One thing I like about the soil-sorting - this is the process where I mix aliquots of the soil with water, and hunt through them to pick out any invertebrates that missed being collected in the extraction step - is that it gives me time to think about things. In a way, it's like weeding a garden or hand-quilting or even driving on a low-traffic country road, in that while you are paying attention, you are not paying TOTAL attention, and part of your brain can work on other stuff. (It's also oddly restful: I cannot be doing anything else while I sort.)

And I think I came up with the best way of putting the lock-picking incident to rest. I decided not to e-mail the guy's chair, at least not right away. I'm generally a pretty good judge of people and the sense I get off this guy is not "criminal in the making" but "slightly goofy and immature, but a decent guy at heart." And I don't want to get him in trouble if the stunt he was pulling was simply a "stunt" - that it was, as I suspect, him and his lab partner sitting there bored, he pulls out his Leatherman tool, and either he says, "Hey, look what I can do" or his lab partner says, "Bet you can't get the door open with that" and it went from there.

I asked a colleague - someone with a few more years on me - who's had some weird stuff happen to him in the time he's been here (that's actually how I opened the conversation: "Hey, Tim, you've had some weird stuff happen to you while you've been here") and asked him. His advice was to take the guy aside and try to determine if it was (a) really a stupid stunt or (b) there was something more to it.

But I'm bad at opening conversations that feel confrontational to me. I thought of a way, though, while working on the soil this afternoon.

"Hey, what would you have done if you had actually gotten the door open?"

If he laughs, or says that he figured he couldn't, or gets a little embarrassed or something, I'll figure it was, as I suspect, two guys just out of teenagerhood being bored and doing something not-well-thought-through. If he kind of stutters or gets irritated, I'll figure it's something more.

I'm also going to just calmly and casually remark, "You know, if it had been someone other than me that ran across you doing that [e.g., the campus security force, who wear sidearms and take stuff pretty seriously], you could have been in a boatload of trouble."

I think that will be a subtle way of letting him know that (a) what he did wasn't cool and (b) I'm going to be keeping an eye on him. (And if he seems hinky when I'm talking to him, then I can e-mail his chair).

So, rather than being the deeply tedious task that some people think it looks like, I find sorting the soil rather restful - and I can work out things I need to work out while I'm doing it.

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I've decided - at least for now - to leave comments on 'moderate' but take off the captcha word requirement: so you can comment without having to type in some weird mix of letters that sounds sometimes like what a dolphin might come up with if it were trying to put together an English word based on what it had heard.

I'll see if this leads to a  marked uptick in bot-spam or not. If not, I'll leave it off. If it does, though, the captcha will go back on.