Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

exhausticated

Well, it's late, and I'm beat. Wednesdays are my day to prepare for teaching on Thursdays. I write up my lecture notes, prepare handouts, enlarge materials for transparencies, make copies of case law if I'm using any.

But because it's a "free" day (meaning unencumbered), appointments that don't fit elsewhere in the week tend to skitter along and land on Wednesdays. So, today I had a noon meeting and a meeting at 5 and one at 5:30 and class at 6 and another meeting at 8:30 - just enough to break up the rhythm of the day. You know that hour or so before you have to leave for somewhere when you look at the clock every couple of minutes and re-calculate when you have to leave and how much time you have left, and what you can achieve in that time? I'm usually pretty good about using small bits of time effectively, but not when I'm "waiting" for the next meeting.

Long and short - my lecture notes aren't done and I haven't finalized the next assignment, which I need to hand out tomorrow. I'm gonna try to go to bed and sleep - but if I can't, I might just get up and work some more. B is correcting rough drafts, and he has a few more hours of it.

More urban musings - Paris is so dense that when I came back from there, Minneapolis felt positively suburban by comparison. I want to get some numbers and compare people per square mile. Do the two huge parks in Paris reduce that density significantly? I think not - and one of the hints you get is that Parisians seem to need less personal space. They'll be closer in the street and in the subway and especially in restaurants than is tolerated here in the U.S. And they'll bump you slightly, or brush against you, and it's no big deal. Here, people get really offended - or scared - by such moves.

The numbers for Mpls will be easy to find. Not sure about Paris. Stay tuned...