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... )

Yesterday was a public holiday*. Owing to the featureless slide of pandemic days spent working from home, I had completely forgotten about this, so I staggered out of bed at a quarter to eight as usual, placated the cats, watered the garden, sat down at my desk and cleared my inbox before realising, an hour later, that I needn't be working, ( Read more... )

Student funding application deadline this week, which means my inbox has been flooded with last-minute students needing my advisor signature on their appeals, leading to such student gems as "Do I qualify for the course I want to add?" with no further details. My life is not made measurably better by the need to fire off frequent emails in the ( Read more... )

Longtime denizens of this blog may remember the supermarket seed promotion thingy a couple of years back, with the magical compressed soil, which gave me one vigorous viola plant and a couple of leggy vegetables which subsequently fell over and died. Not so the viola, which grew happy faces madly all that year, and died back that winter only to ( Read more... )

Life doesn't actually give me random lemons with any notable success, my potted lemon tree is one of those knobbly-skinned ones which gives me more evil poisonous spine encounters than anything else whenever I try to water, prune or move it. It has quite a nice outbreak of blossom this year but has only ever produced one small, knobbly, inedible ( Read more... )

The major terrors of COVID - actual COVID, COVID side effects, death, food shortages, economic collapse - are all a bit distant to those of us in my fortunate position, but the minor terrors will get you every time. See: car battery, yesterday. Today I braved Uber and hit Rondebosch to get a prescription filled and buy the next two weeks' worth of ( Read more... )

Gods, but this epidemic thing is weirding to the mental health. I have spent two weeks quite happily noodling around at home, surviving interminable Zoom and Teams meetings (Tracy, I completely agree that Teams is horrible, it's severely clunky and the sound quality is awful), and tempering the faculty's disfunctional flailing by cuddling kitties ( Read more... )

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It was all cloudy and cool and vaguely rainy yesterday, which is altogether lovely. Sunday featured extremely high winds and occasional drizzle, causing me to have to bring the chilli bush inside as it was lying horizontal, and also having to re-upright the potted frangipani several times, before finally tucking it around a corner so it stopped ( Read more... )

Cape Town is having a January heatwave, which I resent somewhat given that it's October. This week has been temperatures in the high 30s, which the weather site assures me is ten degrees higher than the average for this time of year, so thanks, global warming and climate change. I have been sleeping in a mosquito net in sheer self defence. (That is ( Read more... )