And I'm home

AT LEAST I got the job applications looked at today. It took a couple hours, most of my office-hours time. And I also let the class know my displeasure about the mess they left, though I framed it as "It's not fair to your classmates if you leave equipment they need to use dirty" although I also think it's unfair to *me* to expect me to clean up after them.

I really thought I'd get a bit more respect after earning my Ph.D. and becoming a full professor. I am SURE part of it is a gendered thing; the students who typically expect me to 'take care of' stuff for them are male and I am female, and female-very-feminine-presenting in that I wear dresses and lipstick and have long hair. They need to get over that, as my colleague Doug points out, because someday they may have a woman boss who is like me, and they will be in trouble if they leave mess for her to clean up.

I can probably do the scholarship stuff tomorrow. I'm still hoping to get enough work done during the week to be able to take Saturday off. (Or part of Friday afternoon; Lulu and Hazel's is doing a Valentine's day sale with treats and I would kind of like to go, also they are "introducing" their new fancy longarm quilting machine)

I did get a couple cards in the mail (Thanks, Purlewe, and the other is from my mom) so that was nice.



Package from the UK, apparently a small surprise gift, which I will open in a moment.

But yes, more ugliness in the outside world. I heard a snippet of news on the radio about a shooting at a Wal-Mart in Arkansas and I don't know if this was a past one that's gone to court now, or a new one, but it seems more and more, shootings are treated as fairly commonplace and it more makes me want to:

a. Mail order everything I can and

b. Do "order online, pick up at the curb" for things I can't.

But it's sad. I'm already too much of a hermit and I know it makes me sad and weird to hole up in my house too much but I hate how dangerous the world feels right now (there was a shooting at a Dave and Buster's in Dallas this weekend, allegedly over one of the stuffed-animal game prizes). And there just is a lot of people treating other people in ugly ways out there and I feel like we're at a tipping point, either people will wise up and say "This is dumb and I'm going to strive to be a better person to other people" or people will just double down and it will get worse and worse. I hope it's the first but I fear it's the second....

The sad thing also: sometimes you just want to go shopping. I suppose avoiding big-box type stores is maybe 90% of avoiding bad human interaction, I don't know.