RBOC: Oh What a World Edition

• Cookies by mail? Holy god, so good. Girl Scouts, you're on notice.
• Last week of the term (not counting finals, of course). Now if only one more person would sign up for my summer course. They could drop at the end of the first day. That'd be alright.
  
• I must be getting old because I found myself mentally trying to marry two of my favorite students to each other. I can only attribute this to age.
  
• Two departmental events left to get through.
  
• I'm considering changing my insurance company because their commercials are that annoying.
  
• What do you think it would take to get Oprah to pay off my student loans? Hell, I'd let Flava Flav help, even if it meant hearing him shout his name for three hours straight.
  
• Did I mention cookies in the mail? Swoooooooooooooooooooon. Seriously.
  

RBOStuck in the Office on a Satruday

So no one warns you that in any term you get extra time to work on some other sort of project that half of the time given will be spent defending the remaining half. So here I am on the weekend, after a four hour long faculty meeting Friday, doing the stuff that my Fridays are theoretically alloted to.

Thus far, the challenges of the term:

• keeping the music down so as not to disturb the Religious Studies person next door. Honestly, the music is no louder than it was before. It's interesting that her complaint was about the type of music (I had The Roots on low), and her description was that it was "that bump-da-bump bump music."
• all the computers IT have updated with Vista in the classrooms completely freeze when the screen saver kicks in. The IT person I spoke with described this as a very limited problem with minimal impact. This has prompted my suggestion for a new slogan for our university: "University X: Hiring University X Graduates No One Else Will Have"
• a more general battle against the "because it's already here" sort of logic that inflicts this place in terms of hiring has overtaken me. Granted, we're in a crappy place and luring people from elsewhere to here is one of our big hiring challenges, but still...
• how to tell students I'm writing reference letters for that the programs they're applying to are a waste of their talents (including one student whose announcement that he intends to apply to a program here at University X was as close as I've come to having my skin literally crawl)

So happy Saturday to all of you. More to come, I'm sure.