And Wednesday morning

* POSSIBLY (I don't know if you need an institutional subscription/access) you can get my latest article as a .pdf file from here. As I said, I'm not sure people not linked into my state university's system can get it but I'm saving a copy of the .pdf so if you want it and can't, e-mail me and it will be no effort at all to send it on.

* I guess my talk went well. It was mostly my students at it (I had told them, as the topic touched on something we covered in class, this was one of those vanishingly-rare chances at extra credit if they came and summarized the talk.) There was a smattering of students from other classes in my department; I had to sign a few people's notes pages to prove they were there to the prof (who couldn't be there as she was in a lab).

There were a few of my colleagues (and one of them, the one giving a talk on Antarctica afterward, gave me a little shout-out because I had mentioned that tardigrades can survive in Antarctica) and a former (? I thought he had retired but I guess is still teaching) admin who said he enjoyed the talk.

I guess one thing I do today is update my CV - another paper and then this presentation can go on it. If I don't update as I do stuff, I forget things, and then it looks worse than it actually is.

* Even though I had seen my colleague's Antarctica talk before, I stayed partly to be polite but partly because I knew I wouldn't be good for anything for at least an hour after giving my own talk. And these things are never all that well attended.

* I also went to the previous talk (previous to mine), which was two Finance students talking about student loan debt and whether it's worth taking it on. (Conclusion: generally not, unless you are specifically going into a field where employment chances are excellent).

They also brought up an interesting point about how a lot of millennials are getting out of Master's programs or whatever and they wind up living with their parents because their debts are extreme enough that they can't afford housing/life in general AND pay off their debt.

And it strikes me: what I did at the time when I was in grad school - living with my parents - everyone then saw it as slightly eccentric but I was just doing the thing millennials are doing but in reverse: I lived with my parents, got room and board (they did not charge me rent and I only had to buy my own food if I wanted something vastly different and more expensive than what they were having, or if I went out to a restaurant with colleagues or something). I was a TA, which was good training for what I am doing now and which also netted me a tuition waiver and a decrease in fees. There was  a stipend, but it was small - it allowed me to buy the clothes I needed and a few balls of yarn (since I didn't have rent to deal with) but, had I chosen to live "out," I probably WOULD have had to take out a few loans, which I would now be paying back (though given my attitude towards debt, they probably would have been paid off well before now - I graduated when I was 30 and started working a couple months after graduating).

I am very grateful I didn't have debt for my education. That was rare enough 20-30 years ago when I was in school and it seems even rarer now. (I could go into a whole dissertation about what has caused college costs to rise but I will note that it's not cost-of-instruction, unless you include all the people who demand stuff like smart classrooms. And even then that's not where most of the raised cost goes. I could happily manage with a chalkboard and my own voice if I had to. I use the computer and projector because it's there and it's easier to project a photograph of the species under discussion than it is to describe it, and it's a better way of showing graphed data than trying to reproduce it on a chalkboard, but I really and truly could teach with just chalk and a chalkboard and I wouldn't do stuff like demand a smartboard and clickers and all those gewgaws)

And also: I recognize and own the fact that the reason I don't have undergrad debt is that I had an "inheritance" to pay for it. My dad took his share of the money from the sale of his parents' property and invested it - with the plan of using it to pay for my brother's and my educations. And his investments did very, very well (it was the 1980s boom, he pulled the money out largely before the bust in 1987 or thereabouts). So it was also my dad being generous (he could have spent the money on himself or on something like a lavish family vacation) that helped me to avoid debt.

And yeah, some would say that's "privilege" and maybe it is but that doesn't stop me from being grateful for my circumstances. (ALL my circumstances: I think the fact that my parents loved me deeply and cared about my developing into a decent human being (and therefore, disciplined when necessary) was a greater privilege than whatever money I had available to me. Privilege in the sense of giving me an advantage over other people)

* I fixed the errors in Raven last night. It was less tedious than I remembered and there is something *so* satisfying about being able to drop down to a mistake, fix it, redo all the stitches above, and then it's like the mistake *was never there*. Would that there were more things in my day to day life that were like that - that I could erase mistakes I made, or erase their effect.

I give another exam Thursday and will have to be more attentive to what I am doing so I don't create more errors, but as I said, I suspect it was when I was distracted by both invigilating AND dealing with abdominal cramps that I made the errors.

* My new/old Ponies (the G1 pegasusususes that I ordered from Etsy came). Very cute. And I do have to get a little shelf - I plan to put it up on the wall over the head of my bed - for these guys. I now have two Earth Ponies (Bubbles and Posey), one unicorn (and a SPARKLY unicorn at that: Star Hopper) and two Pegasi, one a Baby Pony - Baby Surprise and Heart Throb. I think that's a nice sized herd for someone who doesn't want to go TOO whole-hog into collecting.

I guess I really was "too old" for these the first go-round because I do think they were toys for children younger than I was then. But as an adult collector with a little case of 80s nostalgia, it's okay for me to have them.

* And yeah, sometimes I am kind of nostalgic for the 80s. Not so much that they were necessarily so great a time geopolitically, but they were a time when my life felt more secure in a lot of ways than it does now. And when I look back at some of the sitcoms, I am struck with how *wholesome* they are compared to what is on now. Discovery Family, back when it was The Hub, used to run ALF - which was a favorite of mine as a teen. And I was struck about how even the "edgy" jokes seem tame now. Discovery Family currently re-runs "Blossom," which I glanced at the other day - I didn't watch it as a kid. It's kind of interesting from the standpoint of "This is 'Amy Farrah Fowler before she became Amy Farrah Fowler'" but also, again, from the "wholesomeness" angle. (The episode I mostly-saw was about Blossom "becoming a woman" - in the sense of menarche - and the jokes were all fairly gentle and not-gross. The one slightly edgy joke - her father looking distressed when she made the "I'm a woman" declaration, because he apparently thought she meant she had become sexually active, was subtle enough that it might have gone over a younger kid's head. And his relief when she clarified was kind of funny and also kind of sweet, in an odd way.) And I'm sure some people back in the 80s thought that episode went too far. (Though as one of the young-teen girls who went through the very experience Blossom did, even though I was prepared for it as my mom had had "the talk" with me, I was still somewhat discombobulated.)

Also, the 80s were a time when the toymakers more or less stopped hating kids (or at least stopped hating kids like me) and started making some nice toys.

I also admit I find the technological world of the 2010s somewhat baffling sometimes. Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the internet - I would not be nearly as happy living here as I am without it, because I can find kindred spirits from miles upon miles away and I live in a town where I don't always feel like I have a lot of kindred spirits. But the pace of change and stuff like the constant drumbeat of social media are a bit crazy-making. And also the fact that the internet allows the dark, spiny underbelly of humanity to show to a greater degree than it did in the past. That alone makes me nostalgic for the 1980s, when there was no, "Look upon the comments section, ye not-so-mighty, and despair"

As I said once before: in a lot of ways my childhood will have more in common with that of the fictional Ralphie Parker of the 1940s than my niece's childhood will have with mine. (then again: the 1970s are closer to the 1940s than they are to now, which is a scary thought)

* I am thinking maybe, given the fact that I have a little cushion now (the tax refund), I need to get my rear in gear, clean my bedroom extensively, buy a new ceiling fan/light fixture, and hire someone to install it for me. It's been about a year since the motor on the fan burned out and I've been limping along since then with no overhead light, just a bedside lamp.

The biggest obstacle is cleaning my room to the point where I feel comfortable bringing someone in, to be honest. But maybe this is the summer of FIX ALL THE THINGS, at least until the tax refund money runs out.