Cars, teaching, and stuff
After waiting most of last week to hear from the insurance company of the people that hit my car with their motor home, I finally decided they weren't going to call me, so I called on Thursday to get the ball rolling. I left a message and didn't hear back from the Progressive agent till Friday, but after going over my information with her and recounting what happened to verify that their client was the one at fault, they set me up with an appointment to take my car to an auto body place, and with a reservation for a rental.
Here's what the damage looks like, by the way. I found it hard to take good pics, I think because my car is a weird indeterminate not-dark, not-light color.
So I had an appointment to take my car yesterday afternoon. I had to cut out of work a bit early, which sort of annoyed me because I was stressing over a lesson plan for today and I had to skip Core & Stretch class due to lack of time. It occurred to me shortly before I was about to leave that I had never heard anything from Enterprise about the rental, even though the insurance agent had said in her email that they'd be contacting me. When I double-checked her email, it didn't even mention a specific Enterprise location (there are 3 in Eugene), just a reservation number. So I called the one closest to the autobody place and talked to them; it took them a little while to find the reservation, and the woman on the phone told me that Progressive files their claim information in weird ways that don't make the reservations generate any notifications or something. Same thing for the autobody shop, who apparently had no idea I was showing up until they looked me up in their scheduling system. Anyway, dropped off car, went back to sign out rental car, came home, was ambushed by a nap.
Got a call this morning at work from the Progressive agent who had gone out to look at my car and make an estimate for the damages. Apparently it's gonna be $1900 to fix. I was surprised it was that high, honestly, even though I know body work is a bitch, but the damage seemed mild to me. The adjustor dude said they'd noticed some scuffing on the wheel, so they're going to send it to another place to be realigned, in addition to replacing the dented fender and panel and replacing the scraped up headlight assembly. Oh well. Just glad I'm not the one paying for it (nor my insurance.) They'll have to have it till at least Tuesday, though, which sucks, but oh well.
Today I taught my first library instruction session. It's for MUS 611, the Research Methods class that all music school grad students have to take. The summer instructor runs it a lot like an old-school bibliography class, which is perhaps a rather outdated way of doing it, but at least makes it similar to what I took as a new grad student. Anyway, today's session was on online indexes and databases. I was nervous about it mostly because I feel like I still don't really know exactly what we have or how to get to things or how they work-- because I learned how to use the resources at IU by doing research with them, not from my bibliography and library school courses. I haven't really done that here yet, plus some of the resources I like a lot work differently here, and some of the ones I didn't use much at IU are packaged better here. (Dear God, why do we have EBSCO's version of RILM?! It sucks so bad! Why don't we have the First Search version? Argh. On the other hand, Music Index seems to work better here.) Also, I apparently left out one particular function of one particular database (that I have very little personal experience with) that the instructor really wanted me to highlight (how to find what other articles cite a particular article in Arts & Humanities Citation Index; but I showed them the same task using Google Scholar, so it's not like they didn't learn any way to do it.)
Our electronic classroom is neat, but also frustrating. The lighting setup is such that, if you're projecting what you're doing on the instruction computer onto the projector screen, you really have to have pretty much all the lights off in order to be able to see it. Also, the instructor station is on one of the same seat-height tables as the other student computers, but I really have to stand when I teach, so I ended up bending over so that I could mouse and type, and now my wrists hurt a lot from being flexed the whole time. Also, I felt like I was talking into my computer screen a lot.
Now I'm up on the Reference Desk, testing out remote desktop capabilities (so I'm remotely connected to my desktop in my cubicle downstairs); I thought I might do some cataloging while I'm up here, since I totally short-shrifted my cataloging duties this morning while I was spazzing out working on my lesson plan. Everything looks just a little bit weird, but it's pretty neat. I feel like I'm operating a remote control! Yea, verily, we live in The Future.
Here's what the damage looks like, by the way. I found it hard to take good pics, I think because my car is a weird indeterminate not-dark, not-light color.
So I had an appointment to take my car yesterday afternoon. I had to cut out of work a bit early, which sort of annoyed me because I was stressing over a lesson plan for today and I had to skip Core & Stretch class due to lack of time. It occurred to me shortly before I was about to leave that I had never heard anything from Enterprise about the rental, even though the insurance agent had said in her email that they'd be contacting me. When I double-checked her email, it didn't even mention a specific Enterprise location (there are 3 in Eugene), just a reservation number. So I called the one closest to the autobody place and talked to them; it took them a little while to find the reservation, and the woman on the phone told me that Progressive files their claim information in weird ways that don't make the reservations generate any notifications or something. Same thing for the autobody shop, who apparently had no idea I was showing up until they looked me up in their scheduling system. Anyway, dropped off car, went back to sign out rental car, came home, was ambushed by a nap.
Got a call this morning at work from the Progressive agent who had gone out to look at my car and make an estimate for the damages. Apparently it's gonna be $1900 to fix. I was surprised it was that high, honestly, even though I know body work is a bitch, but the damage seemed mild to me. The adjustor dude said they'd noticed some scuffing on the wheel, so they're going to send it to another place to be realigned, in addition to replacing the dented fender and panel and replacing the scraped up headlight assembly. Oh well. Just glad I'm not the one paying for it (nor my insurance.) They'll have to have it till at least Tuesday, though, which sucks, but oh well.
Today I taught my first library instruction session. It's for MUS 611, the Research Methods class that all music school grad students have to take. The summer instructor runs it a lot like an old-school bibliography class, which is perhaps a rather outdated way of doing it, but at least makes it similar to what I took as a new grad student. Anyway, today's session was on online indexes and databases. I was nervous about it mostly because I feel like I still don't really know exactly what we have or how to get to things or how they work-- because I learned how to use the resources at IU by doing research with them, not from my bibliography and library school courses. I haven't really done that here yet, plus some of the resources I like a lot work differently here, and some of the ones I didn't use much at IU are packaged better here. (Dear God, why do we have EBSCO's version of RILM?! It sucks so bad! Why don't we have the First Search version? Argh. On the other hand, Music Index seems to work better here.) Also, I apparently left out one particular function of one particular database (that I have very little personal experience with) that the instructor really wanted me to highlight (how to find what other articles cite a particular article in Arts & Humanities Citation Index; but I showed them the same task using Google Scholar, so it's not like they didn't learn any way to do it.)
Our electronic classroom is neat, but also frustrating. The lighting setup is such that, if you're projecting what you're doing on the instruction computer onto the projector screen, you really have to have pretty much all the lights off in order to be able to see it. Also, the instructor station is on one of the same seat-height tables as the other student computers, but I really have to stand when I teach, so I ended up bending over so that I could mouse and type, and now my wrists hurt a lot from being flexed the whole time. Also, I felt like I was talking into my computer screen a lot.
Now I'm up on the Reference Desk, testing out remote desktop capabilities (so I'm remotely connected to my desktop in my cubicle downstairs); I thought I might do some cataloging while I'm up here, since I totally short-shrifted my cataloging duties this morning while I was spazzing out working on my lesson plan. Everything looks just a little bit weird, but it's pretty neat. I feel like I'm operating a remote control! Yea, verily, we live in The Future.