under ( Read more... )

Apparently we are in another part of the pandemic where we are singing about the dark times, and I have learned a new random collection of words, which is "TikTok shanty fandom". It is curiously pleasing that the TikTok sea shanty fandom exists, and that it randomly builds multi-part shanty versions which disparately add a voice or instrument line ( Read more... )

I have been working my way gradually around the kitchen cleaning out cupboards and evicting beetles over the last couple of weeks (it's tiring and annoying and I have Zelda to play, so I've been doing it a bit at a time rather than as a single massive clean-up, which possibly means they're moving in behind me as I go, but honestly I can't.) And on ( Read more... )