"Hinky" is a funny word. I think of it as a "Chicago" word, because I first heard it from people from the Chicago area, when I was going to grad school in Illinois. It seems odd to me, then, that Abby Sciuto would use it; isn't she supposed to be from New Orleans or somewhere like that?

I like "hinky" and I use it a lot - generally to describe something that's not quite right. (I've also seen it used to describe a suspicious action). I also like "wonky," though not in the political-wonk sense; I tend to think of "wonky" in terms of a table with one short leg that wobbles.

Sadly, lots of things in life are either hinky or wonky.

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An e-mail this morning: they are going to begin doing background checks on new hires here. We (long-time faculty and staff) are all exempt. (I guess being employed >18 months is sufficient to prove you're not a criminal?). It's going to include sex-offender checks. Which I guess is a good thing, but I do hope they differentiate between the person charged with 'statutory rape' because they were 18 and had consensual sex with a 17 year old, and someone who actually, you know, forcibly raped someone. Or worse.

Undergraduate TAs are exempt. Which is interesting, because the one or two problems we've had have been with UTAs.

I suspect this is a result of the case in Alabama, though based on what I've read, I'm not at all sure a background check would have weeded Amy Bishop Anderson out.

I guess I'm glad they're doing this and not subjecting all faculty and staff to psychological evaluations or credit-score reviews or something. (Though that could still be coming, I suppose).

(I still think it's strange and not-quite-right that an employer could require a credit check for a job applicant and reject someone who wasn't an ideal credit risk. I suppose they have their reasons but it seems vaguely unfair to me.)

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I got an e-mail advertising a new edition of a textbook I have considered in the past. I won't be considering this one, though: the author of the e-mail saw fit to use LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EMPHASIS and TONS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!! to talk up how GREAT!!!11!! the new book is.

Um, I was talking about "hinky" earlier? I immediately get a hinky feel off of any e-mail aimed at a professor that promotes a textbook in that way. You don't have to shout at me, and that's what ALL CAPS and LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!! comes off as.

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Yeah, I like avoiding lots of driving when I can. I think it's because in my adult life, prior to living here, I lived in Ann Arbor (didn't even have a car and most things were within easy walking distance - true, both of the groceries I had access to were small, expensive, and offered little choice) or in Normal, where just about anything you could want was within a 10 minute or so drive (well, maybe more than that if State Farm was changing shifts and you had to go on Veteran's Parkway). So yeah, I guess I am spoiled...and that 30 minutes is not door-to-door time; it's time-on-the-interstate. It's another 10-15 minutes negotiating my way into Sherman (and especially getting downtown to where the quilt place is).

I notice that the local quilt shop, in its yellow pages ad, says, "On site longarm services." I don't know if that means you can rent time on a machine (impractical for me; I'd have to try to complete quilting a quilt in a day) or if they have someone on-site who does the quilting. I do know they have a machine back in the back that usually has a quilt on it.

I have said - and now, watch, in a couple years I may actually be doing this - that if I had the room and the money, I'd buy myself a machine and do my own machine quilting myself. (Though, then again, a top-of-the-line longarm machine with all the outfittings is like half the cost of a modest new car).

And if I did that, I'd feel like I had to do quilting for other people to pay off the machine...and I'd be back to the same old issue of valuing other people's deadlines more than my own.

(The ideal situation? Have a couple of quilting friends and we all go in on a machine together...and keep it somewhere where we all had access, like we rent a studio together and do time-sharing on the machine. But I don't have a couple of quilting friends to do that with.)

So maybe I just need to push myself to hand quilt more...I worked some on the quilt in the frame last night, and in the course of my picking-up my sewing room and pressing fabric, I pulled out and pressed off the "sea glass" colored Yellow Brick Road quilt and the backing fabric: I want it to be my next handquilting project. I put it out in a prominent place so maybe seeing it will spur me on to finishing the quilt in the frame (which really, it's two fullsized blocks and maybe four half-blocks, plus the border, away from being done).