Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Tired of summer

In this part of the world, summer is like that party guest who never leaves. Depending on who you are and the kind of parties you give, summer is that annoying dudebro who sticks around to hoover up the remaining pizza and beer and to try to chat up your sister, who has already told him she's definitely not interested. Or summer is like that woman who has any number of horrifying stories of botched medical procedures, and she's going to share every one of them with you, in order to hear the sympathetic noises you make (in the desperate hope she'll shut up and leave). Or it's the person with advice about EVERYTHING and who cheerfully tells you how every aspect of your life is being done wrong, and remains there, on the porch, haranguing you about how you could be so much better, long after the other guests have fled.

Unfortunately, you can't tell summer. "Hey. I really need to get ready for tomorrow" or "Stop bugging my sister and leave" or "That's all really very concerning, maybe you should go and talk to someone who has more qualifications than I do"

It's supposed to be 92 here today. Ninety-two. I know that in the depths of summer that would sound cool, but it's really too hot for October. And every year, the weather starts to fluctuate  - we'll get a few nice cool dry days and then things will happen that suck moisture out of the Gulf and also heat up the air (the weather guy last night, with what seemed to be a Tufnel-esque delight, commented that our winds today were going to be out of the southwest, and "that's the hottest wind we can get, it doesn't get any hotter than that.") (There are certain weather guys who seem to delight in weather that makes people miserable. I don't understand that.)

Yeah, great. I'm really ready to put away the thin little cotton dresses and wear something more substantial but I had to pull out one of the thinnest, lightest ones for today. Also, they are once again "working on" the HVAC system in my building - the room that was running about 55 degrees? Yesterday, the one day I bothered to haul my (technically illegal) space heater from my office ALONG WITH my packet of papers, calculator, and both textbooks I was going to be using data from, it was 80 degrees and distinctly humid in there. Great. (I suppose I COULD have used the thing on its "fan" function, but I didn't think of that).

(At least it's not like some of the schools I've been at in the Upper Midwest, where the boilers went on around October 1, regardless of the weather, and you had a few days of sweating indoors while the outdoors weather was pleasant. And none of our windows open....

I have found that among the many things that aggravate my hives, heat and humidity are high on that list. So I'm really, really ready for this to be done.


***

Fortunately I published that when I did; I was writing at home and my internet service tanked right after that. (Judging from the color of the router light, it was back before I left home). My ISP/cable people are very nice and congenial, but stuff has tanked a lot more often since they took over. The old, old service (Communicomm) was super-reliable and the one or two times I had problems they were helpful and quick with a fix. Mediastream were idiots who couldn't find the words "customer service" in a dictionary if someone opened it to the CUST.... page, but at least they seemed to mostly keep stuff running. The current folks are all very congenial but it seems they are slightly cack-handed, as if maybe Derpy Hooves was one of their techs or something. (Or maybe not Derpy, but another pony who is slightly accident-prone, just not as much as she is....)

***

One thing about teaching an overload? More people with more problems you have to deal with. More students out sick (or "sick") on exam day, more excuses to deal with, more claims to look at with a jaded eye (the most recent: a person's car broke down, their cell phone was out of charge because they had stayed with a relative and left the charger at home, so they had to walk 15 miles (!) back to their relatives'. I hike, and I know how long a 10-mile hike takes me*, so that 15 mile walk thing sounds distinctly hinky. But whatever. I did ask the person in an e-mail back to them how long the walk took them, which I hope they will take as a subtle "She's on to me!")

(*Then again, when I'm in good form, I can do 5 miles in an hour on the cross-country ski exerciser, but that's under optimal conditions (no hills to deal with, no rough terrain) and I'm pushing myself to go as fast as possible - faster than I would walk if I had to walk a long distance)

I don't know how profs who teach the multiple-hundred-students mass lecture do it;  with 65 students this last exam I had two out demonstrably sick, one in the hospital, one with a work-schedule problem (documented and dealt with later that day) and then the guy stranded on the road. And one who just didn't show and hasn't dropped but maybe has "dropped.". And that's with 65 students. Multiply it by 10 - which would be the typical size of a standard intro lecture somewhere like OU or University of Michigan, and you've got a prof tearing their hair out. (Well, kind of, I do know how the mass-lecture profs manage: they have a platoon of TAs who run interference for them and who deal with most of the problems before they reach the professor.)

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