Friday morning random

* I tried plain cocoa with stevia for sweetener in the morning oatmeal. I don't recommend it. (Why are chocolate chips so good in oatmeal, and cocoa + stevia so terrible? Maybe I needed more stevia but there was enough to get the definite "stevia aftertaste," which I honestly thought the cocoa would mask). Plain oatmeal with nothing added to it actually tasted better. (Yes: I like bland things)

* I realized something this morning: places like JoAnn Fabrics are like my bar. I was thinking, sitting at the piano this morning, "This was a sort of rough week. I wish I had time to go to JoAnn's and look around" (I don't, and anyway, there's nothing I need and I should not be spending more money. And I cannot justify driving an hour's round trip to buy nothing. I could justify going if there were one in my town, but I don't think that's gonna happen unless we get A LOT more growth and I also suspect it might take Texas seceding and thus making getting there a lot more difficult ("Passport and papers!") than it is now)

* There's been a lot of anger and rage directed at the privileged woman who apparently likes to cosplay all the time like it's the Victorian era. Eh, meh. I can't be bothered to care. Her life doesn't affect mine and as long as she's not keeping a stable of 14 year old girls laboring in the scullery, I don't really care what she does. (It is interesting, though, to see the outrage over what someone else chooses to do with their life. I suppose there's someone somewhere who would look at my life and declare me self-indulgent and selfish because I am not raising a child or something like that.)

I dunno. I get that this is probably a situation different from Tasha Tudor and there may be something here that I'm not seeing, but Tasha Tudor lived much of her life pretending to be in the nineteenth century (Though she allegedly had a modern kitchen, hidden away behind a door).

And yeah, I get that the rage is probably that she's slightly playing the victim card for being badly treated for being "outside of the norm" when there are a lot of other people who were badly treated in the past because they were a different ethnicity or religion than the rest of their community, but again....I can't work up any anger over this. People sometimes have strange ideas about stuff and I know I've dealt with my fair share of people who believed themselves to be big victims when objectively they were not.

I think I've reached the point of outrage fatigue. Not my own, I'm not that often truly outraged about anything - other people's outrage. There are also some things going on that I think truly ARE an outrage that seem not to get the attention that the sort of SWPL stuff that causes outrage. I suppose it's easier to be outraged over where someone happens to shop than it is to be outraged over the treatment of the Syrian people by their government, or the truly shocking growth and spread of ISIS and what they are doing, or about what Putin is doing....Or for that matter, instead of a person being outraged over something like "food insecurity," maybe they go work at a food bank or donate to programs that try to help raise people out of poverty to the point where they're not "food insecure" any more. But it's easier to froth and foam on Facebook or somewhere than to show up some place and go "I can help, what do you want me to do?" (And YES. I have seen my share of people who did hashtag activism and when they were asked about what they were actually DOING they kind of faded away....)

*  I added a few more rows to Starbuck last night. This one is gonna take a while, like any fine-gauge sweater. I'll be glad when I can get to the point of joining to work in the round....that's a little ways off yet.

I've also been knitting on a worsted-weight shawl (the Sloane shawl). It was my invigilating knitting these past couple days and does seem to work pretty well for that - no counting, the only difference is between right-side and wrong-side rows in what you do (and I have different stitch markers to indicate - when the "figural" stitch marker (it has a little fox charm on it) is the one up first, that means I am working the right side.

The markers are from Chaton Designs and are probably the BEST markers I've ever had - they're pretty, they're made to be snag-free (some markers will snag in your work and that's a pain) and they're easy to move. And they're not so heavy they distort the work. These markers have a nice little bead covering the join of the jump ring that makes them (that's why they are snag-free).

(Maybe I need more of them. Maybe that's a nice little treat for some time - order another set of these).

* More headaches in re: online homework. The students need an access code to do this, right? And these codes cost quite a bit. (I would have really objected as a student to buying a "code" that was only good for one semester.... it feels like spending a lot of money for nothing).

Well, one of my students is in a sufficiently-dire financial situation that they cannot afford the code. And the "free trial" you can get - 14 days - has run out for them. So they can't do the homework.

And while there IS the possibility of this being me being "played," I don't think it is.  One thing they pointed out to us at the first fall meeting was just what a large proportion of our students are really trying to pull themselves out of poverty, that for some the yearly family income is on the order of $25,000 (and I ask, then: Why the push for online classes, which cost more to the student? Why the push to make us do stuff like use online codes they must purchase to access homework, when a faculty member could make pen-and-paper homework for free to the student?)

Apparently there's some office on campus that can help with this and I'm trying to track down the information, but again, it irks me. I know I tend to be excessively old-school about this stuff but I am not seeing the 'value added' by the online homeworks.....I could as easily write my own for free, and then the students would get my written feedback and such on the papers. Yes, more work for me, because the online homework is auto-graded, but really, all the headaches of "I can't get access" or "It's not working for me" or "I can't afford access" and trying to resolve those problems is more tiring than grading homework would be.

(Also, what I found slightly distasteful was that the "A lot of our students come from families earning $25,000 a year" was presented before all these other things that would raise the price of course access were talked about, and it was talked about in the context of "None of you 'rich' faculty dare complain that there is no money for a pay raise this year." I mean, I get that there's no money for a pay raise but still we should be focusing on keeping education affordable for our students, and adding on bells and whistles that cost them more but do not give CLEAR enhancements seems....not right.)

ETA: Apparently there's a small loan (against future financial aid, I guess?) they can apply for. Not sure what to do if they've already got financial aid and it's all already been used. I'm not in a position to hand a student $180 or whatever out of my own pocket. And THIS is why a colleague of mine and I have been agitating to try to get rid of the online homework component...

* I confess, I hesitate about wading into Twitter and other places today. Because it's Sept. 11 and there's bound to be pointiness. (And on tv, disaster porn - I once said I never need to see the videos of the towers collapsing to remember what happened, and I stand by that).