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... )

Orientation/registration hellseason seems to have leaped out of the gate with considerable verve and velocity this year, I have been working 11-hour days since the start of last week. I am thus currently submerged in the usual sticky and insistent morass of remote registration admin, orientation site design, continuous student queries, advisor ( Read more... )

A misty, moisty new year, which I think is a Good Omen in my personal lexicon of signs - it's raining very lightly, everything is cool and green. I have ceremonially tidied the house, mopped the kitchen floor and had a Healthy Breakfast, TM, which I think about does it in the "start as you mean to go on" department. Bugger resolutions, anyway.

2021 ( Read more... )

I am, once again, a very tired thing in the limp chewed string category, it's been a long year, and one very full of emergencies and makeshifts and adaptations, all demanding unlikely quantities of my time and mental energy. It was exam committee season last week; over four days, including the weekend, I individually checked around 1500 student ( 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... )

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By way of rewarding self for the horrors of this year's remote reg and orientation experiences, I ordered myself Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and have been playing it in the evenings as far as possible given the various outcomes of the daily war between myself and Pandora for occupancy of my gaming chair. Apparently I can only occasionally seduce ( 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... )

We have nearly finished processing the returning student registrations, which means that currently we are doing the last-minute ones concurrently with orientation and registration for the new students. This is not an auspicious year in which to begin your university career: we are teaching largely online this year, and the remote format is going to ( Read more... )