Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Wednesday morning stuff

* every week right now just feels long. Lots to do. Having two sections of one class, wow, I'm amazed how that one extra class eats up a lot of time and just makes me tired. I hope I don't wind up doing this kind of overload regularly. (We really, really need another person in the department. Ideally another tenure line, so we get someone who is fairly committed to staying, but at any rate, we need another person. Especially if we revamp the Master's program to make it better, which we want to do. Unfortunately, we probably won't get another person)

* I'm thinking this is the ultimate in social-media "WTH?" - a scientific supply house is sponsoring a contest on Pinterist. Yeah, Pinterist, which I think of as the place where women with too much to do but a desire to have a gracious life put up pictures of the kind of interior decorating, children's birthday parties, and craft projects they ASPIRE to do, but never get to in reality because they are too busy cleaning up puppy vomit, doing laundry, and making sure their children didn't lose their math homework. (And yeah, I know, there are other uses of Pinterist; apparently there are hipster corners of it where people pin "cool" tattoo designs or mustaches, and there are people who use it ironically). But it just seems strange to me for them to sponsor a contest on Pinterest. The contest on Pinterist is your "dream science classroom."

Considering I share classrooms and my big hope is that someone left a few whiteboard pens that actually work and bothered to erase the chalkboard, I think my "dream classroom" would be aiming very low. (Also, I tend to be low tech - my dream classroom would be chalkboards - those chalkboards on tracks where you can fill one up and BAM! push it up to the ceiling and have a clean board underneath it, and students who didn't quite get everything written down still have the material on the top chalkboard available. Oh, and a computer, a projector, and screen. That's what it would take to make me happy.)

(I'm not on Pinterist. Nor am I on LinkedIn, or Instagram, or whatever the newest ones are. I do twitter, mainly because it works as a short break during the day, and I'm nominally on Facebook (have an account, don't have a page). I'm not big on social media and it seems like it can be an awful timesuck. And in some cases, a source of drama: I've heard of Facebook stuff causing fights in families.)

I also get so tired of the "like us!" and "follow us!" demands that so many businesses and groups seem to make.

* We must have gotten a bunch of wind last night; I came out of the house to several largish branches down. Luckily, today is extra hauling day, so I just pulled them down to the curb and left them on the bags of yard waste that I want extra hauling to take. I did manage to drop one of the heavier branches on my foot (I was wearing sandals) but I don't seem to have done any damage.

* I worked a bit more on the Chrysalis amigurumi last night. I don't know why working on toys should make me happier than working on just about any other craft project, but it does. Part of it may be that making toys (whether by sewing or crocheting - I learned to knit later) was about the first craft I ever did. When I was six, seven, and eight, I was already making some of my own toys. When I was a kid, there was a real freedom in that, especially for a kid with almost no allowance and little access to shopping areas.

Once in a while my brother and I got down to "The Attic," downtown, which had stuffed animals and a few other things, and rarely, I had enough money saved up AND we were going somewhere like Gold Circle that sold toys. Though I don't really remember often walking into a store with money and just buying something; more often I saw something somewhere, wanted it, and then had to save up for weeks or months for it. And it was almost never that we just got a toy, I mean that our parents bought for us. At Christmas and birthdays, sure. And maybe something VERY small after a particularly painful medical thing or if we got straight As on the report card. But not always, and never a "just because we're at a store that sells toys" thing. Well, sometimes when my dad traveled he'd bring something small back as a gift, especially if it was something unusual - I think I got a bird marionette I used to have that way, as a "I saw this while traveling and thought of you" thing. But the little gift things, there was always a special reason behind it.

Which is why I kind of boggle at the kids throwing tantrums in the Target because they want their parents to get them a toy. When I was a kid, you just didn't do that, because you knew that not only would you not get the toy, but you'd get in trouble....

* One of the consolations of being a grown-up? You have a bigger allowance and, if you're single and without dependents, no one to tell you how to spend it. I wonder if I'd own so many tiny Pony figures if my parents had been the sort who bought toys for me "just because we're at a store that sells toys." I wonder if we do sometimes make up for things we missed in childhood as adults.

* Something I wonder about: on local news stories, how do they select the people they talk to as the witness/"I knew the alleged perp"/man on the street person? Locally, it seems like they find the MOST "backwoods" person in the town and talk to them. And it makes me cringe a little because I feel like it must just reinforce stereotypes. (Then again: if there were some crime that happened in my neighborhood and the local news pushed a mike in my face, I'd likely either decline to speak or say I didn't know enough about it to say anything useful.)

There's an alleged (well, it looks pretty likely, based on the fact that the perp was apparently photographed on an ATM camera during the time he had the victim in captivity with him) case of kidnapping/rape/attempted robbery in the area. They wound up interviewing the former girlfriend of the alleged perp. That.....that just seems all kinds of wrong to me. (And yes, she essentially said the "I can't believe this, he wouldn't hurt a flea" thing. I don't know. I think if someone close to me were alleged with strong evidence of committing a crime, my response would be, "Wow. You really never know a person, it's horrible what people are capable of doing.")

I also wonder how much making a big deal of these stories on the local news makes it hard to prosecute them later on, finding a jury that's unbiased.

* Honestly, the only thing I could see myself actually speaking about on the local news? Would be an area in which I was specifically an "expert" - prairie plants, or soil invertebrates, something like that. And even then I wouldn't be all that comfortable.

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