It happened less than 30 minutes before the scheduled testing of the new campus alert system. Some of us (the cynical, like myself) thought it actually WAS the test, and that thing about "this is not a test" was a fake, designed to make sure we really left the building.
I had the presence of mind to grab important things (like my car keys and my laptop, as it turned out that classes in my building were cancelled and the building locked down) while my colleagues urged me to hurry up, and I wasn't scared until we were gathered en masse in the campus center, and then the thought occurred that a person REALLY wishing to do harm (assuming some intelligence and pre-planning skills; yeah, it's a lot to assume) would pretend to target one building, and then show up in the evacuation center.
Now I am sort of freaked out. But I am not home appreciably earlier than usual, and I have two sets of lecture notes to write, so onward I go.
From the police blotter in our local weekly:
"A 14-year old female dialed 911 because she was upset with her parents because they would not allow her to go out that night. An officer informed the girl of the proper use of 911."
Kids these days....
I am listening to In Cold Blood by Truman Capote these days, in the car. It was my "three-strikes and this form of entertainment is OUT": I found the Sue Grafton crime novel I'd borrowed from the library annoying beyond belief and although I sort of enjoyed Nadine Gordimer's Beethoven was 1/16 Black, I found the cadences of it a bit pretentious as well.
But Capote is just right (so the game is on) - what a gift for language he had, and how perfectly he evoked the salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners of mid-century. I am only on disk 2 of I think 13 but I am enjoying it so much that even my 1:40 hour commute last night did not annoy as it might have.
(What's up with Thursday traffic anyway? Monday through Wednesday is a dream commute. Who ARE all these people who materialize on Thursdays??)
I don't teach on Fridays, which is good, because school got cancelled mid-day today, which would have been a reprise of the Black Thursday (see??) commute-from-hell on Dec 13. Snow-schmow.
We have shoveled the driveway and walks once, but we'll be doing it in the morning, no doubt. We must return Miss Kitty to the State of Insanity. Murp!
PS: confidential to my "North Dakota" reader: I'm working on squirrel cuisine. Stay tuned...
I daresay I could write something here every day - my coz, who is really sick, has a blog on Caringbridge, and SHE has the discipline to write daily.
But I sort of get out of the habit, and then I think my next entry has to be GREAT to compensate, and there's no greater inhibitor to writing than that sort of pressure, and so you get the drift.
Here's what's up: I wrote an angry post about the state of health care in this country, prompted by the fact that my bro-in-law (who has no health insurance) has now had THREE surgeries and has been in the hospital for three weeks, with months of rehab to come. Then I felt the post was just too angry and incoherent, so I got up in the middle of the night and deleted it.
I wrote a new chapter of my dissertation over the winter break, and revised a couple of other chapters, but DID NOT FINISH THE DRAFT, which is a daily disappointment and reminder of my ineptitude. And now I'm caught up in the daily grind of writing (or rewriting) lecture notes, grading, preparing slide shows, and doing all the little bits of administrative work that constitute my day job.
But we do have my sister-in-law's cat to play with so that's fun. This is the cat that used to say "murp!" She meows now, no murps anymore, alas. It was fun watching her watch the avian wildlife out the window this morning.
And the squirrel population has been "relocated" out of our house, so my sleep is more normal. And the days are getting longer, so that's a mood elevator. I must begin soon to think about my garden and how I will maximize my biomass.
B and I were talking about logistical things we are learning along the way.
1. Build in some flex into the syllabus, to account for snow days, sick days, family emergencies and the like. Then, have some free-floating lesson plans that relate to the course objectives but don't have to be in sequence, to fill in if you haven't missed any class meetings. I was sick on Monday, and I am really stressing out about catching up: my syllabus is a finely-tuned instrument and if I get behind it will cause all sorts of other problems.
2. Set up a directory system and naming conventions for documents BEFORE THE SEMESTER STARTS. I spent a bunch of time this morning looking for a document I'd renamed. It got into the wrong folder somehow.
3. Likewise, use the Save As function to make new documents AS SOON AS YOU OPEN THE ORIGINAL. Otherwise you lose old material because you mistakenly Save. It really doesn't matter a huge amount in the particular mistakes I've made in the last couple of days, but I don't have a full archive of what I did last fall anymore, which is kind of too bad.
4. Spend some time learning how to foster useful discussions in class. I spent a lot of time with this last summer, and it worked, but I've gotten out of the habit at my new job - partly because it is SO HARD to get them talking that sometimes I am just not up to the effort. College as a spectactor sport; the professor as a sort of live TV screen. Harrumph.